Favorite Quotations
I shall never be ashamed of citing
-- Hank Aaron
If the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content
with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.
-- Edward Abbey
-- Bella Abzug
-- Dean Acheson
-- Jim Acker
-- Diane Ackerman
-- Abigail Adams
Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often
the supreme disappointment.
The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.
Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.
There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of
exploration.
-- Ansel Adams
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the
Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced
by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory
which states that this has already happened.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account
be allowed to do the job.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the
experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination
to do so.
When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
-- Douglas Noel Adams
-- Franklin P. Adams
-- James Truslow Adams
-- John Adams,
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties
disappear and obstacles vanish.
-- John Quincy Adams
-- Richard Adams
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to
keep.
--Scott Adams
An ostentatious man will rather relate a blunder or an absurdity he has
committed, than be debarred from talking of his own dear person.
-- Joseph Addison
-- Konrad Adenauer
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else.
-- Alfred Adler
You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in
order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.
-- Mortimer Adler
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the
public.
The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment,
in which . . . enlightenment, that is the progressive technical
domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for
fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent
individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.
If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that
search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a 1-foot
chain.
-- Theodore Adorno
-- Aesop
If you are too smart to pay the doctor, you had better be too smart to get ill.
-- African Proverbs
-- George Aiken
-- Hoshang N. Akhtar
-- Edward Albee
-- Herm Albright
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.
-- Amos Bronson Alcott
-- Kurt Herbert Alder
-- Alexander the Great
-- Muhammad Ali
The Iron Rule is: Never, ever do for anybody what he or she can do for themselves.
When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters -
one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.
Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.
Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
-- Saul Alinsky
-- Fred Allen
-- Steve Allen
If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the
worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too
soon.
The difference between sex and death is, with death you can do it alone and
nobody's going to make fun of you.
-- Woody Allen
-- Isabel Allende
-- Gordon W. Alport
-- Stewart Alsop
-- Victor Altzhul
-- Eric Ambler
A lively, disinterested, persistent looking for truth is extraordinarily rare.
Action and faith enslave thought, both of them in order not to be troubled or
inconvenienced by reflection, criticism or doubt.
-- Henri Frederic Amiel
-- Kingsley Amis
-- Joe Ancis
-- Poul Anderson
-- Mario Andretti
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what
you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
If you don't like something change it. If you can't change it, change your
attitude. Don't complain.
-- Maya Angelou
-- Robert Newton Anthony
-- Susan B Anthony
-- Humphery Appleby
-- Edward Appleton
A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit;
change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger;
and mistaking foes for friends.
If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.
-- Arab Proverbs
-- Janos Arany
There are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.
Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also
believes to be true.
-- Diane Arbus
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the
revolution.
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds
to be either good or evil.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think
To think and to be fully alive are the same.
Is it of the very essence of the truth to be impotent and of the very essence
of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is
powerless in the public realm, which more than any other sphere of human life
guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men--that is, to beings who
know they have appeared out of non-being and will, after a short while, again
disappear into it?
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and
lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little
attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political
thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and,
on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word
whatever happens to be the case.
-- Hannah Arendt
-- Moshe Arens
-- Pietro Aretino
Anyone can become angry.
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing,
and being nothing.
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is
sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Melancholy men, of all others, are the most witty.
Our characters are the result of our conduct.
-- Aristotle
-- Louis Armstrong
-- Arthur Ashe, Jr.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it
remains premature today.
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save
people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of
their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a
TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul,
foul, foul.
A poor idea well written is more likely to be accepted than a good idea poorly
written.
Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
-- Isaac Asimov
-- Herbert Henry Asquit
-- Nancy Astor
-- Brooks Atkinson
Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
Man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.
O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
-- Augustine
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to
live.
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing
itself, but to your judgment of it; and this you have the power to revoke at
any moment.
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
You will find relief from vain fancies if you do every act in life as though
it were your last.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, therefore
guard accordingly; and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to
virtue, and reasonable nature.
Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of
your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main
thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.
-- Marcus Aurelius
-- Jane Austen
-- Jim Auster
-- Alfred Jules Ayer
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify
the hunter.
-- Azerbaijani Proverb
-- Charles Babbage
-- Roger Ward Babson
-- Richard David Bach
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped
anything but himself.
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he
will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
Truth comes out of error more readily than out of confusion.
The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not
when they miss and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
-- Francis Bacon
-- Joan Baez
-- Ben Bagdikian
-- Walter Bagehot
-- David Bailey
Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories -
those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories --
those that don't work, those that break down, and those that get lost.
By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American
education... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock,
commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the
laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments.
An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns
out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious,
mendacious - just dead wrong.
-- Russell Baker
I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free.
The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom,
is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.
Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony
[Beethoven's] will remain.
-- Mikhail Bakunin
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and
sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last
time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we
will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems,
taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags,
nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart; for his
purity, by definition, is unassailable.
The price one pays for pursuing a profession, or calling, is an intimate
knowledge of its ugly side.
-- James Baldwin
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by
permanent ideals --- that is what keeps a man patient when the world
ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
-- Honore de Balzac
-- Tallulah Bankhead
-- Dan Barker
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available
to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying
thing is what people do want.
-- Clive Barnes
-- James M. Barrie
The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the
job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the
ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste?
Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and
other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually
masturbate.
Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated
than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using
only your teeth.
-- Dave Barry
-- Marion Barry
-- John Barrymore
-- Roland Barthes
There are no such things as incurable, there are only things for which man has
not found a cure.
Only as you do know yourself can your brain serve you as a sharp and efficient
tool. Know your own failings, passions, and prejudices so you can separate them
from what you see.
-- Bernard Baruch
Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode
of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a
privilege and seeing it as a handicap.
A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed
to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.
-- Jacques Barzun
All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
-- Charles A. Beard
-- Bill Beattie
-- Warren Beatty
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
-- Pierre Beaumarchais
The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined
in their weakness rather than in their strength-each asking from the other
instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of
gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable
to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of
disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being
wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.
-- Simone de Beauvoir
-- Ernest Becker
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be
perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying to
set people right.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
-- Brendan Francis Behan
-- Alexander Graham Bell
-- Cardinal Bellarmine (1615, during the trial of Galileo)
-- Robert Benchley
-- Ruth Benedict
And chaos was institutionalized,
On the second day God received a bill.
-- Michael Benjamin
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to
unconscious impulses.
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
-- Walter Benjamin
-- Alan Bennett
-- Gregory Benford
-- Bernard Berenson
-- José Bergamín
-- Kenneth Berman
-- Claude Bernard
-- William Bernbach
If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else.
-- Yogi [Lawrence Peter] Berra
Brain, n. An apparatus with which we think that we think.
Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they
ought to be.
Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without
knowledge, of things without parallel.
Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.
-- Ambrose Bierce
-- Steve Biko
The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance. It's know'n so many
things that ain't so.
-- Josh Billings
The revolutionary becomes respectable --- a barrier against revolution.
-- Wilfred Bion
-- Jim Bishop
-- Otto von Bismarck
If the doors of perception were cleansed
It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
-- William Blake
-- Smiley Blanton
-- Jerome Blattner
-- Marguerite Blessington
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very
narrow field.
-- Niels Bohr
The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all.
-- Nicolas Boileau
-- Erma Bombeck
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
-- Edward De Bono
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of
wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real
than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction
is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise
image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty
the more. Instead he adores his camera –and himself.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations
officers.
-- Daniel J. Boorstin
-- William H. Borah
-- Max Born
-- Alec Bourne
-- Ray Bradbury
-- F.H. Bradley
If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant
may prove to be our executioner.
-- Omar N. Bradley
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
-- Louis D. Brandeis
-- Robert Brault
-- Brazilian Proverb
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
-- David Brin
-- Jim Britell
-- Herb Brody
--- William Brody
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. This is why science
has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to
cast on nature.
-- Jacob Bronowski
-- Charles Brower
-- Dan Brown.
-- Helen Gurley Brown
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
-- Rita Mae Brown
-- Merry Browne
-- Robert Browning
-- Frank Broyles, college football coach
Sitting on fences is hard on the butt.
When you only have one basket, you tend to put all of your eggs into it.
-- Craig Bruce
-- Lenny Bruce
-- Jerome S. Bruner
-- Jean de la Bruyere
-- William Jennings Bryan
-- Martin Buber
You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're
doing is recording it.
-- Art Buchwald
-- Pearl S. Buck
The mind is everything. What you think you become.
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on
the present moment.
Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart to give yourself
to it.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in
anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in
anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not
believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do
not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many
generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything
agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all,
then accept it and live up to it.
-- The Buddha
If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.
-- Bulgarian Proverbs
-- Edward Bulwer-Lytton
-- Luther Burbank
The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't
do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.
True, a little learning is a dangerous thing, but it still beats total ignorance.
-- Abigail Van Buren
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do
a little.
-- Edmund Burke
Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs
and cutting hair.
-- George Burns
I find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I
want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred
years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to
see the manager."
-- John Burroughs
Conquer thyself, till thou has done this, thou art but a slave; for it is
almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own.
-- Richard Francis Burton
A blow with a word strikes deeper than a blow with a sword.
-- Robert Burton
-- Earl Bush
-- George H. W. Bush
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop
thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely
read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves.
-- George W. Bush
-- Vannevar Bush
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth.
-- Samuel Butler
-- James F. Byrnes
-- James Branch Cabell
-- Herb Caen
-- John W. Campbell, Jr.
-- Joseph Campbell
You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists
of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides
the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to
have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that
it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; Don't walk behind me, I may not
lead; Walk beside me, and just be my friend.
Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
-- Albert Camus
-- Robert Capa
Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.
-- Truman Capote
-- Alex Carey
-- Rachel Carlson
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do
what lies clearly at hand.
The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have
finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct.
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.
-- Thomas Carlyle
Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.
-- Henri Cartier-Bresson
-- George Washington Carver
-- Willa Cather
-- Miguel de Cervantes
--Allan K. Chalmers
Man is not necessarily intelligent because he has plenty of ideas, any
more than he is a good general because he has plenty of soldiers.
Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the one most surely wasted.
-- Nicholas de Chamfort
-- Raymond Chandler
When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.
-- Anton Chekhov
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable
to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
To be clever enough to get a great deal of money, one must be stupid enough
to want it.
It is always the secure who are humble.
-- Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The remedy for dirt is soap and water. The remedy for dying is living.
The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.
He who asks looks foolish for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a
fool forever.
-- Chinese Proverbs
We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our
Sunday School teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers and others
with a vested interest in controlling us.
The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the concept of right and
wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent
and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of the old people, these are
the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.
-- G. Brock Chisholm
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority,
hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a
justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled,
to increase the scope of human freedom.
This is a culture in which three-fourths of the population believe in religious
miracles, half believe in the devil, 83 percent believe that the Bible is the
'actual' or the inspired word of God, 39 percent believe in the Biblical prediction
of Armageddon and 'accept it with a certain fatalism,' a mere 9 percent accept
Darwinian evolution while 44 percent believe that 'God created man pretty much in
his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years,' and so on. The 'God
and Country rally' that opened the national Republican convention is one remarkable
illustration, which aroused no little amazement in conservative circles in Europe.
The beauty of the democratic systems of thought control, as contrasted with their
clumsy totalitarian counterparts, is that they operate by subtly establishing on a
voluntary basis - aided by the force of nationalism and media control by substantial
interests - presuppositions that set the limits of debate, rather than by imposing
beliefs with a bludgeon.
-- Noam Chomsky
-- Agatha Christie
Life is too short to drink bad wine.
Men occasionally stumble upon the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and
hurry off as if nothing had happened.
It is no use dealing with illusions and make-believes. We must look at the facts.
The world ... is too dangerous for anyone to be able to afford to nurse illusions.
We must look at realities.
You can count on the Americans to do the right thing, once they've exhausted every
other possible course of action.
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
-- Winston Churchill
A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
-- John Anthony Ciardi
I don't want to die, but I wouldn't care if I were dead.
Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory can't make it believable.
Avarice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our
provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey's end.
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue
than education without natural ability.
There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it.
-- Marcus Tullius Cicero
-- Tom Clancy
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
is very probably wrong.
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it
is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring
prophecies seem laughably conservative.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
-- James Clavell
-- Appius Claudius
-- William Kingdon Clifford
-- Claud Cockburn
-- Barnett Cocks
-- Jean Cocteau
-- Randy Cohen
-- Isabel Colegate
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
-- Henry Steele Commager
-- James Bryant Conant
--Marquis de Condorcet
When words lose their meaning, there is chaos in the land.
-- Confucius
-- Congolese Proverb
-- Joseph Conrad
-- Jadelr and Cristina Cordova
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please
everybody.
-- Bill Cosby
-- Rene Coty
Laughter is inner jogging.
-- Norman Cousins
-- Stephen Covey
-- Michael Crichton,
-- Robert X. Cringely
-- Benedetto Croce
-- Helena Cronin
-- Bill Crosby
-- Philip (Bayard) Crosby
-- Samuel McChord Crothers
-- Imogen Cunningham
-- Mario M. Cuomo
-- Marie Curie
There is only one ultimate and effectual preventive for the maladies to which
flesh is heir, and that is death.
