Collected by F. W. Elwell
"The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things; Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, Of cabbages and kings, And why the sea is boiling hot, And whether pigs have wings."
--Lewis Carrol
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
--James Madison, (1751-1836)
There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.
--Emma Goldman, (1869-1940)
A man can do what he wants. But he can’t want what he wants.
--Arthur Schopenhauer
No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, (1805-1859)
University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.
--Henry Kissenger
We get the belief in the old age of mankind, the belief, at all times harmful, that we are late survivals, mere Epigoni.
--Nietzsche
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Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science. --Henri Poincare |
History is a vast early warning system.
--Norman Cousins, (1915-1990)
It is a dangerous business going out your front door.
--JRR Tolkein
Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
--Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis)
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
--Jean-Paul Sartre
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)
One need not argue a full-blooded materialist position to say that it is
capitalism that has given the general character to modern liberal societies It
is capitalist institutions and values--private property, profit-seeking,
individualism, consumerism--that color the attitudes and beliefs of the majority
of the populations of modern societies.
--Krishan Kumar
There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.
--Walter Lippman, (1889-1974)
An artist is a person who does completely useless work, but only according to the majority of the population.
--Gary Moeller
The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
--Samuel Johnson, (1709-1784)
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
--Abraham Lincoln, (1809-1865)
Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.
--Sam Ervin, (1896-1985)
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
--Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, (1613-1680)
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
--Gore Vidal, (1925- )
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
--Upton Sinclair
People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.
--Otto von Bismarck, (1815-1898)
Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat.
--Caroline Schoeder
Nodding the head does not row the boat.
--Irish Proverb
History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
-Thurgood Marshall, (1908-1993)
Insanity in individuals is something rare--but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)
A painter is a man who paints what he sells; an artist, on the other hand, is a man who sells what he paints.
-Pablo Picasso, (1881-1973)
In the long run, we're all dead.
--John Maynard Keynes
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
--Arthur Schopenhauer , philosopher (1788-1860)
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief ... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
--Walter Lippman, (1889-1974)
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
--Carl Sagan, (1934-1996)
The living are soft and yielding; the dead are rigid and stiff. Living plants are flexible and tender; the dead are brittle and dry.
--Lao Tzu, (6th century BCE)
God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.
--Henry Ward Beecher
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship.
--Louisa May Alcott
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
--Seneca
Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
--Peter Drucker, (1909-2005)
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
--Gilbert Highet, writer (1906-1978)
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
--Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790)
I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
--Charles Darwin, (1809-1882)
When Democrats open their mouths, they try to say something interesting. If the true thing is obvious and boring, the liberal person will go off and say something original, even if it is completely idiotic. This is how deconstructionism got started.
--David Brooks
The best writing is rewriting.
--E. B. White, (1899-1985)
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
--John Adams, (1735-1826)
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
--Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)
The important fact of the present time is not the struggle between capitalism and socialism but the struggle between industrial civilization and humanity.
--Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970)
One need not have been Caesar in order to understand Caesar.
--Max Weber, (1978: 5)
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
--Bill Moyers, 2004
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
--Ivan Illich, priest (1926-2002)
As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
--Leonardo da Vinci, (1452-1519)
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
-Thomas Carlyle, (1795-1881)
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt, (1882-1945)
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
--Joseph Conrad, novelist (1857-1924)
[T]he job is not to see where ‘Marx was wrong’ so much as to make a fresh application of his theory to the world around us as it is, not as it once was. To borrow a comparison from the field of physics, we need socialist Faradays and Maxwells or if we are lucky, Einsteins and Plancks, not people who confine themselves to knocking Isaac Newton.
--Harry Braverman, (1920-1976)
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
--Mark Twain, (1835-1910)
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell, (1903-1950)
Liberal education is the pursuit of human excellence, not the pursuit of excellent salaries and excellent forms of polish and sophistication. Liberal education is not even about excellent intellectual achievements. Its goal is more ethical than intellectual: It focuses on the development of individuals as moral agents, and it teaches students how to reflect both analytically and evaluatively on the fact that the choices we make turn us into the persons we become.