-- Harvey Cushing
-- Czech Proverb
--Salvador Dali
-- Dandemis
-- Frank Dane
-- Dante
-- Jean Danielou
One bag of money is stronger than two bags of truth.
-- Danish Proverbs
I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.
The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of
themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.
-- Clarence Darrow
-- Charles Darwin
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact,
a return to the idealized past.
-- Robertson Davies
--Bette Davis
If you want to understand life, don't think about vibrant, throbbing gels
and oozes, think about information technology.
It is a simple logical truth that, short of mass emigration into space, with
rockets taking off at the rate of several million per second, uncontrolled
birth-rates are bound to lead to horribly increased death-rates. It is hard
to believe that this simple truth is not understood by those leaders who
forbid their followers to use effective contraceptive methods. They express
a preference for 'natural' methods of population limitation, and a natural
method is exactly what they are going to get. It is called starvation.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and
evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the
lack of evidence.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there
is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind
pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins
-- Doris Day
Too much praise makes you feel you must be doing something terribly wrong.
-- Dorothy Day
-- Edward De Bono
-- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
-- Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once
in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest
virtues.
--Rene Descartes
-- Thomas Dewar
Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from
his failures as from his successes.
The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the
way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry
are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into
possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized
than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand.
-- John Dewey
-- Nick Diamos
-- Philip K. Dick
Much Madness is divinest Sense-- To a discerning Eye-- Much Sense--the starkest
Madness.
--Emily Dickenson
There are three principal means of acquiring knowledge available to us:
observation of nature, reflection, and experimentation. Observation collects
facts; reflection combines them; experimentation verifies the result of that
combination. Our observation of nature must be diligent, our reflection profound,
and our experiments exact. We rarely see these three means combined; and for this
reason, creative geniuses are not common.
-- Denis Diderot
-- E. W. Dijkstra
-- Annie Dillard
-- Walt Disney
Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
-- Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women's Studies, Bowling Green State University
-- J. Frank Dobie
-- Thomas G. Donlan
-- "Wild Bill" Donovan
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-- Mary Douglas
The search for static security---in the law and elsewhere---is misguided.
The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old
ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts.
-- William O. Douglas
profess to favor freedom and
yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground,
they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be
a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a
struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never
will.
-- Frederick Douglass
-- Maureen Dowd
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins
to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
I have mastered the principles of several religions. They have all shocked me
by the violence which I should have to do to my reason to accept the dogmas
of any one of them.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle
-- Rudolf Dreikurs
There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done
at all.
Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at
night with no lights while looking out the back window.
-- Peter F. Drucker
-- William Drummond
-- John Dryden
-- David Dunham
-- Charles H. Duell [Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899]
-- Finley Peter Dunne
As we acquire knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible, but more
mysterious.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do
and always a clever thing to say.
-- William J. Durant
To endure what is, we must remember what was, and dream of things as they
will one day be.
-- William J. and Ariel Durant
-- Henry Van Dyke
-- Freeman Dyson
-- Terry Eagleton
-- George Eastman
-- Abba Eban
-- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
-- Umberto Eco
-- Arthur Eddington
-- Marian Wright Edelman
Hell, there are no rules here --- we're trying to accomplish something.
I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in
proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways
that will not work, I will find the way that will work.
-- Thomas A. Edison
I think and think for months and years, ninety-nine times,
the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe is as good
as dead; his eyes are closed.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not
sure about the former.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results.
Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education,
and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed
be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope
of reward after death.
-- Albert Einstein
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.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies,
in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who
are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the
hopes of its children.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
-- George Eliot
Where is the knowledge that is lost in information? Where is the wisdom that
is lost in knowledge?
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
-- T. S. Eliot
-- Duke Ellington
There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well.
And the world must be easy.
-- Albert Ellis
-- Havelock Ellis
The two most abundant elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
-- Harlan Ellison
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little
statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has
simply nothing to do.
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable,
to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and
lived well.
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to
have succeeded.
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
The Gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And a
person will worship something, have no doubt of that either. One may think that
tribute is paid in secret, in the dark recesses of his or her heart, but it is
out. That which dominates imagination and thoughts will determine life and
character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we are worshiping, for
what we are worshiping we are becoming.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
-- Madeline L'Engle
Woman can be emancipated only when she can take part on a large social
scale in production and is engaged in domestic work only to an insignificant
degree. And this has become possible only in the big industry of modern
times, which not only admits of female labor on a grand scale but even
formally demands it.
-- Friedrich Engels
Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a part as it may please
the master to assign you, for a long time or for a little as he may choose.
And if he will you to take the part of a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler,
or a private citizen, then may you act that part with grace! For to act well
the part that is allotted to us, that indeed is ours to do, but to choose it
is another's.
Only the educated are free.
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
All men’s actions proceed from one source; that as they assent from a
persuasion that a thing is so, and dissent from a persuasion that it is not,
and suspend their judgment from a persuasion that it is uncertain,—so
likewise they seek a thing from a persuasion that it is for their advantage.
-- Epictetus
Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while
we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.
If God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
The wise man neither rejects life nor fears death. For living does not
offend him, nor does he believe not living to be something bad.
Of all things which wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, much the
greatest is the possession of friendship.
It is impossible to live pleasurably without living wisely, well, and
justly, and impossible to live wisely, well, and justly without living
pleasurably.
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not,
but rejoices for those which he has.
It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the
power to obtain by himself.
Riches do not exhilarate us so much with their possession as they
torment us with their loss.
If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away
from his desires.
-- Epicurus
In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
-- Desiderius Erasmus
-- Erik H. Erikson
-- Edzard Ernst
-- Susan Ertz
-- Evan Esar
-- M. C. Escher
Man's most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
The man who knows when not to act is wise.
The man who glories in his luck may be overthrown by destiny.
A great obstacle to happiness is to anticipate too great a happiness.
-- Euripides
-- Medgar Evers
-- Sam Ewing
-- Clifton Fadiman
-- Giovanni Falcone
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified
in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress,
all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no
taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt.
And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense
a revolutionary.
-- Frantz Fanon
-- William Faulkner
-- William Feather
--Diane Feinstein
-- Ludwig Feuerbach
-- Paul Feyerabend
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Physics is like sex: Sure, it may give some practical results but that’s
not why we do it.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as
dumb as the next guy.
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much
more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be
wrong.
I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring. [His last words]
The theoretical broadening which comes from having many humanities subjects
on the campus is offset by the general dopiness of the people who study these
things.
Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
-- Richard Feynman
Closeness without conflict only exists in the cemetery.
-- Finnish Proverbs
-- Carrie Fisher
Either you think - or else others have to think for you and take power
from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize
you.
Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to
start over.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
-- Paul Fix
-- Gustave Flaubert
-- Bernard de Fontenelle
-- Margot Fonteyn
It's so much easier to suggest solutions when you don't know too much about
the problem.
-- Malcolm Forbes
-- Henry Ford
-- E. M. Forster
-- Gene Fowler
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we
leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we
can enter another.
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
It's not by amusing oneself that one learns.
It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another
one which will last forever.
-- Anatole France
-- Francis of Assisi
The mark of a truly civilized man is confidence in the strength and security
derived from the inquiring mind.
Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalized medium
of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere
will and the cruelty of unbridled, undisciplined feeling
-- Felix Frankfurter
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly
the first time.
-- Viktor E. Frankl
Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more
difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am very
jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; the least encroachment on
those invaluable privileges makes my blood boil.
They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the
freeness of speech.
-- Benjamin Franklin
-- Elio Frattaroli
-- Paulo Freire
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls
in with our instinctual desires.
One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man’s judgments of value
follow directly his wishes for happiness that, accordingly, they are an attempt
to support his illusions with arguments.
Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us
the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return
in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. They may be of a kind
which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of [psychoanalytic]
hypothesis.
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.
In the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart.
We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body,
which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain
and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against
us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our
relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is
perhaps more painful than any other.
-- Sigmund Freud
-- Max Frisch
There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.
The only truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be
eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture
and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are
intelligible and can be validated.
Infantile love follows the principle: 'I love because I am loved.'
Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love.'
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.'
Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'
-- Erich Fromm
-- David Frost
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
-- Robert Frost
-- Stephen Fry
I think we Americans tend to put too high a price on unanimity, as if there
were something dangerous and illegitimate about honest differences of opinion
honestly expressed by honest men.
-- J. William Fulbright
-- Robert Fulford
-- Thomas Fuller
-- Glen O. Gabbard
-- Victor Galaz
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard
to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them,
the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other
hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in
passing judgment upon anything new.
I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the
extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost
philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and
invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder,
to look at the planets or Moon or my telescope.
-- Galileo Galilei
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
-- John Galsworthy
-- Indira Gandhi
Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die
tomorrow.
An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then
you win.
Whatever you do may be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
-- Mohandas Gandhi
-- Donald R. Gannon
-- John W. Gardner
-- Floyd Garrett
-- Les Garwood
-- Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil
-- Bill Gates
In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the
electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.
-- Charles de Gaulle
-- Jules de Gaultier
-- Francois Gautier
-- Theodor Seuss Geisel
-- Murray Gell-Mann
-- Ernest Gellner
He who conquers his anger has conquered an enemy.
--German Proverbs
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you
are not.
-- Andre Gide
Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
-- Kahlil Gibran
-- Elaine Gill
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
-- Kenneth R. Gladieux
-- Ellen Glasgow
--Robert H. Goddard
--William Godwin
-- Joseph Goebbels
-- Hermann Goering
Don't judge anyone harshly until you have been through his experiences.
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
When we take men as they are, we make them worse. When we treat them as
what they are capable of becoming, we help them to achieve it.
Man supposes that he directs his life and governs his actions, when his
existence is irretrievably under the control of destiny.
The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man
hardly anything.
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end
of it, and others do just the same with their time.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-- Arthur J. Goldberg
You truly understand something scientific when you can explain it to a
classroom of first graders.
I have great belief in the existence of an objective world, but little
belief in our ability to accurately perceive it.
Experts are people who will tell you in the future why the things they
predicted in the past never came about.
-- Ivan K. Goldberg
-- Emma Goldman
-- William Goldman
-- Samuel Goldwyn
-- Ellen Goodman
-- Paul Goodman
-- Maxim Gorky
Facts do not ’speak for themselves’, they are read in the light of theory.
When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the
seeds of political manipulation are sown.
The invalid assumption that correlation implies cause is probably among
the two or three most serious and common errors of human reasoning
Nothing makes me sadder than the peer pressure that enforces conformity
and erases wonder...Countless others had the light of intellectual wonder
extinguished because a thoughtless and swaggering fellow student called
them nerds on the playground.
Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination
with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival.
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more
constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness
to novelty.
The more important the subject and the closer it cuts to the bone of our
hopes and needs, the more we are likely to err in establishing a framework
for analysis.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
-- Katharine Graham
-- Antonio Gramsci
-- Amy Grant
-- John Gray
-- A.C. Grayling
Terrifying are the weaknesses of power.
Success is doing what you like and making a living at it.
-- Greek Proverbs
-- Roedy Green
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a
temporary measure, is to betray it.
Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity
with someone who has ceased to communicate.
-- Germaine Greer
-- Angus Grossart
-- Mardy Grothe
-- Sacha Guitry
-- Tenzin Gyatso
-- Ernst Haas
Theories have four stages of acceptance: i) this is worthless nonsense; ii)
this is an interesting, but perverse, point of view; iii) this is true, but
quite unimportant; iv) I always said so.
-- J. B. S. Haldane
-- Edward Everett Hale
-- Alex Haley
-- Robert M. Hamilton
-- Christopher Hampton
-- Learned Hand
-- Tom Hanks
-- Garret Hardin
-- Richard Harkness
An idealist believes the short run doesn't count. A cynic believes the
long run doesn't matter. A realist believes that what is done or left
undone in the short run determines the long run.
We have not passed that subtle line between childhood and adulthood
until we move from the passive voice to the active voice -- that is,
until we stop saying "It got lost," and say "I lost it."
-- Sydney J. Harris
-- Barbara G. Harrison
-- Earnest Hartmann
Retiring is just practicing to be dead. That doesn't take any practice.
-- Paul Harvey
A silk dress doesn't mean clean undergarments.
-- Haitian Proverbs
-- Robert J. Hanlon
-- Vaclav Havel
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something
about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is
purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
-- Stephen Hawking
-- Friederich Hayek
Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a
beginning as well as an end. There was time when we were not; this gives us
no concern --- why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we
shall cease to be?
-- William Hazlitt
-- Ben Hecht
-- Frederick Henry Hedge
-- Georg Hegel
-- Martin Heidegger to the students of Freiburg University
The road to wisdom?—Well, it’s plain -- Piet Hein
We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last
come to look upon them as virtues.
He only profits from praise who values criticism.
You cannot feed the hungry on statistics.
-- Heinrich Heine
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing
daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then
do it.
Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of
genius.
When any government . . . undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may
not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end
result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty
little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked;
contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind
is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't
conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
-- Joseph Heller
-- Lillian Hellman
-- Ernest Hemingway
-- Katherine Hepburn
Nothing endures but change.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and
he's not the same man.
-- Heraclitus
-- Alan Patrick Herbert
-- Frank Herbert
-- Don Herold
-- Hermann Hesse
-- Benny Hill
What is hateful unto thee, do not do unto thy neighbor-this is the entire
Torah; the rest is commentary.
-- Hillel the Elder
-- Lewis Hine
Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always.
It is not enough that the physician do his part but the patient and the
attendants
must do their parts too. And the circumstances must be favorable.
Extreme remedies are very appropriate for extreme diseases.
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous,
judgment difficult
Learning gives birth to knowledge, and assumption generates ignorance.
-- Hippocrates
Universal education is the most corroding and disintegrating poison that
liberalism has ever invented for its own destruction.
-- Adolf Hitler
-- Hitopadesa
The Papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman empire,
sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
Desire to know why, and how -- curiosity, which is a lust of the mind,
that a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable
generation of knowledge -- exceedeth the short vehemence of any
carnal pleasure.
The world is governed by opinion.
-- Thomas Hobbes
-- Thomas Hoepker
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but
the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.
We have perhaps a natural fear of ends. We would rather be always on
the way than arrive. Given the means, we hang on to them and often
forget the ends.
Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of
are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the
past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping.
We see out past achievements as the end results of a clean forward
thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self,
the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion,
his race or his holy cause.
To grow old is to grow common. Old age equalizes - we are aware that what
is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time.
When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he
uses to frighten you.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Eric Hoffer
-- Heinrich Hoffmann
-– Richard Hofstadter
-- Raymond Holliwel
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it
often substitutes for both.
-- John Andrew Holmes
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine
on it, the more it will contract.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original
dimensions.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great
scholars great men.
I firmly believe that if the whole materia medica could be sunk to the
bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the
worse for the fishes.
To be seventy years young is something far more cheerful and hopeful than
to be forty years old.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
To deny me the right to err is to deny me the right to believe.
-- Sidney Hook
It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, 'We've always done it
this way.' I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall
that runs counter-clockwise.
-– Grace Hopper
Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own; He who
secure within can say: Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
-- Horace
“There is no good reason why we should not develop and change until the
last day we live.
-- Karen Horney
-- Fred Hoyle
Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe
you anyway.
Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the
commonplace.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the
work of one extraordinary man.
-- Elbert Hubbard
-- Kin Hubbard
-- Edward L. Hudgins
In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies of liberty.
No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be
of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact
which it endeavors to establish.
-- David Hume
Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.
In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends
upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in
very important respects, what they seem to be.
-- Hubert Humphrey
-- Hungarian Proverb
-- Samuel P Huntington
-- Zora Neale Hurston
-- Robert Hutchins
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what
happens to him.
The end cannot justify the means for the simple and obvious reason that the
means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice
and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism,
dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
It is a little embarrassing that, after 45 years of research and study,
the best advice I can give to people is to be a little kinder to each other.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice
and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism,
dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can't be ignored any
longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma.
Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
-- Aldous Huxley
-- Julian Huxley
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection
of authority.
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make
yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you
like it or not.
The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an
ugly fact.
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
It is the fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end and superstitions.
-- Thomas H. Huxley
-- Hypatia of Alexandria
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the
rest of us would have to settle for something else.
You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas
will not get you anywhere.
-- Lee Iacocca
Mediocrity is climbing molehills without sweating.
He who lives without discipline dies without honor.
Everyone wants to live long, but no one wants to be called old.
Better shoeless than bookless.
-- Icelandic Proverbs
-- Michael Ignatieff
-- Ignatius of Loyola
A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all
who want to learn with access to available resources at anytime in their
lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want
to learn it from them; and finally, furnish all who want to present an issue
to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.
-- Ivan Illich
Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having
given it wings.
-- Indian Proverb
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to
enslave a philosophy.
-- William Ralph Inge
Reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by stumblers carried
in the star-less night, -- blown and flared by passion's storm, --- and yet,
it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.
I am not so much for the freedom of religion as I am for the religion of
freedom.
I admit that reason is a small and feeble flame, a flickering torch by
stumblers carried in the star-less night, blown and flared by passion's
storm, and yet, it is the only light. Extinguish that, and nought remains.
Who can over estimate the progress of the world if all the money wasted in
superstition could be used to enlighten, elevate and civilize mankind?
-- Robert G. Ingersoll
-- International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1946
-- Eugene Ionesco
A man can pose as a wise when searching for wisdom, but if he believes to
have found it, he is a fool.
-- Iranian Proverbs
A loud voice can make even the truth sound foolish.
-- Irish Proverbs
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back into the same box.
Do good and care not to whom.
An ounce of discretion is better than a pound of knowledge.
-- Italian Proverbs
The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease
to be free for religion.
-- Robert H. Jackson
Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him
which the incitements of that day do not call forth. Compared with what we
ought to be, we are only half awake.
Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources
are than we had supposed.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow
to call it falsehood.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging
their prejudices.
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter
his life by altering his attitudes.
If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a
past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a
different reality system.
-- William James
Adversity is the foundation of virtue.
If you wish to learn the highest truth, you must begin with the alphabet.
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
He is rich who knows when he has enough.
-- Japanese Proverbs
Reason is like an open secret that can become known to anyone at any time;
it is the quiet space into which everyone can enter through his own thought
An ideology is a complex of ideas or notions which represents itself to the
thinker as an absolute truth for the interpretation of the world and his
situation within it; it leads the thinker to accomplish an act of self-
deception for the purpose of justification, obfuscation and evasion in some
sense or other to his advantage.
-- Karl Jaspers
The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads
nothing but newspapers.
When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by
itself.
In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with
the current.
I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have
of it.
Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and
define you.
Do not bite the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.
-- Thomas Jefferson
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where
excellence is expected.
-- Steve Jobs
-- Lyndon B. Johnson
Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call
a man 'a good man', upon easier terms than I was formerly.
-- Samuel Johnson
-- Wendell Johnson
-- Franklin P. Jones
-- William Alton Jones
You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing:
no one to blame.
Always do the things you fear the most. Courage is an acquired taste, like caviar.
--Erica Jong
-- Franklin P. Jones
-- Erica Jong
To teach is to learn twice.
One who has imagination without learning has wings without feet.
-- Joseph Joubert
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy
would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
All of the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally
insoluble . . . They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of
ourselves.
The word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have
a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it
---I don't need to believe it.
-- Carl Jung
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new
bureaucracy.
A book should serve as the ax to break the frozen sea within us.
There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the
opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has
lost.
A book must be like an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.
-- Franz Kafka
-- Wendy Kaminer
-- Richard Kammann,
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant
-- Kashmiri Proverbs
-- Ralph Kaufman
--John Keats
I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.
-- Garrison Keillor
College isn't the place to go for ideas.
-- Helen Keller
-- Florynce Kennedy
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy growth.
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie---deliberate, contrived and
dishonest---but the myth---persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Mythology
distracts us everywhere.
-- John F. Kennedy
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are
extreme, but that they are intolerant.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to
change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be
written the history of this generation.
-- Robert F. Kennedy
-- Richard A. Kern
-- Andre Kertesz
Success is getting what you want, happiness wanting what you get.
-- Charles F. Kettering
Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the
most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
In the long run, we're all dead.
Better to be approximately right, than precisely wrong
-- John Maynard Keynes
-- Nikita Khrushchev
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule beings.
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought
which they avoid.
Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger
than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who
really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory,
formed by the gangs who have no opinion- and who, therefore, in the next
instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its
opinion . . . while Truth again reverts to a new minority.
-- Soren Kierkegaard
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity.
In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of
doing wrong deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by
drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what
I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated
structure of reality.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
-- Alfred Kinsey
-- Rudyard Kipling
In crises the most daring course is often safest.
The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
-- Arthur Kleinman
-- Alfred A. Knopf
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are
located in the same individual.
-- Arthur Koestler
Bankers, priests, lawyers,… politicians, [and news media] constitute one
class [of our rulers] and work together. They do not produce any values but
manipulate the values produced by others, and often pass signs for no value
at all. Scientists and teachers also comprise a ruling class. They produce the
main values mankind has, but, at present, they do not realize this. They are,
in the main, ruled by the cunning methods of the first class.
-- Alfred Korzybski
The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they
believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of
victory.
-- Jonathan Kozol
-- Sonja Kovalevsky
-- Charles Krauthammer
Your belief in God is merely an escape from your monotonous, stupid and cruel life.
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That
is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why
you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all
that is life.
In self-knowledge is the whole universe; it embraces all the struggles of
humanity.
-- Jiddu Krishnamurti
-- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
-- Milan Kundera
Violence attempts to constrain the other's freedom, to force him to act
in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference
to the other's own existence or destiny.
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we
can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our
thoughts and deeds.
-- R. D. Laing
-- Edward C. Lambert
-- Louis L'Amour
-- Ann Landers
-- Andrew Lang
-- Lao Tzu
--Lao Zi
Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to
your regular duties.
-- Doug Larson
The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything
boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American
political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-
intellectualism in our time.
-- Larry Laudan
D. H. Lawrence
-- Norman Lear
-- Jerome Laurence
-- Timothy Leary
-- Gustave Le Bon
In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country,
capitalism triumphed over democracy.
-- Fran Lebowitz
No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.
The consumer's side of the coffin lid is never ostentatious.
It’s the priests who have demands, not the gods.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and a fork?
The first condition of immortality is death.
One has to multiply thoughts to the point where there aren't enough
policemen to control them.
-- Stanislaw J. Lec
The Army has carried the American ... ideal to its logical conclusion.
Not only do they prohibit discrimination on the grounds of race, creed
and color, but also on ability.
-- Tom Lehrer
Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself. (Attributed)
There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may
be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel. (Attributed)
-- Vladimir I. Lenin
-- Max Lerner
-- David Letterman
-- Oscar Levant
-- Aaron Levenstein
-- Alex Levine
-- David I. Levine
-- Kurt Lewin
-- Richard Lewontin
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Obviously crime pays, or there'd be no crime.
What you do, you become.
-- G. Gordon Liddy
Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.
An Englishman teaching an American about food is like the blind leading
the one-eyed.
-- A. J. Liebling
-- Robert J. Lifton
-- Lin Yu Tang
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character,
give him power.
'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all
doubt.
-- Abraham Lincoln
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
-- Robert M. Lindner
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.
Very few established institutions, governments and constitutions...are ever
destroyed by their enemies until they have been corrupted and weakened by
their friends.
Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it
serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
-- Walter Lippman
The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
-- John Locke
-- Anne Locksley & Charles Stangor
-- John Loengard
-- Jack London
If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me.
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we would find in
each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet
hypothesis every day before breakfast. It keeps him young.
-- Konrad Lorenz
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
-- James Russell Lowell
Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but, unlike charity, it
should end there.
When a man can't explain a woman's actions, the first thing he thinks about is
the condition of her uterus.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
Nature does all things spontaneously, by herself, without the meddling of the
gods.
Fear is the mother of all gods.
-- Lucretius
-- Arnold M. Ludwig
There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed
and adroit reason.... Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must
trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must
be put out of sight and...know nothing but the word of God.
-- Martin Luther
-- Rosa Luxemburg
-- William G. McAdoo
-- Eugene McCarthy
-- Michael McClary
-- David McIntosh
-- Mignon McLaughlin
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
-- Marshall McLuhan
-- Douglas MacArthur
-- Aaron Machado
Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men
have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct,
or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction
of a new order to things.
One can generally say this about men: that they are ungrateful, fickle,
simulators and deceivers, avoiders of danger, greedy for gain; and while
you work for their good they are completely yours, offering you their blood,
their property, their lives, and their sons when danger is far away; but
when it comes nearer to you, they turn away.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli
-- Archibald MacLeish
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
-- Ferdinand Magellan
-- Rene Magritte
-- Naguib Mahfouz
-- Norman Mailer
Teach your tongue to say 'I do not know,' and you shall progress.
The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.
Man's obsession to add to his wealth and honor is the chief source of his
misery.
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
May I never see in the patient anything but a fellow creature in pain.
-- Moses Maimonides
--Josef de Maistre
-- Malaysian Proverb
-- Kenan Malik
All art is a revolt against man’s fate.
--André Malraux
I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all
persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an
ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But, if needs be, it is an
ideal for which I am prepared to die.
As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates
others.
-- Nelson Mandella
-- Louis L. Mann
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
-- Thomas Mann
-- Mao Tse-Tung
-- Herbert Marcuse
America is Rome reincarnate. Like the Roman empire, the American empire
is vastly powerful and unfathomably corrupt. Like Rome, America imposes
her civilization upon an ungrateful world. Like Rome, America needs bread,
circuses and philosopher-statesmen to forestall and yet to hasten her demise.
-- Lou Marinoff
-- John A. Marshall
--Thurgood Marshall
Outside of a dog, a book is probably man's best friend; inside of a dog, it's
too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e.
the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force.
-- Karl Marx
A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I
warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life."
-- Abraham Maslow
-- Walter Mattau
She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute
for wit.
It wasn't until late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say "I
don't know."
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He
lives by makebelieve.