--Marshall Gregory
The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.
--Madame De Stael, (1766-1817)
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
--Anne Lamott, (1954- )
To plan for the future without having a sense of history is like trying to plant cut flowers.
--David McCullough
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963)
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.
--Rene Descartes, (1596-1650)
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.
--George D. Aiken, (1892-1984)
When you enjoy loving your neighbor it ceases to be a virtue.
-Kahlil Gibran, (1883-1931)
A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.
--Leo Rosten, (1908-1997)
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
--Edmund Burke, (1729-1797)
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
--Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)
At bottom, every man knows perfectly well that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
--Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844-1900)
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
--Isaac Asimov, (1920-1992)
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
--Galileo Galilei, (1564-1642)
People rarely win wars; governments rarely lose them.
--Arundhati Roy, (1961- )
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963)
Faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
--Arthur C Clarke, (1917- )
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
--Ray Bradbury, (1920- )
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
--Noam Chomsky, (1928- )
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground.
--Frederick Douglass, (1817-1895)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have always been derided as fools and madmen.
-Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963)
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
--Carl Sagan, (1934-1996)
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
--John Cleese, (1939- )
Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.
--John Ruskin, (1819-1900)
Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
-William James, (1842-1910)
The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
--John Steinbeck, (1902-1968)
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
--James Madison, (1751-1836)
If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.
--Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)
To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.
--Saadi, (c. 1200 AD)
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
-Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)
He that is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
--Thomas Paine, (1737-1809)
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
--William Ellery Channing, clergyman, reformer (1810-1884)
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
--Lord Salisbury, British prime minister (1830-1903)
The difference between genius and stupidity is; genius has its limits.
--Albert Einstein
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
--James Baldwin
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
--J. William Fulbright, US Senator (1905-1995)
Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
--Socrates, (469?-399 BCE)
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
--Virginia Woolf, (1882-1941)
Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.
--Carl Schurz, revolutionary, statesman and reformer (1829-1906)
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
--Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Adulthood is the ever-shrinking period between childhood and old age. It is the apparent aim of modern industrial societies to reduce this period to a minimum.
--Thomas Szasz, (1920- )
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
--John Ruskin, (1819-1900)
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
--Abraham Lincoln, (1809-1865)
If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the men would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one's reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state.
-Leo Tolstoy, (1828-1910)
--Upton Sinclair
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
-Susan B Anthony, (1820-1906)
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
--Hanlon's Razor
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
--Carl Sagan, (1934-1996)
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
--George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), novelist (1819-1880)
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
--Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
When nations grow old, the arts grow cold and commerce settles on every tree.
--William Blake, poet, engraver, and painter (1757-1827)
Do not be satisfied with the soul quest for economic advantages. Great
affluence, in fact, can also generate great poverty.
--John Paul II
Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them.
--Philip Dormer Stanhope, statesman and writer (1694-1773)
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
--George Bernard Shaw, (1856-1950)
Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
--Cato the Elder, (234-149 BCE)
The past isn't dead. It isn't even past.
--William Faulkner
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.
--Edward Abbey, (1927-1989)
Cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?' Expediency asks the question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?' But, conscience asks the question, 'Is it right?' And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
--Michelangelo Buonarroti, (1475-1564)
I love mankind. It's the people I can't stand.
--Charles Schultz
Great souls have wills; feeble souls have wishes.
--Chinese Proverb
Above all, the privately incorporated economy must be made over into a publicly responsible economy. I am aware of the magnitude of this task, but either we take democracy seriously or we do not. This corporate economy, as it is now constituted, is an undemocratic growth within the formal democracy of the United States.
--C. Wright Mills (1958)
I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
--Albert Camus, (1913-1960)
God must have loved the people in power, for he made them so much like their own image of him.
--Kenneth Patchen, (1911-1972)
Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
--Amschel Mayer Rothschild, (1743-1812)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
--William Pitt, (1759-1806)
The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.
-William Butler Yeats, (1865-1939)
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
--Richard Francis Burton, (1821-1890)
Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
--Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
In the faces of men and women I see God.