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom;
and the irony of it is that if it is comfort that it values more, it will
lose that too.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
-- Andre Maurois
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect
them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can
change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre
as possible.
-- Margaret Mead
The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange
protein; it rejects it.
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the
intensity of a conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on
whether it is true. The importance of the strength of our conviction
is only to provide a proportionately strong incentive to find out if
the hypothesis will stand up to critical examination.
-- Peter. B. Medawar
-- Donella Meadows,
Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you're aboard, there's
nothing you can do.
-- Golda Meir
--Joost A. Merloo
A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
-- Herman Melville
The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly
greater than that of any other animal.
The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe,
but in their readiness to doubt.
God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable.
They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority,
soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
The curse of man, and the cause of nearly all his woe, is his stupendous
capacity for believing the incredible.
-- H. L. Mencken
-- Karl Menninger
-- Robert King Merton
Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects
combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous,
independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which
would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?
Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does,
contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion
on any subject is or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision
of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of
being supplied.
Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true
that most stupid people are conservative.
Ask yourself if you are happy, and you cease to be.
On religion in particular the time appears to me to have come, when it is the
duty of all who being qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature
consideration make their dissent known; at least, if they are among those
whose station, or reputation, gives their opinion a chance of being attended
to. Such an avowal would put an end, at once and forever, to the vulgar prejudice,
that what is called, very improperly, unbelief, is connected with any bad
qualities either of mind or heart.
-- John Stuart Mill
-- Margaret Millar
Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to
accept it, no matter where it leads him.
The American white man (not to speak of the Indian, the Negro, the Mexican)
hasn't a ghost of a chance. If he has any talent he's doomed to have it
crushed one way or another. The American way is to seduce a man by bribery
and make a prostitute of him. Or else to ignore him, starve him into
submission and make a hack of him.
-- Henry Miller
-- Olin Miller
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be
people with advantages.
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the
images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or
another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology
itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be
understood without understanding both.
-- C. Wright Mills
-- John Milton
-- Tim Minchin
-- Charles Mingus
-- Ludwig von Mises
-- Miss Alabama, responding to a question in the 1994 Miss USA contest
-- Margaret Mitchell
-- Wilson Mizner
A person's true wealth is the good he or she does in the world.
-- Mohammed
A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.
I prefer an interesting vice to a virtue that bores.
-- Jean Baptiste Moliere
In science, self-satisfaction is death. Personal self-satisfaction is the
death of the scientist. Collective self-satisfaction is the death of the
research. It is restlessness, anxiety, dissatisfaction, agony of mind that
nourish science.
-- Jaques Monod
Without love, intelligence is dangerous; without intelligence, love is not
enough.
The idea is to die young as late as possible.
The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the
difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in
fact become.
-- Ashley Montagu
-- Mary Wortley Montagu
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never
happened.
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise
with other men's wisdom.
How absurd to anguish over our passing into freedom from all anguish. Just
as our birth was the beginning of all things for us, so our death will be
the death of them all. That is why it is equally mad to weep because we
shall not be alive a hundred years from now and to weep because we were
not alive a hundred years ago.
Men of simple understanding, little inquisitive and little instructed,
make good Christians.
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
-- Alfred A. Montapert
What orators lack in depth, they make up for in length.
The less men think, the more they talk.
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public
welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield
of law and in the name of justice.
If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier
than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them
happier than they are.
No kingdom has shed more blood than the kingdom of Christ.
-- Charles de Montesquieu
-- Thomas Moore
-- John Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon
-- Hannah More
-- Christopher Morley
-- Grandma Moses
-- Mother Teresa
When I learn something new - and it happens every day - I feel a little
more at home in this universe, a little more comfortable in the nest.
--Bill Moyers
-- Patrick Moynihan
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
We have created an industrial order geared to automatism, where feeble-
mindedness, native or acquired, is necessary for docile productivity in
the factory; and where a pervasive neurosis is the final gift of the
meaningless life that issues forth at the other end.
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers
that come from trusting solely in intelligence.
However far modern science and technics have fallen short of their inherent
possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is
impossible.
Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
-- Lewis Mumford
-- H. H. Munro
-- Clint W. Murchison
-- Maureen Murphy
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging
their prejudices.
The obscure we see eventually; the completely apparent takes a little longer.
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
-- Edward R. Murrow
-- Ralph Nader
I drink to make other people seem more interesting.
-- George Jean Nathan
Don't let yesterday use up too much of today.
Only when the last tree has withered, and the last fish caught, and the
last river been poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.
Force, no matter how concealed, begets resistance.
Seek wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is of the past, Wisdom is of the future.
Lose your temper and you lose a friend; lie and you lose yourself.
-- Native American Proverbs
-- Holly Near
-- Suzanne Necker
-- Thomas Neill
-- Arnold Newman
-- James R. Newman
If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of
giants.
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself
in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary
while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
-- Isaac Newton
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to
injustice makes democracy necessary.
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
-- Martin Niemoeller
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and
epochs, it is the rule.
All things that are truly great are at first thought impossible.
Which is it; is man one of God's blunders, or is God one of man's blunders?
He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
Convictions are greater enemies of truth than lies.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
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.
Thinking about suicide is a potent consolation: it helps us to get through
many a bad night.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
The owl is the wisest of all birds because the more it sees, the less it talks.
-- Nigerian Proverbs
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
-- Anaïs Nin
-- Richard M. Nixon
-- David Noble
-- Ralph Novak
-- Sherwin B. Nuland
-- Sean O'Casey
-- William of Ockham
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My
opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller
that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
-- Flannery O'Connor
-- Joseph O'Connor
Skiing consists of wearing $3,000 worth of clothes and equipment and driving
200 miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and drink.
. . . no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If
we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for
drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high
powered rifle and scope.
-- P. J. O'Rourke
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all
the time.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went
before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is
happiness.
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls
the past.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could
believe in them.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand
ready to do violence on their behalf.
-- George Orwell
-- John Osborne
Common-sense nerve fibers are seldom medullated before forty--they are never
seen even with a microscope before twenty.
We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.
The load of tomorrow added to that of yesterday, carried today, makes the
strongest falter. Shut off the future as tightly as the past.
-- William Osler
-- Jesse Owens
It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that
mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so corrupted and
prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief
to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission
of every other crime.
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always
a vice.
Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion,
however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this
right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes
himself the right of changing it.
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to
place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
There is scarcely any part of science, or anything in nature, which those
imposters and blasphemers of science, called priests, as well Christians as
Jews, have not, at some time or other, perverted, or sought to pervert to the
purpose of superstition and falsehood.
To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to
the dead.
A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men.
-- Thomas Paine
-- Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit
-- Norm Papernick
-- Robert Ezra Park
-- Robert L. Park
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
-- Ellen Parr
I put it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other,
there would not be four friends left in the world.
Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest,
without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then
he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness,
emptiness.
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it
shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal
Did you ever observe to whom accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared
mind.
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely
in my tenacity.
-- Louis Pasteur
-- Boris Pasternak
-- Alan Paton
-- Linus Pauling
-- Hesketh Pearson
Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It
is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.
Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and
accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted,
the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.
-- M. Scott Peck
-- Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaello Luigi Pecci (Pope Leo XIII)
-- Oliver Pell
-- Edmund D. Pellegrino
-- William Penn
Our dependency makes slaves out of us, especially if this dependency
is a dependency of our self-esteem. If you need encouragement, praise,
pats on the back from everybody, then you make everybody your judge.
-- Fritz Perls
Most people give up just when they're about to achieve success. They
quit on the one yard line.
-- H. Ross Perot
--Peruvian Proverb
You can flatter any man by telling him he's the kind of man who can't
be flattered.
My problem is I say what I'm thinking before I think what I'm saying.
Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting
where you heard it.
-- Laurence J. Peter
-- Tom Peters
-- Gaius Petronius
-- Jan Phillips
-- Philo of Alexandria
-- Jean-Luc Picard
-- Thomas Pickering
-- Pablo Piccaso
-- Max Planck
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to
say something.
Come, Protagoras, uncover your thought for me on this: how do you stand on
knowledge? Do you think of it as the majority of men do, or otherwise? The
Many think that knowledge has neither strength nor authority nor power of
command, that though knowledge may from time to time be present in a man,
it does not govern him. Something else governs: sometimes anger, sometimes
pleasure, sometimes pain, on occasion love, often fear--as though they
conceived of knowledge as a mere slave to be dragged about by everything else.
-- Plato
-- P. J. Plauger
Desire is a treasure map. Knowledge is the treasure chest. Wisdom is the
jewel. Yet without action they all stay buried.
Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.
-- Pliny the Elder
-- John J. Plomp
-- Pogo
Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection
of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
Logic, which alone can give certainty, is the instrument of proof; intuition is
the instrument of invention.
--Henri Poincare
-- Michael Polanyi
-- Polybius
-- Georges Pompidou
-- Richard M. Poniarski
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
A little learning is a dang'rous thing; -- Alexander Pope
Our belief in any particular natural law cannot have a safer basis than our
unsuccessful critical attempts to refute it.
In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be
falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about
reality.
Attack authoritarianism, dogma, and historical inevitability; stress
tolerance, transparency and debate; embrace trial-and-error; distrust
certainty; and espouse humility.
-- Karl Popper
-- Colin Powell
-- Michael Pritchard
-- Portuguese Proverb
-- William Preece
-- Elvis Presley
A truly wise man never plays leap frog with an unicorn.
-- Polish Proverbs
-- George Price
-- Michael Pritchard
-- Protagoras of Adera
The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.
-- Marcel Proust
-- William Proxmire
-- Myron Pulier
-- Mario Puzo
I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix.
We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.
For NASA, space is still a high priority.
-- Dan Quayle
-- Queen Victoria
-- Jane Bryant Quinn
Everyone has the right to make his own decision/s, but none has the right to
force his decision on others.
If devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater,
nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the
responsibility of thinking . . . The alleged short-cut to knowledge, which is
faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
The government was set to protect man from criminals - and the Constitution was
written to protect man from the government.
The skyline of New York is a monument of a splendor that no pyramids or palaces
will ever equal or approach.
-- Ayn Rand
-- James Randi
-- Herbert Rappaport
-- Daniel L. Reardon
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would hire them away.
History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression
is cheap.
-- Ronald Reagan
-- Robert Redford
We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death.
-- Theodor Reik
Our opinions become fixed at the point where we stop thinking.
The way to not change is to not think.
-- Ernest Renan
-- Jules Renard
-- Drummond Rennie
-- Agnes Repplier
He [Richard Nixon] inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but
by diligent hard work, he overcame them.
This is the devilish thing about foreign affairs: they are foreign and will not
always conform to our whim.
-- James Reston
-- John H. Rhoades
-- Cecil Rhodes
-- Fredric L. Rice
-- Adrienne Rich
-- Robert Richards
-- Eddie Rickenbacker
Success teaches us nothing; only failure teaches.
-- Hyman G. Rickover
-- Dennis Ridley
-- Richard K. Riegelman
Reality isn't the way you wish things to be, nor the way they appear to be,
but the way they actually are.
-- Robert J. Ringer
The most Civilized people are as near to barbarism as the most polished steel
is to rust. Nations, like metals, have only a superficial brilliance.
-- Antoine de Rivarol
-- Tom Robbins
We are never so happy, never so unhappy, as we suppose ourselves to be.
There goes another beautiful theory, about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts.
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy
those are who already possess it.
The intellect is always fooled by the heart.
We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the
motives that produced them.
Our enemies come nearer the truth in the opinions they form of us than we
do in our opinion of ourselves.
Hope and fear go arm in arm: There is no fear without hope, nor hope without fear.
Old people love to give good advice; it compensates them for their
inability to set a bad example.
We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.
The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used
to acquire it.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
-- John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.
-- John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
-- Gene Roddenberry
-- Carl Rogers
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
With Congress--every time they make a joke it's a law. And every time they
make law it's a joke.
-- Will Rogers
-- Andy Rooney
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway.
You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process
never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own
responsibility.
What you don't do can be a destructive force.
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to
be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that
there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks
humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that
in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love
and charity.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to
fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which
paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has
never learned to walk forward.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard
at work worth doing.
No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.
Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, "Certainly I can!" Then
get busy and find out how to do it.
To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are
to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonable to the American public.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
-- Jeffrey Rosen
Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood -- we
fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.
Falsity cannot keep an idea from being beautiful; there are certain errors
of such ingenuity that one could regret their not ranking among the
achievements of the human mind.
-- Jean Rostand
I never cease being dumbfounded by the unbelievable things people believe.
-- Leo Rosten
-- Jean de Rotrou
Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with
ourselves.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
--- Joseph Roux
-- Galen Rowell
-- Helen Rowland
--Arundhati Roy
-- Theodore Rubin
-- Donald Rumsfeld
-- Salmon Rushdie
There is scarcely anything in the world that some man cannot make a little
worse, and sell a little more cheaply. The person who buys on price alone
is this man's lawful prey.
-- John Ruskin
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been
searching for evidence which could support this.
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the
intelligent are full of doubt.
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not
utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind,
a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good
ground exists; indeed, the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of
rational conviction.
This world is not one, in which certainty is possible, If you think you've
achieved certainty, you are almost certainly mistaken, that is one of the
few things you could be certain about.
-- Bertrand Russell
-- David Russell
You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your
grandmother.
To ask is no sin and to be refused is no calamity.
Even a blind hen will sometimes find a grain.
-- Russian Proverbs
-- Ernest Rutherford
Roam abroad in the world, and take thy fill of its enjoyments before the day
shall come when thou must quit it for good.
Kings need the company of the intelligent far more than the intelligent need
the society of kings.
-- Saadi
-- A. Sachs
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.
-- William Safire
The tools of skepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our
society. They're hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the
presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although skepticism
repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday
life. Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old)
are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to
influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a
vested interest in discouraging skepticism.
In order to survive we someday must be able to give up our allegiance to our
nation, our religion, our race and economic group and think of ourselves more
as just a temporary form of life under the creation of a power beyond our
comprehension
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is
no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little
good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look
Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent
opportunity that life provides.
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.
At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid,
doctrinaire religion.
-- Carl Sagan
-- Mort Sahl
The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.
-- Jonas Salk
-- Carl Sandburg
-- Margaret Sanger
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and
denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of
their human interests.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of
routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only
a residual fraction is thought.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender
it too soon, or to the first comer: there is a nobility in preserving it coolly
and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and
discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what
language he shall speak.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of
his fortunes.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh
is a fool.
-- George Santayana
-- William Saroyan
Man is condemned to be free.
If you are lonely while you’re alone, you are in bad company.
l
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with
greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being
whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it
can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man....
--Jean-Paul Sartre
Our biggest problem as human beings is not knowing that we don't know.
I believe the greatest gift I can conceive of having from anyone is to be
seen, heard, understood and touched by them. The greatest gift I can give
is to see, hear, understand and touch another person.
-- Virginia Satir
-- John Ralston Saul
-- Walter Savage
-- Marilyn vos Savant
-- Alexi Sayle
--Roy L. Schaefer
-- Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
-- Bernard Schoenberg
Religion could not have arisen had it not been for the fact of death.
There is no absurdity so obvious that it cannot be firmly planted in the
human head if you only begin to impose it before the age of five, by
constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
All truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; next it is
violently attacked; finally, it is held to be self-evident.
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else
can see.
To overcome difficulties is to experience the full delight of existence.
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
-- Michael Schrage
-- Erwin Schrödinger
-- Charles M. Schulz
-- David Joseph Schwartz
-- Elias Schwartz
Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
-- Albert Schweitzer
What may be done at any time will be done at no time.
-- Scottish Proverbs
-- Pete Seeger
-- Haile Selassie
There is a well-documented method for building optimism that consists of
recognizing and then disputing pessimistic thoughts.
What would happen if my entire life were made up of easy pleasures, never
calling on my strengths, never presenting challenges? Such a life sets one
up for depression. The strengths and virtues may wither during a life of
taking shortcuts rather than choosing a life made full through the pursuit
of gratifications.
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the
pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better. The optimist bounces
back from defeat, and, with his life somewhat poorer, he picks up and
starts again. The pessimist gives up and falls into depression. Because of
his resilience, the optimist achieves more at work, at school, and on the
playing field.
-- Martin Seligman
While we are postponing, life speeds on.
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what
harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
True happiness is...to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon
the future.
So death is having all these tries at me, is he? Let him, then! I had a try
at him a long while ago myself.' 'When was this?' you'll say. Before I was
born. Death is just not being. What that is like I know already. It will
be the same after me as it was before me.
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as exercise does the body.
Show me a man who isn't a slave; one is a slave to sex, another to money,
another to ambition; all are slaves to hope or fear.
We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter
and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of
slaughtering whole peoples?
--Seneca
-- Seneca the Younger
Tenacity is a pretty fair substitute for bravery, and the best form of
tenacity I know is expressed in a Danish fur trapper's principle, "The
next mile is the only one a person really has to make."
The difference between the men and the boys in politics is, and always
has been, that the boys want to be something, while the men want to do
something. -- Eric Sevareid
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be
a fool.
-- William Shakespeare
--Vera Sharav
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those
who have not got it.
We learn from experience that we never learn anything from experience.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing.
Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an
international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases
to be serious when people laugh.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment
by the corrupt few.
-- George Bernard Shaw
-- Gail Sheehy
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
-- Brooke Shields
-- Judith Shklar
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
-- Beverly Sills
-- Herbert Simon
-- Lee Simonson
-- O. Carl Simonton
The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.
-- Edith Sitwell
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
-- B. F. Skinner
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,
but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some
contrivance to raise prices.
Man was made for action, and to promote by the exertion of his faculties such
changes in the external circumstances both of himself and others, as may seem
most favorable to the happiness of all.
-- Adam Smith
-- Hannah Whitall Smith
You can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.
-- Liz Smith
-- Sydney Smith
-- Carrie Snow
Technology … is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it
stabs you in the back with the other.
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.
The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness
you'll never find it.
-- C(harles) P(ercy) Snow
-- Ralph W. Sockman
If we were all to bring our misfortunes into a common store, so that each
person should receive an equal share, the majority would be glad to take up
their own and depart.
Let him who would move the world first move himself.
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
-- Socrates
The only interesting answers are those which destroy the questions.
The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If
there were no speaking or writing, there would be no truth about anything.
There would only be what is.
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a
sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery,
the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is
born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of
the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later
each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens
of that other place.
-- Susan Sontag
How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be when there's no help in truth!
Knowledge must come through action; you can have no test which is not fanciful,
save by trial.
-- Sophocles
-- Julia Sorel
-- Jim Sorensen
-- John Lancaster Spalding
-- Gerry Spence
Science is organized knowledge.
The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral
till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill
the world with fools.
-- Herbert Spencer
Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most
ambitious and envious.
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.
-- Baruch Spinoza
-- Charles Spurgeon
-- Nadine Stair
The death of one man is a tragedy; the death of a million is a statistic.
Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide
everything.
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns,
why should we let them have ideas.
-- Joseph Stalin
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
-- Richard Steele
The philosophers of the Middle Ages demonstrated both that the Earth did not
exist and also that it was flat. Today they are still arguing about whether
the world exists, but they no longer dispute about whether it is flat.
-- Vilhjalmur Stefansson
-- Edward Steichen
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common
sense.
-- Gertrude Stein
-- John Ernst Steinbeck
-- Gloria Steinem
-- George Stephanopolous
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an
open forum.
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall
until his back is up against it.
A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
-- Adlai Stevenson, Jr.
Quiet minds can't be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune
at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought
necessary.
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
-- Jimmy Stewart, in "Harvey", 1950
-- Potter Stewart
-- Benjamin Stolberg
-- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in; first, you get
accused of things you never did, and later, credited for virtues you never
had.
Great issues are rarely resolved by frontal assault; for every abolitionist
prepared to challenge slavery as a moral wrong, there were dozens of
compromising politicians (including Lincoln) who talked as if the real
issue were states' rights or the criminal jurisdiction of the Federal
courts or the right of the people in a new territory to determine their
own future.
-- I. F. Stone
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
-- Tom Stoppard
-- Anthony Storr
-- Bjarne Stroustrup
-- J. Michael Straczynski
-- Igor Stravinsky
-- Billy Sunday
-- William Graham Sumner
-- Han Suyin
-- Shunryu Suzuki
-- Richard Swinburne
-- Barry Switzer
-- Thomas Sydenham
Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.
Fortune is like glass--the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.
-- Publilus Syrus
A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to
be right but also to be wrong.
Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to
the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to
adults.
Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for
medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake
medicine for magic.
If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you,
you have schizophrenia.
-- Thomas Szasz
-- Albert Szent-Gyorgi
Even in times of war, you can see current events in their historical
perspective, provided that your passion for the truth prevails over your bias in
favor of your own nation.
-- Leo Szilard
Live well. It is the greatest revenge.
-- The Talmud
The sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white.
-- Alfred Tarski
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson
Grabbing shit is better than grabbing a fart.
-- Thai Proverb
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people;
we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we
change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way, not
by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique,
individual human beings to comprehend each other.
We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal.
We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present,
unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
-- Lewis Thomas
America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all
the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in
the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that
you are alone in the world.
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your
eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and
look toward another land. There is no other land, this is no other life
but this.
No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.
What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out
to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted
for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.
What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather
indicates, his fate.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation
is confirmed desperation.
-- Henry David Thoreau
-- Guðmundur Andri Thorsson
-- Thucydides
It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
-- James Thurber
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction
listen to weather forecasts and economists?
Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center
of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An
incorrect model can be a useful tool.
-- Kelvin Throop III
-- Frank Tibolt
--Paul Tillich
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.
-- Alvin Toffler
Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one
has asked them.
-- Leo Tolstoy
Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking,
honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the
publicity. But then, we elected them.
-- Lily Tomlin
The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused
by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and
second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice.
As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot
shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must
shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility.
Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of
them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.
-- Arnold Toynbee
There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a
democratic people.
-- Anthony Trollope
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a person.
If we had had more time for discussion, we probably would have made
a great many more mistakes.
-- Leon Trotsky
The mind likes a strange idea as little as the body likes a strange protein
and resists it with similar energy. It would not perhaps be too fanciful to
say that a new idea is the most quickly acting antigen known to science.
-- Wilfred Trotter
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
-- Harry S Truman
--Barbara Tuchman
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs
to be done.
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human
into believing that it was human.
-- Alan Turing
-- Ted Turner
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear --- not absence of fear.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't
do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the
safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Time is a resource whose supply is inversely proportional to its demand.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you.
This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Inherently, each one of us has the substance within to achieve whatever our
goals and dreams define. What is missing from each of us is the training,
education, knowledge and insight to utilize what we already have.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands
explained.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause
and reflect.
-- Mark Twain
-- Morris Udall
-- Miguel de Unamuno
Money often speaks louder than values.
Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, chronic condition of unknown
etiology.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter
and those who matter don't mind.
Blessed are the cracked: for it is they who let in the light
You can lead conservatives to the facts--but you can't make them think.
There are a number of mechanical devices that increase sexual arousal,
particularly in women. Chief amongst these is the Mercedes-Benz CKL550
convertible.
There are three kinds of [people: those who know how to count and those who do not.
Change is inevitable - - - except from a vending machine.
Light travels faster than sound. That's why most people seem bright until you
hear them
speak.
Life is like a jar of Jalapeno peppers. What you do today may burn your ass
tomorrow.
You only need two tools: WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn't move and it
should, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
Being happy doesn't mean everything's perfect; it just means you've
decided to see beyond the imperfections.
A couple hours in the library can frequently be saved by a few months
in the laboratory.
If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving
safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in
sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thoroughly
used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO what a ride!"
There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary
notation and those who don't.
He has his head so far up his ass that if he opened his mouth he could see
daylight.
The desire to understand is sometimes far less intelligent than the inability
to understand.
I want to be what I was when I wanted to be what I am now.
Everything you read in the New York Times seems absolutely true except for
those rare stories about which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.
Daniel didn't go back to the lion's den for the hat he left behind.
Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may
not follow.
Yield to temptation; it may not pass your way again.
Blessed are those who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to
be amused.
If you want to kill and idea, assign it to a committee for study.
If at first you don't succeed, so much for sky-diving.
Happiness is the by-product of a life well-lived.
The quality of restaurant food is inversely proportional to the size of the
peppermill.
Progress comes from below. No man with four aces howls for a new deal.
No matter how wise you may be, your wisdom is greatly exceeded by your ignorance.
Bacon and eggs explains the difference between being involved and being committed.
To make bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
There are three kinds of people in the world: Those who make things happen,
those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what's happening.
Stress is when you wake up screaming and then you realize you haven't fallen
asleep yet.
The disabled are the only minority group one can join in a millisecond.
Courage isn't the absence of fear...it's taking action in the face of it.
People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer
to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs.
The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault
finders.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
Don't tell my mother I'm a psychiatrist; she thinks I'm a piano player in a
whore house.
Life is a sexually transmitted, inevitably fatal, disease.
You have to lie a little and cheat a little in order to make an honest living.
I have not lost my mind - - - it's backed up on disk somewhere.
Sometimes you're the dog, other times the hydrant.
Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.
A drug is that substance which, when injected into a rat, produces a scientific
paper.
Life may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the sun.
He who hesitates is not only lost, but miles from the next exit.
Bene caca et declina medicos.
[In a bathroom in the House of the Seven Sages, Ostia Antica, Italy]
A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the
sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove . . . but the world
may be different because I was important in the life of a Child.
There are two types of people: Those who divide people into two types, and
those who don't.
If you wish strongly enough for something to be true, eventually your logic
will warp itself enough to make it true.
If it's green, it's biology, If it stinks, it's chemistry, If it has numbers
it's math, If it doesn't work, it's technology
Life is not about how fast you run, or how high you climb, but how well you
bounce.
A self-righteous liberal or conservative with a cause is more dangerous than
a Hell's Angel with an attitude.
Just because orthodox medicine doesn't always work is no reason to resort to
witchcraft.
Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is
everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the
altar of superstition.
For every mile you jog, you add one minute to your life. This means that
when you're 85 you can spend an additional five months drooling in a
nursing home at $6,500 per month.