--Walt Whitman, (1819-1892)
He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
--Immanuel Kant, (1724-1804)
One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
--James Earl Jones, (1931- )
It must be remembered that necessity is only the mother of invention; socially accumulated knowledge is its father.
--Robert K. Merton, (1910-2003)
The only gift is giving to the poor; / All else is exchange.
--Thiruvalluvar, (c. 30 BCE)
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
--Johannes Kepler, (1571-1630)
The great tragedy of science--the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
--Thomas Huxley, (1825-1895)
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
--George Bernard Shaw
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
--John F. Kennedy, (1917-1963)
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
--Thomas Mann, (1875-1955)
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
-- Peter Drucker
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
--Mario M Cuomo, (1932- )
No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
--Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)
He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.
--Joseph Joubert, (1754-1824)
You are never too old to be what you might have been.
--George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), (1819-1880)
I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.
--Konrad Lorenz, (1903-1989)
War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
--Ambrose Bierce, (1842-1914)
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
--Jorge Luis Borges, (1899-1986)
If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money.
--Abigail Van Buren, (1918- )
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
--William Arthur Ward, (1921-1994)
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.
--Marcus Aurelius, philosopher (121-180)
Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
--Mark Twain, (1835-1910)
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
-Ray Bradbury, (1920- )
Start every day off with a smile and get it over with.
--W. C. Fields
Beware the fury of the patient man.
--John Dryden, (1631-1700)
You can have nice things or you can have children.
--Betty J. Elwell, (1927-1997)
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
--H. L. Mencken, (1880-1956)
We are here to make another world.
--W. Edwards Deming
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
--Abraham Lincoln
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
--Eric Hoffer, (1902-1983)
Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
--Harry S. Truman, (1884-1972)
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
--Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)
The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.
--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)
War would end if the dead could return.
--Stanley Baldwin, (1867-1947)
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
--Henri Frederic Amiel (1821-1881)
What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams.
--Nikos Kazantzakis, poet and novelist (1883-1957)
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
-- H.L.Mencken
Hatred--the anger of the weak.
--Alphonse Daudet, writer (1840-1897)
When governments fear the people there is liberty. When the people fear the government there is tyranny.
--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and the fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, (1856-1941)
There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
--Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790)
What I stand for is what I stand on.
--Wendell Berry, (1934- )
He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.
--Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
- -Paul Valery, (1871-1945)
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
--Friedrich Nietzsche
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
--Samuel Johnson, (1709-1784)
It’s interesting to read the archives of Nazi Germany, fascist Japan, the Soviet Union. The leaders are acting from the highest imaginable motives, and probably believed it. It is remarkably easy to come to believe what it is convenient to believe. That’s the secret of being a “responsible intellectual,” someone who serves power abjectly while believing oneself to be an independent thinker.
--Noam Chomsky
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
--Joseph Heller, (1923-1999)
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
--William Butler Yeats, (1865-1939)
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
--Carl Jung, (1875-1961)
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
-Harper Lee, (1926- )
I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.
--Jane Addams
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
--George Bernard Shaw, (1856-1950)
Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't - you're right.
--Henry Ford
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
--Pearl S. Buck, (1892-1973)
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
--Robert Maynard Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
--Salman Rushdie, (1947- )
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
--Henry David Thoreau
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
--Barnett Cocks
A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron.
--Horace Mann, (1796-1859)
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)
An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.
--James McNeill Whistler, painter (1834-1903)
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
--Francis Bacon, (1561-1626)
The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
--Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Let the gods avenge themselves.
--Roman law maxim, on blasphemy
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border.
--Pablo Casals, (1876-1973)
As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
--Hannah Arendt
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
--Clarence Darrow, (1857-1938)
Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration.
--Igor Stravinsky, (1882-1971)
The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
--Edmund Burke, (1729-1797)
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
--Samuel Butler, (1835-1902)
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
--Mark Twain
Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.
--Otto von Bismarck
The truth is the truth, whether it is told by Agamemnon or the man who keeps his pigs.