If you are arguing with an idiot, make sure he isn't doing the same thing.
The closest to perfection that people ever come is when they are creating
their resume.
Its hard to remember your main objective is to drain the pond when you’re
up to your ass in alligators.
-- Unknown
-- John Updike
The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.
In America, though pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice,
but nothing to choose from.
-- Peter Ustinov
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost
certain to be false.
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof,
a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an
oracle, is inborn in us.
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
-- Paul Valery
-- Henry Van Dyke
-- Hal Varian,
-- Bill Vaughan
-- Thorstein Veblen
-- Jules Verne
-- Gianbattista Vico
-- Gore Vidal
-- Leonardo da Vinci
-- Joan Vinge
-- Judith Viorst
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
A witty saying proves nothing.
Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest
of all.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
When he who hears doesn't understand him who speaks, and when he who speaks
doesn't know what he himself means - that is philosophy.
We use ideas merely to justify our evil, and speech merely to conceal our
ideas.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.
One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today,
that is our illusion.
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities
are wrong.
-- Voltaire
Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.
People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in
working order so they'll have good voice boxes in case there's ever anything
really meaningful to say.
-- Kurt Vonnegut
-- Peter de Vries
-- James S. Vuocolo
-- Denis Waitley
-- Alice Walker
-- Edgar Wallace
--William Wallace
-- Karl Wallenda
The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those who feel.
Old friends are the great blessings of one's later years.
-- Horace Walpole
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change;
the realist adjusts the sails.
Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you.
Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you.
-- William Arthur Ward
-- Andy Warhol
-- Earl Warren
-- Fred Warshaw
--- Martha Washington
-- James D. Watson
The ability to ask the right question is more than half the battle of finding
the answer.
Would you like me to give you a formula for...success? It's quite simple,
really. Double your rate of failure... You're thinking of failure as the
enemy of success. But it isn't at all... You can be discouraged by failure--
or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can.
Because, remember that's where you'll find success. On the far side.
I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. [1943]
-- Thomas J. Watson, Sr.
-- Bill Watterson
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes
along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The
point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it.
It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are
unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
-- Alan B. Watts
-- J. C. Watts
-- John Wayne
-- Adam C. Webber
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves
atheists. And that, I think, is one of the great things about science -- that
it has made it possible for people not to be religious.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and
evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that
takes religion.
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that
lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of
the grace of tragedy.
Religious people have grappled for millennia with the theodicy, the problem
posed by the existence of suffering in a world that is supposed to be ruled
by a good God. They have found ingenious solutions in terms of various
supposed divine plans. I will not try to argue with these solutions, much
less to add one of my own. Remembrance of the Holocaust leaves me
unsympathetic to attempts to justify the ways of God to man. If there is a
God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to
hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to
bother such a God with our prayers.
-- Steven Weinberg
-- Fay Weldon
A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted
international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the
noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble
with men's lives should not stake their own.
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- H. G. Wells
Starting the work is two thirds of it.
-- Welsh Proverbs
-- Eudora Welty
-- John Wesley
It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and
gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own.
-- Jessamyn West
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
You're never too old to become younger.
-- Mae West
-- Rebecca West
-- William Westmoreland
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
-- Edith Wharton
-- John A. Wheeler
Personality change follows change in behavior. Since we are what we do, if
we wish to change what we are we must begin by changing what we do, must
undertake a new mode of action. . . . The new mode will be experienced at
difficult, unpleasant, forced, unnatural, anxiety-provoking. It may be
undertaken lightly but can be sustained only by considerable effort of will.
That person gains most from therapy, and gains it most quickly, who has the
heart and will to go it alone in the event that therapy does not help;
whereas he who clings to therapy as a drowning man to a ship's timber is
likely to burden therapy with a weight it can't support and so take himself
and therapy down together.
-- Allen Wheelis
-- Western Union internal memo, 1876.
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a
desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the
frog dies of it.
-- E. B. White
-- Minor White
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to
watch someone else doing it wrong, without commenting.
-- Theodore H. White
We cannot think first and act afterward. From the moment of birth we are
immersed in action, and can only fitfully guide it by taking thought.
Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
It is no paradox to say that in our most theoretical moods we may be
nearest to our most practical applications.
The deepest definition of youth is life as yet untouched by tragedy.
A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism into dogmatism is an
inability to respect those who disagree. In philosophical discussion, the
merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an
exhibition of folly.
Seek simplicity but distrust it.
Every really new idea looks crazy at first.
-- Alfred North Whitehead
-- John Greenleaf Whittier
-- Charlotte Whitton,
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he
exercises over himself.
-- Elie Wiesel
-- Alfren E. Wiggam
Give the average man the right to say whatever he wants to say and he
will usually say whatever you want him to say.
Both madmen and geniuses see something that no one else does. The
difference, of course, is whether or not it's actually there.
He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.
Cynicism, as a state of mind, produces more accurate observations about
the universe than practically any other.
-- Michael Wikoff
When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written.
I am not young enough to know everything.
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
-- Oscar Wilde
-- Thornton Wilder
We know next to nothing about virtually everything. It is not necessary to
know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization
depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave
knowledge.
Intellectual rigor annoys people because it interferes with the pleasure they
derive from allowing their wishes to be the fathers of their thoughts.
You really don't want a president who is a football fan. Football combines
the worst features of American life. It is violence punctuated by committee
meetings.
-- George F. Will
-- H. H. Williams
-- Tennessee Williams
--August Wilson
-- Colin Wilson
Nothing is as embarrassing as watching your boss do something you assured him
couldn't be done.
If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
-- Earl Wilson
The scientists, not the philosophers, now address most effectively the great
questions of existence, the mind, and the meaning of the human condition.
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth
will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information
at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.
Blind faith, no matter how passionately expressed, will not suffice. Science
for its part will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition.
All biologists speak of the interaction between heredity and environment. They
do not, except in laboratory shorthand, speak of a gene 'causing' a particular
behaviour, and they never mean it literally. That would make no more sense that
its converse, the idea of behaviour arising from culture without the
intervention of brain activity.
The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe
in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage
throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp
contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modern age
and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is
that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who
hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in
full measure.
-- Edward O. Wilson
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable
the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of
hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish
yourself if you forget the errand.
I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause
that will some day lose.
The state exists for the sake of society, not society for the sake of the
state.
-- Woodrow Wilson
-- Walter Winchell
-- Oprah Winfrey
-- Shelley Winters
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means
of language.
Resting on your laurels is as dangerous as resting when you are walking in
the snow. You doze off and die in your sleep.
If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge
him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there,
then I know he is a fraud.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order
to enjoy ourselves.
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein
-- P. G. Wodehouse
-- Charles Wolf, Jr.
-- David T. Wolf
--Alan Wolfe
-- Gene Wolfe
--Tom Wolfe
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
-- Virgnia Wolf
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your
character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what
others think you are.
Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn
out.
-- John R. Wooden
-- William Woodsworth
-- Alexander Woollcott
One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship
with other human beings as we take our place among them.
-- Virginia Woolf
The heart is the chief feature of a functioning mind.
The truth is more important than the facts.
An expert is a man who has stopped thinking - he knows!
TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
-- Orville Wright
The early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese.
-- Steven Wright
-- Wilbur Wright,
The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to
make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's
power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
-- Malcolm X
If oxen and horses or lions had hands, or could draw and fashion works
as men do, horses would draw the gods shaped like horses and lions like
lions, making the bodies of the gods resemble their own forms.
No human being will ever know the Truth, for even if they happen to say it
by chance, they would not even known they had done so.
-- Xenophrates
-- Chuck Yeager
-- Rosalyn S. Yalow
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
-- William Butler Yeats
-- Boris Yeltsin
-- Frank Yerby
Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can
throw everything into it-beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything
you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht.
-- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
A schlemiel lands on his back, and bruises his nose.
If things are not as you wish, wish them as they are.
If you want your dreams to come true, don't sleep.
Words show the wit of a man, but actions his meaning.
A man is not old until his regrets take the place of his dreams.
--Yiddish Proverbs
-- Brigham Young
-- Whitney M. Young
-- Marguerite Yourcenar
-- Yugoslav Proverb
If two men on a job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they
disagree all the time, then both are useless.
People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box [television] every
night.
-- Darryl F. Zanuck
Journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk
for people who can't read.
--Frank Zappa
-- Roger Zelazny
When the pupil is ready to learn, a teacher will appear.
To follow the path, look to the master, follow the master, walk with the
master, see through the master, become the master.
It takes a wise man to learn from his mistakes, but an even wiser man to
learn from others'.
Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions.
Be master of your mind rather than be mastered by your mind.
-- Zen Proverbs
-- Martha Zimmerman
-- Howard Zinn,
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
-- Emile Zola
-- Eric Zorn
A fault confessed is half redressed.
-- Zulu Proverbs
-- Carl Zwanzig
A collection some wise, foolish and humorous things
said or written during the past 2,500 years.
A short saying oft contains much wisdom.
-- Sophocles
a bad author if the line is good.
-- Seneca
You can only milk a cow so long, then you're left holding the pail.
If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the
wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me.
Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an
assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted
as a male schlemiel.
A memorandum isn't written to inform the receiver, but to protect the writer.
I have always admired the insular closed-mindedness which fundamentalists
possess, a quality which allows them to filter the chaff from the wheat. And
eat the chaff.
I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the
length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.
We have too many high sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with
them.
You don't take a photograph, you make it.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely
foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who
believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of
the people all of the time.
The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought
to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations,
or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and
evidence.
The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction.
Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal.
If there are no stupid questions, then what kind of questions do stupid people
ask? Do they get smart just in time to ask questions?
The fear of death often proves mortal, and sets people on methods to save
their lives, which infallibly destroy them.
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Friendship is a very taxing and arduous form of leisure activity.
Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the
hunters.
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.
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will
have to ram it down their throats.
-- Howard Aiken
An intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite
direction.
The act of writing is an act of optimism; you would not take the trouble
to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will
annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of ignorance.
Tradition is what you resort to when you don't have the time or the money to
do it right.
Upon the efforts of each depends the fate of all.
The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has
wasted 30 years of his life.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you are free to live. You no
longer care about your reputation...You no longer care; except so far as your
life can be used tactically - to promote a cause you believe in.
A committee is a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group
decide that nothing can be done.
No actual tyrant known to history has ever been guilty of one-hundredth of the
crimes, massacres, and other atrocities attributed to the Deity in the Bible.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads
to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray
we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
The great, wonderful quality of human beings is that we can overcome even absolute
terror, and we do.
So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword
other than laughter.
A dying man needs to die, as a sleepy man needs to sleep, and there comes a
time when it is wrong, as well as useless, to resist.
The practicing psychotherapist is perhaps better qualified than other serious
human beings to discuss boredom.
For the skeptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such
a thing as superhuman law it is administered with subhuman inefficiency.
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
It is no wonder that people are so horrible when they start their life as children.
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it
in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough.
Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without it
we can't practice any other virtue with consistency.
Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,
because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language
I don't understand.
You may forget with whom you laughed, but you'll never forget with whom you wept.
It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth
in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues
are at stake.
The thing that's important to know is that you never know.
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for
telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies.
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
That is easy.
But to be angry with the right person,
to the right degree,
at the right time,
for the right purpose
and in the right way.
That is not easy.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Success is a journey not a destination. The doing is usually more important
than the outcome. Not everyone can be Number 1.
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful
adherents who will defend it to the death.
Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.
Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a
broken precedent.
People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares
them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what
they know.
A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken
magnificently.
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
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking
them.
Gambling is a tax on the mathematically impaired.
If the assertion that there is a god is nonsensical, then the atheist's
assertion that there is no god is equally nonsensical, since it is only a
significant proposition that can be significantly contradicted.
It's not shameful not to know, but it's shameful not to ask.
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray,
Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers
come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question.
Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.
Sometimes when learning comes before experience It doesn't make sense right
away.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not;
a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
Action is the antidote to despair.
Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like
trying to play Bach's St. Matthew's Passion on a ukulele.
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less
imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in photography
everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see
the ordinary.
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad
is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to
church on Sunday.
There is no horror, no cruelty, sacrilege, or perjury, no imposture, no
infamous transaction, no cynical robbery, no bold plunder or shabby
betrayal that has not been or is not daily being perpetrated by the
representatives of the states, under no other pretext than those elastic
words, so convenient and yet so terrible: "for reasons of state."
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is
because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor
the fault-finding of men.
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can
accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be
taken on its own merits.
I am convinced that anyone can be a great writer... if he can only... tell
the naked truth about himself and other people. That, a little technique with
words and the willingness to bare heart, soul and body are really all it
takes. But few people know the truth, and fewer have the artistic intent and
perhaps ruthlessness to tell it.
Life is a long lesson in humility.
People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to
share yours with them.
If you take out the killings, Washington actually has a very low crime rate.
A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
Myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them
the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back
beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a world which is without
contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in
the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something
by themselves.
Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be
wrong about his facts.
In any assembly the simplest way to stop the transacting of business and split
the ranks is to appeal to a principal.
One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these
days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used
in the great struggle for independence.
The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to
think--rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves,
than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're
doing is work or play.