--Antonio Machado
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
--Albert Einstein
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
--Albert Einstein
One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
- -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, (1749-1832)
The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil.
--James Monroe
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
--Oscar Ameringer
Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.
--Joseph Joubert, (1754-1824)
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
--Greek proverb
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
--Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
-Voltaire (1694-1778)
In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy.
--John C. Sawhill (1936-2000)
Shadow owes its birth to light.
--John Gay, (1685-1732)
Without valleys there would be no peaks.
--Johnny Carson, (1925-2005)
The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.
--John Adams
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
--R. Buckminster Fuller, (1895-1983)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
--Arthur C. Clarke
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
--Edward Abbey, (1927-1989)
Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried .
-- Winston Churchill
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
--Louis Dembitz Brandeis, (1856-1941)
He who says organization says oligarchy.
--Robert Michels, 1915
Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
-Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
--Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)
Reading is seeing by proxy.
--Herbert Spencer, (1820-1903)
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
--John Andrew Holmes
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
--Pericles, (430 BCE)
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
--Eric Hoffer, (1902-1983)
A survey found that the fear of public speaking ranks higher in most people's minds than the fear of death. In other words, at a funeral the average person would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.
--Jerry Seinfeld
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
--Victor Hugo, (1802-1885)
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
--Thomas Pynchon, (1937- )
Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.
--Carl Schurz, (1829-1906)
The world of books is still the world.
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
--Heraclitus, (c. 540-470 BCE)
A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
--Frank Lloyd Wright
Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.
--Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1803-1882)
In Germany they came first for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I
wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't
speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no
one was left to speak up.
--Martin
Niemölle (1892-1984)
Even a lie is a psychic fact.
--Carl Jung, (1875-1961)
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
--Albert Einstein
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
--Oscar Wilde
Science is nothing but perception.
--Plato
Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
--Mark Twain, (1835-1910)
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
--Maxim Gorky, author (1868-1936)
No people can be both ignorant and free.
--Thomas Jefferson
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.
--Henry Miller, (1891-1980)
Fatigue is the best pillow.
--Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790)
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
--Arthur C. Clarke
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
-Stephen Jay Gould, (1941-2002)
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
--Mark Twain, (1835-1910)
There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.
--Thomas A. Edison
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
--Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts--for support rather than for illumination.
--Andrew Lang
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
--W.C. Fields, (1880-1946)
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
--Plato
You forget that the fruits belong to all and that the land belongs to no one.
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
--Jessamyn West
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
--William R. Inge (1860-1954)
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, (1844-1900)
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
--Carl Jung, (1875-1961)
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
--HenryDavid Thoreau, (1817-1862)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-- Edmund Burke
"The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil."
-- Unknown
"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all -- the apathy of human beings."
-- Helen Keller
"The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."
-- Albert Einstein
"When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil."
-- Max Lerner
"...Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons."
-- Douglas Adams
"When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before."
-- Mae West
"To defeat them, first we must understand them."
-- Elie Wiesel
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your
temper or your self-confidence.
--Robert Frost
Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.
--James Nicoll
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
--Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963)
The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.
--Japanese proverb
If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.
--Frank Lloyd Wright
When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.
--Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.
--Kurt Vonnegut
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
--Edmund Burke
Cry, "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.
--William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar III.i.270
I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.
--Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Since we cannot know all that there is to be known about anything, we ought to know a little about everything.
--Blaise Pascal
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
--Steward L. Udall
Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.
- -Joe Theisman, Former quarterback
A court common to all is swept by no one.
--Chinese Proverb
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
--Albert Camus, (1913-1960)
The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.
--Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788-1860)
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
--Albert Einstein
Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
--Jean Jacques Rousseau
False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
--Charles Darwin
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
--Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963)
I sometimes wonder if two thirds of the globe is covered in red carpet.
--Prince Charles
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts.
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Religion--freedom--vengeance--what you will, A word's enough to raise mankind to kill.
--Lord Byron, (1788-1824)
The historical past has a persistent and penetratring influence upon the behavior and ideas of any generation...If we would diagnose our own age we had better do so historically, for history is the essence of human culture and thought.