If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.
In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is
stupid.
The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else;
it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of
death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it
done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and
so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open
for us.
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim
that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
Drinking makes such fools of people, and people are such fools to begin with,
that it's compounding a felony.
The trouble with life isn't that there is no answer, it's that there are so
many answers.
In the beginning God created his Legal Advisor,
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than
convictions.
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people
wouldn't obey the rules.
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
True statements are always legally accurate, but legal accuracy is not always
the truth.
Never perform an experiment which might be harmful to the patient
even though highly advantageous to science or the health of others.
In this very real world, good doesn't drive out evil. Evil doesn't drive out
good. But the energetic displaces the passive.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
Speak when you are angry--and you will make the best speech you'll ever regret.
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
As scarce as the truth is, the supply is always greater than the demand.
Immaturity, confusion, helplessness and impotence are replaced, in those who are
intolerant of frustration, by prematurity, order, omnipotence and power.
Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who
care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else
has been.
Politics is the art of the possible.
The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles
of the mind.
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up till he sees
all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
The desire for success lubricates secret prostitutions in the soul.
A person who trusts no one can't be trusted.
There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in
the world.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of
a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
A fool always finds someone more foolish than he is to admire him.
Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the Titanic who waved off the
dessert cart.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger
that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of
what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial
detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so
the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events,
but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the
significant in the factual is wisdom.
A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed
because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance -- it is the illusion of
knowledge.
The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to
burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.
The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of
it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely
uneducated.
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct;
but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the
government's purposes are beneficent . . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk
in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the
big things.
A timely "no" beats a hasty "yes."
My sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating.
It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts
the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
Every American citizen is involved in politics. Some people do politics,
the rest have it done to them.
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain
constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
The American health care system doesn't work - in fact, it doesn't even exist.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are
scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is
imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be
stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right
person's brow.
Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what
they desire.
Never fail to know that if you are doing all the talking, you are boring
somebody.
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number
of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo,
Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom.
Who knows most, doubts most.
Our strength is that we don't have any weaknesses. Our weakness is that
we don't have any real strengths.
Smoking reduces your risk of getting Alzheimer's Disease.
Liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a
tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker
at work.
Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of
its brevity.
If the Bible and the microscope do not agree, the microscope is wrong.
There are three principles in a man's being and life, the principle of
thought, the principle of speech, and the principle of action. The origin
of all conflict between me and my fellow-men is that I do not say what I
mean and I don't do what I say.
Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time
we've got.
We send missionaries to China so the Chinese can get to heaven, but we won't
let them into our country.
Doubt everything. Find your own light.
Tell me what your friends are and I will know what you are.
Castles in the air cost a vast deal to keep up.
It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order
to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best to at least
rearrange their prejudices once in a while.
If you want a place in the sun, you've got to put up with a few blisters.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate.
A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to blame
somebody else.
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped
anything but himself.
Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men
still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach
the top.
Don't write what he says, write what he means.
"It's no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.
If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long
as I'm the dictator.
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we
should not get very far in our understanding of the physical world. One might
as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the
mathematics of probability.
Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents
my doing so.
Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more
afraid of life than death.
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the
pessimist fears this is true.
The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain
the second time around.
Anything that can go wrong, will --- at the worst possible moment.
Eternity has nothing to do with the hereafter... This is it... If you don't get
it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity right here and
now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience;
here's the place to have the experience.
The one thing your friends will never forgive you is your happiness.
If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.
It's a scientific fact that if you stay in California you lose one point of your
IQ every year.
The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political
importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth
of corporate propaganda against democracy.
If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions
and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds
must grow.
I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less.
It is not easy for authoritarian leaders with deep religious beliefs
to be tolerant of the divergent views of others.
-- Jimmy Carter
Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second,
of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of
forms which give that event its proper expression.
How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant
of the weak and the strong.
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
There is no remembrance which time will not deface, nor no pain to which
death will not put a period.
The grand essentials of happiness are: something to do, something to love, and
something to hope for.
There are more fools than wise men, and even in wise men, more folly than wisdom.
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an
advertising agency.
Any idiot can face a crisis --- it's the day to day living that wears you out.
"My country right or wrong" is like saying "My mother drunk or sober."
A wise person must hear the truth once to believe it; a sensible person
twice and an idiot three times before he believes it.
You can only cure retail but you can prevent wholesale.
If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If
there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to
making a better world. That's your choice.
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable ... but through it
all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but
a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the
landscape of idea.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience,
the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
New ideas pass through three periods:
It can't be done.
It probably can be done, but it's not worth doing
I knew it was a good idea all along !
A man's fate is a man's fate and life is but an illusion.
Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
It is wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything on insufficient
evidence.
Never believe anything until it has been officially denied.
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Art is science made clear.
There is a kind of virtue that lies not in extraordinary actions, not in saving
poor orphans from burning buildings, but in steadfastly working for a world where
orphans are not poor and buildings comply with decent fire codes.
It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It
saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine
only the track it has passed.
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is
to function, it must have dissent.
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness,
we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established
inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors. One would look in
vain for reasons to justify it, by differences in physical constitution,
intelligence, moral sensibility. This inequality has no other source but the
abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.
It is only the wisest and the stupidest that cannot change.
A priest sees people at their best, a lawyer at their worst, but a doctor
sees them as they really are.
It is a curious fact that the more ignorant and degraded a man is, the more
contemptuously he holds those whom he deems inferior.
If you trust Google more than your doctor then maybe it's time to switch doctors.
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside
us while we live.
It has taken me all my life to understand it is not necessary to understand
everything.
History is a vast early warning system.
If you start to think the problem is 'out there,' stop yourself. That thought
is the problem.
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels;
it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a
Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and
explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
Philosophy removes from religion all reason for existing...As the science of
the spirit, it looks upon religion as a phenomenon, a transitory historical
fact, a
psychic condition that can be surpassed.
Natural selection is simply about genes replicating themselves down the
generations. Genes that build bodies that do what's needed - seeing, running,
digesting, mating - get replicated; and those that don't, don't.
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please
everybody.
Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search
continually for learning is not.
The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them.
Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I'm going to take tomorrow.
We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship,
to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it . . . not so much
with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring
people to their senses.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than
the whole man --- he must view the man in his world.
The big thieves hang the little ones.
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels:
it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own.
You may both be wrong.
Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral
crisis maintain their neutrality.
The most dangerous tendency of the modern world is the way in which bogus
theories are given the force of dogma.
No one is so hard on the poor as the pauper who has got into power.
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm
beginning to believe it.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is
those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively
assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Knowledge may enable you to memorize the whole of Gray's Anatomy and Osler's
Principles and Practice of Medicine, but only wisdom can teach you what to
do with what you have learned.
A sure way to lose happiness, I found, is to want it at the expense of
everything else.
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not
understanding the world.
The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you'll grow out
of it.
People say, "What is the sense of our small effort?" They cannot see that we must
lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time.
Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain.
We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.
Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice
that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change
in your circumstances.
Everybody thinks himself so well supplied with common sense that even those most
difficult to please...never desire more of it than they already have.
Minds are like parachutes,they only function when open.
Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Spare no expense to make everything as economical as possible.
No man has received from nature the right to give orders to others. Freedom is a
gift from heaven, and every individual of the same species has the right to
enjoy it as soon as he is in enjoyment of his reason.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have
a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be too cynical. Well,
that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings
on the way down.
It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the
refutation of that nonsense.
We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech!
The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transference of bones from one graveyard
to another.
The lesson of history is that we don't learn the lessons of history.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.
Our technological infrastructure alienates us from each other. No need to form a
workplace community, everybody there will be out in a year or two, and so will
you, looking for a better place.
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances
there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in
such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however
slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all
they get.
The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you
settled for.
No doctor has a right to be a pessimist. If you are conscious of that
temperament, you should fly the profession. A reasoned optimism is essential
for a doctor.
The complaints which anyone voices against his mate indicate exactly the
qualities which stimulated attraction before marriage.
The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares
not is a slave.
Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is, with thoughts of
what may be.
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
A proletarian dictatorship is never proletarian.
There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to
stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.
If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to
regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know
which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology,
either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.
Fundamentalism means sticking strictly to the script, which in turn means
being deeply fearful of the improvised, ambiguous or indeterminate...Since
writing is meaning that can be handled by anybody, any time, it is always
profane and promiscuous. Meaning that has been written down is bound to be
unhygienic...Fundamentalism is the paranoid condition of those who do not see
that roughness is not a defect of human existence, but what makes it work.
What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do in our
leisure hours determines what we are.
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted
all other alternatives.
To be satisfied with little is hard, to be satisfied with a lot, impossible.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth.
We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone
wrong.
Failure is just another way to learn how to do something right.
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote
peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much
that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them
have it.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy
evidence of the fact.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
A problem is a chance for you to do your best.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are
your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president.
You realize that you control your own destiny.
Imagination is a poor substitute for experience.
Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the
names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are,
all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way
for a brief moment.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something
else is the greatest accomplishment.
Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.
Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or
give up existence.
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that
what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood
than to truth.
Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity
enough not to fear death.
The plural of anecdote is not scientific data.
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on
a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under
analysis some of them won't stand up either.
He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder.
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea.
Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves,
some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.
Experience teaches you that the man who looks you straight in the eye,
particularly if he adds a firm handshake, is hiding something.
He who doesn't fear death dies only once.
Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I've written on
it.
The petty economies of the rich are just as amazing as the silly
extravagances of the poor.
Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it.
Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent
on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be
justified and established.
Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to
admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by
man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent,
but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in
favor of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having
examined its advantages and its limits.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the
easiest person to fool.
If you can not find peace within yourself, it is useless to look elsewhere.
Instant gratification takes too long.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed
ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet
be determined to make them otherwise.
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar
territory.
What are we to believe in, then? Nothing. That is the beginning of Wisdom.
It is time to rid ourselves of 'Principles' and to espouse Science,
objective inquiry.
A great obstacle to happiness is the expectation of too great a happiness.
Take your work seriously, but never yourself.
Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.
Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops
of blood form on your forehead.
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you
are doing the impossible.
Old age and sickness bring out the essential characteristics of a man.
When we are no longer able to change a situation --- we are challenged to
change ourselves.
Three people can keep a secret as long as two of them are dead.
Violence, like the demonizing prejudice that justifies it, is always a failure
of our humanity --- something we should be ashamed of rather than something we
should revel in or celebrate or incite.
Washing one's hands of the struggle between the powerful and the powerless means
to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get
anywhere else what it cannot give us.
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as
"moral indignation," which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise
of virtue.
He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now
miserable and depressed.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that
has made all the difference.
Stupid people like to delude themselves that while they may not be clever,
they were at least able to compensate with feelings and insights denied to
the intellectual....It was precisely this kind of false belief that made
stupid people so stupid. The truth was the clever people had infinitely
more resources from which to make the leaps of connection that the world
called intuition. What was 'intelligence' after all, but the ability to
read into things?
In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty
against one another.
I have seen the future and it doesn't work.
He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea.
Psychotherapists are not always attentive to their own self-care. They
need to be sure that their personal lives are reasonably satisfying so
they do not look for emotional gratification from patients. A lifeguard
cannot save a drowning victim if he himself is drowning.
Most problems are either unimportant or impossible to solve.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the
disastrous and the unpalatable.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to
discover them.
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those
who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be
in the first group; there was much less competition.
Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to
die tomorrow.
Where facts are few, experts are many.
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and
tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will
have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its
theories will hold water.
In nature, red in tooth and claw, there is no trauma - and there are no
victims. In nature nothing ever goes wrong because nothing can go wrong.
Nature is beyond good and evil, and also beyond rationality. Nature is.
So called "Free Will" is an illusion exploited by the ruling class to oppress
the masses by persuading individuals to take responsibility for the failures
of society.
You should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is
wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you
believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their
strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they
can't lose.
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.
Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on
the open sea of thought.
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
I would recommend that skeptics devote even more effort than they do now
to understanding the reasons why so many people want or need to believe.
When knowledge is the slave of social considerations, it defines a special
class; when it serves its own ends only, it no longer does so. There is of
course a profound logic in this paradox: genuine knowledge is egalitarian
in that it allows no privileged source, testers, messengers of Truth. It
tolerates no privileged and circumscribed data. The autonomy of knowledge
is a leveler.
Everything has an end, only the sausage has two.
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no
one was listening, everything must be said again.
Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is
no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth."
If you have any doubts that we live in a society controlled by men, try
reading down the index of contributors to a volume of quotations, looking
for women's names.
It is told that Buddha, going out to look on life, was greatly daunted
by death. "They all eat one another!" he cried, and called it evil. This
process I examined, changed the verb, said, "They all feed one another,"
and called it good.
There's no such thing as "fact" anymore. There is only what you believe,
or want to believe, and how hard you argue. Show me a "document" and
I'll find an "expert" to claim it's a fake. Show me an "expert" and I'll
find a way to undermine his or her credentials. Show me an "eyewitness"
and I'll find ten people to swear that he or she smoked pot in college
and can't be trusted.
The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.
It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday
is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.