--Robert A. Nisbet
Laws are the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.
--Solon, (c. 638-c558 BCE)
O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!
--Robert Burns, (1759-1796)
Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us.
--Robert Burns, (1759-1796)
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
--John Kenneth Galbraith
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
--Leonardo Da Vinci, (1452-1519)
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
--Garrison Keillor, (1942- )
In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
--Stephen Jay Gould
Eminent posts make great men greater, and little men less.
--Jean de la Bruyere, essayist and moralist (1645-1696)
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
---Albert Schweitzer, (1875-1965)
I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
--James A. Baldwin
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
--Ralph W. Emerson, (1803-1882)
Study history, study history. In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.
--Winston Churchill
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
--Benjamin Franklin
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.
--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
--Thomas Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859)
Human beings are the only creatures on earth that allow their children to come back home.
--Bill Cosby
If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good.
--Thomas J. Watson
The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.
--Erich Fromm
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
--Charles Robert Darwin, The Origin of the Species, (1859)
Laws, like the spider's web, catch the fly and let
the hawk go free.
--Spanish Proverb
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
--Benjamin Disraeli
We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
--Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.
--Hubert H. Humphrey
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
--Margaret Thatcher
Politics as battle has given way to politics as spectacle.
--Ronald Steel
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
--James Russell Lowell, (1819-1891)
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
--Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970)
Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
--Carrie P. Snow
History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford and Nixon - See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Evil.
--Bob Dole
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.
--Maxwell Planck
The most violent element in society is ignorance.
--Emma Goldman
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
--Aldous Huxley
This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
--T.S. Eliot, (1888-1965)
The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
--Stephen W. Hawking
The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
--Albert Einstein
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I am no more humble than my talents require.
--Oscar Levant, composer (1906-1972)
The greatest task before civilization at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men.
--Henry Havelock Ellis
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures.
--Georges Braque
An American can have a Ford in any color so long as its black.
--Henry Ford
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, (1890-1969)
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
--Chinese proverb
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
--John Muir, (1838-1914)
If the rich could hire someone else to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
--Jewish Proverb
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
--Thomas Wolfe, (1900-1938)
No one has ever become poor by giving.
-Anne Frank, (1929-1945)
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
--Charles Evans Hughes, (1862-1948)
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
--Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
--Niccolo Machiavelli
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life- -so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
--Matt Cartmill, anthropology professor and author (1943- )
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
--Susan Ertz, author (1894-1985)
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
- -James Madison, (1751-1836)
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
--Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
--Ambrose Bierce
Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.
--Sigmund Freud, (1856-1939)
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
--Bill Watterson
Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.
--Michio Kaku
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
--C.P. Snow, (1905-1980)
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
--Paulo Freire, educator (1921-1997)
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
--Zora Neale Hurston
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
--Samuel Johnson
That government is best which governs least.
--Thomas Paine
…A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the personal psyche. The personal sphere is indeed disturbed, but such disturbances need not be primary; they may well be secondary, the consequence of an insupportable change in the social atmosphere. The cause o the disturbance is, therefore, not to be sought in the personal surroundings, but rather in the collective situation. Psychotherapy has hitherto taken this matter far too little into account.
--C. G. Jung, (1875-1961)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
--Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton), historian (1834-1902)
To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.
--Paul Ehrlich
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
--Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
We have to choose between a global market driven only by calculations of short-term profit, and one which has a human face.
--Kofi-Annan
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
-Voltaire (1694-1778)
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
--Confuscious
Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.
--Hugo L. Black
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
--Voltaire, (1694-1778)
The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you're off it.
--Jackie Gleason
If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.
--Orville Wright
Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
--Lord Chesterfield
Without darkness there are no dreams.
--Karla Kuban
Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
--Lucius Annaeus Seneca, (BCE 3 - 65 CE)
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
--Confucius, (c. 551-478 BCE)
He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast.
--Leonardo da Vinci
Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity--- romantic love and gunpowder.
--Andre Maurois
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
--Abraham Lincoln
Whoever degrades another degrades me.
--Walt Whitman
Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called