Love of our country is another of those specious illusions, which have
been invented by impostors in order to render the multitude the blind
instruments of their crooked designs.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it people will eventually
come to believe it.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being
attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing
the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
Thinking is easy, acting is difficult, and to put one's thoughts
into action is the most difficult thing in the world.
If Columbus had had an advisory committee he would probably still be at
the dock.
Hyperfocus on the Hippocratic admonition to do no harm dooms our
patients to excessive morbidity and mortality.
There are ... some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my
disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and Bigotry -- the most
sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving
through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to
get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the
house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-
monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled
by a mass media notoriously phony.
When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery.
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. I am somehow
less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in
the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton
fields and sweatshops.
To love what you do and feel that it matters - how could anything be more fun?
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without
becoming disillusioned.
More important than talent, strength, or knowledge is the ability to laugh
at yourself and enjoy the pursuit of your dreams.
Whenever peace is at odds with liberty, it is always liberty that loses out.
As Hobbes knew, what human beings want most from the state is not freedom
but protection.
It is very much easier to be intolerant, angry, jealous and resentful than it
is to be generous, patient, kind and considerate. Without question it takes
far more thought, and far more work, to treat others from the standpoint of
these virtues than from that of those vices, which is why the latter are so
prevalent.
Character is habit long continued.
Sedulously eschew obfuscatory hyperverbosity and prolixity.
Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you.
Security is the denial of life.
I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
The best teachers aren't those who answer our questions, but those who
question our answers.
When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him
keep her.
My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.
There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography
are in yourself, for what we see is what we are.
Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which
have not yet been filled. Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and
furniture, miracles lurk in the lacunae of science. The scientist
plasters up these cracks in our knowledge; the more militant Rationalist
swats the bugs in the open. Both have their proper sphere and they should
realize that they are allies.
If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not
planned enough.
Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the
reality is going to deal with you.
A book of quotations . . . can never be complete.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a
lamp-post what it thinks about dogs.
Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if
we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us.
You learn more by getting your butt kicked than by getting it kissed.
The god who is reputed to have created fleas to keep dogs from moping
over their situation must also have created fundamentalists to keep
rationalists from getting flabby. Let us be thankful for our blessings.
What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit,
to do the unnecessary.
Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something,
without feeling the necessity to prove someone else is wrong.
Fantasies are more than substitutes for unpleasant reality; they are
also dress rehearsals, plans. All acts performed in the world begin in
the imagination.
One important aspect of what makes a person an artist is having a
psychological make-up of thin boundaries, which includes the ability to
experience and take in a great deal from inside and outside, to
experience one’s own inner life in a very direct fashion and (sometimes
an unwanted ability) to experience the world more directly, more
painfully than others.
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times
like these.
A monkey never thinks her baby is ugly.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Seek the company of those who seek the truth, and run away from those who have
found it.
When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates
everything one does have.
Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and
the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences
of his actions...Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
Cannibals burn their enemies and eat them in good-fellowship with one
another: meek Christian divines cast those who differ from them but a
hair's-breadth, body and soul into hellfire for the glory of God and the
good of His creatures!
Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is
like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Every man is his own ancestor, and every man is his own heir. He devises his
own future, and he inherits his own past.
What experience and history teach us is this - that people and governments
have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they
might have drawn from it.
The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn
to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision,
and every action responsibility.
A lifetime is more than sufficiently long for people to get what there is
of it wrong.
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.
There are more fools in the world than there are people.
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come
drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication,
depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.
Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth
All things truly wicked start from an innocence.
If you always do what interests you, at least one person will be pleased.
Much learning does not teach understanding.
The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without
having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have
only one course of action.
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more
sense than we have.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.
What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us.
Roses are reddish
Violets are bluish
If it weren't for Christmas
We'd all be Jewish.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself,
what am I? And if not now, when?
If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.
It is far more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to
know what sort of disease a person has.
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
That one is learned who has reduced his learning to practice.
Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
You are lucky if you take one, maybe two good pictures in a year.
We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.
For every evil under the sun
There is a remedy or there is none.
If there be one, seek till you find it;
If there be none, never mind it.
If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no
independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to
some special and constricting idea.
No matter what we want of life we have to give up something in order to get it.
It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling
exception, is composed of others.
This is a court of law young man, not a court of justice.
The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.
Those who say that life is worth living at any cost have
already written an epitaph of infamy, for there is no cause
and no person that they will not betray to stay alive.
One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.
Seize today, and put as little trust as you can in tomorrow.
Fortunately psychoanalysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.
Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly
dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly
fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has
any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for
some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they
become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory.
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you
will make one.
If there's anything a public servant hates to do it's something for the public.
Many of our fellow citizens no longer have the tolerant souls and morals of
free men and women. They have the souls and morals of busybodies and petty
tyrants who want to run their neighbors' lives.
The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even
at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken
seriously.
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or
religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.
Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush.
It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can
be sure of changing is oneself.
Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading
smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.
To teach superstitions as truth is a most terrible thing.
We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?
Pissing in your shoes won't keep your feet warm for long.
If the fragile internationalism of the myth of human brotherhood has
returned as a moral force in the modern world, it is because partial
human solidarities - those of religion, ethnicity, and class - have
dishonored themselves by the slaughter committed in their names.
We should always be disposed to believe that that which appears white is
really black, if the hierarchy of the Church so decides.
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners
of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
The world came first and the gods came later.
A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common
hatred of its neighbors.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international
crime, it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.
A sword in the hands of a drunken slave is less dangerous than science in
the hands of the immoral.
You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.
He who knows nothing doubts nothing.
It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling
into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from
falling into error.
The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he
begins to be old.
If you believe everything you read, better not to read.
Conflicts may be the sources of defeat, lost life and a limitation of our
potentiality but they may also lead to greater depth of living and the
birth of more far-reaching unities, which flourish in the tensions that
engender them.
Information is the currency of democracy.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey
if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and
the harms it would cause if improperly administered.
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without
integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use.
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake
when you make it again.
The man who gets the most satisfactory results is not always the man
with the most brilliant single mind, but rather the man who can best
coordinate the brains and talents of his associates.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an
acquaintance, or a stranger.
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.
The more intelligent and cultured a man is, the more subtly he can humbug
himself.
In the battle of one man against the world, bet on the world.
Advocates of religiosity extol the virtues or moral habits that religion is
supposed to instill in us. But we should be equally concerned with the
intellectual habits it discourages.
Our human ability to see positive cases and inability to see negative ones
tends to put us all in the position of the fool who believed that everybody
spoke the same language as he did, because he had never met anybody who didn't.
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general
natural law.
We have not inherited the world from our forefathers; we have borrowed it
from our children.
Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things,
from tuberculosis to polio. It’s the same with the mind.
The only means to strengthening one's intelligence is to make up one's mind
about nothing---to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts.
The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-
backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists,
fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance
racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks,
fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil
Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out
to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch
president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information
and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured
body parts trying to walk.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the
long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or
nothing.
If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Work is a prime means to preserve vigor. The wheel that doesn't turn, rusts….
Faculties and skills, as well as muscles that are not used, weaken and atrophy.
I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture
elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.
There is a great difference between knowing and understanding:
you can know a lot about something and not really understand it.
Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assaults of thought on the
unthinking.
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where
there is no river.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
...a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus but a molder of
consensus...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 he must take it because conscience tells him it is right...
The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black
nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals
with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to
force facts into separated pigeon-holes.
Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.
Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.
Healing has become increasingly marginal to the West's dominant healing
system.
An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
There are two ways to slide easily through life; to believe
everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
Say what you know, do what you must, come what may.
If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history
is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs.
We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life; the
very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show; and the very
devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their
discovery.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
I say to people who care for people who are dying, if you really love that
person and want to help them, be with them when their end comes close. Sit
with them -- you don't even have to talk. You don't have to do anything but
really be there with them.
People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step
forward is also a step on the way to the end.
We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we
begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
Those in the United States who, by and large, have the best medical care
and advice readily available to them at the least expense are the families
of the specialists in internal medicine. These families use less medicine
and undergo less surgery on the whole than any other group, rich or poor.
There will come a time when you will believe everything is finished. That
will be the beginning.
In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you
have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human
beings.
He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts...for support rather than
illumination.
He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.
Only fools seek power, and the greatest fools seek it through force.
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found,
it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition that man’s sense of
curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his
need for clothing and food.
The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live
beyond them.
Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes.
The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don't collect all these tiny
successes, the big ones don't really mean anything.
A neurotic is a person who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the person
who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the person who collects the rent.
In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism.
You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.
One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The
stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude
cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.
When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world
is. Clean is not enough.
In a war of ideas it is people who get killed.
Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded
the Nobel Peace Prize.
A lie told often enough becomes the truth. (Attributed)
The turning point in the process of growing up is when you discover the
core of strength within you that survives all hurt.
USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every
four people make up 75% of the population.
I'm going to memorize your name and throw my head away.
Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they
conceal is vital.
Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups:
alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.
Being born in the elite in the U.S. gives you a constellation of privileges that
very few people in the world have ever experienced. Being born poor in the U.S.
gives you disadvantages unlike anything in Western Europe and Japan and Canada.
If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.
Science is a form of competitive and aggressive activity, a contest of man
against man that provides knowledge as a side product. That side product
is its only advantage over football.
Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have
their bright ideas closer together.
Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear.
People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
The language of the totalist environment is characterized by the thought-
terminating cliché. The most far-reaching and complex of human problems
are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases,
easily memorized and easily expressed.
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of
leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of
nonessentials.
The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from
the support of a cause we believe to be just.
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried
and succeeded.
Authority has every reason to fear the skeptic, for authority can rarely
survive in the face of doubt.
Where all think alike, none thinks very much.
We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were
taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things
themselves.
Almost 30 years of ... research has yet to find a single case in which
intuitive predictors outperform statistical models.
I don't think I have become more skillful a technician over time. I
think I have become more skillful at finding pictures that fit a very
simple technique. . . . You have to learn what you can do well. . . .
My pictures reflect the fact that I'm trying as hard as I can, and I
can't do anything else.
I am a hopeless materialist. I see the soul as nothing else than the
sum of activities of the organism plus personal habits -- plus
inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe
that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am
just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.
The secret of eternal youth is arrested development.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge
us by what we have already done.
The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally
knows everything about nothing.
All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Look back at the eternity that passed before we were born, and mark how
utterly it counts to us as nothing. This is a mirror that Nature holds up to
us, in which we may see the time that shall be after we are dead. Is there
anything terrifying in the sight anything depressing anything that is not
more restful than the soundest sleep?
Without emotion, man would be nothing but a biological computer. Love, joy,
sorrow, fear, apprehension, anger, satisfaction, and discontent provide the
meaning of human existence.
Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad, and theology makes them sinful.
Freedom for supporters of the government only, for members of one party only - - -
no matter how big its membership may be - - - is no freedom at all. Freedom is
always freedom for the man who thinks differently.
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.
Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient.
It's called rain.
The Lord's Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there
are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence. Yet, government regulations
on the sale of cabbage total 26,911 words.
A nymphomaniac is a women as obsessed with sex as the average man.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
I promise to keep on living as though I expected to live forever. Nobody
grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old by deserting
their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up wrinkles the soul.
The imaginary friends I had as a kid dropped me because their friends thought
I didn't exist.
Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy
of gain.
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that
is not learning from experience.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.
The Church says that the Earth is flat, but I know that it is round. For
I have seen the shadow on the moon and I have more faith in the Shadow
than in the Church.
Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether
a man is wise by his questions.
Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the
protagonists.
Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who
will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.
Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed
himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he
kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct
himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.
One can pay back the loan of gold, but one lies forever in debt to
those who are kind.
In an age in which the British Prime Minister takes part in New Age
ceremonies, and the American President blocks medical advances because
of his reading of the Bible, an obsessive concern with reason seems to
me to be a virtue not a vice.
There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish,
the West has women.
Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we
are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most
frightens us.
What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him.
A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
Many people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.
Your time or my time might be for hire, but time itself is not. Hence time
is our most precious asset-and how we decide to use our time is the most
important decision we can make.
One of man's largest defects is our predilection for getting drunk on our
own self-importance.
History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency,
when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go
into another room and read a good book.
Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to
change it.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as
if it were a nail.
.
My doctor gave me six months to live, but when I couldn't pay the bill he gave
me six months more.
There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there
is very little about which one can be certain.
Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to
form.
Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.
There is no more deep-seated biological instinct than that which expresses
itself as a firm grasp upon life; there is more dignity, as there is more
humanity, in fighting for life than in a passive abdication from our hardly
won and most deeply prized possession.
The scarcest resource is not oil, metals, clean air, capital, labor, or
technology. It is our willingness to listen to each other and learn from
each other and to seek the truth rather than seek to be right.
Don't be so humble -- you are not that great.
In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the
bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person
who has chosen any particular political party - democratic or totalitarian -
through study and comparison of principles.
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our
fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions
run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents,
more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great
and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
desire at last and the white house will be adorned by a downright moron.
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science
makes skepticism a virtue.
If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified
in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified
in silencing mankind.
Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses.
In this age, which believes that there is a short cut to everything, the
greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is often, in
the long run, the easiest.
You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could
know how seldom they do.
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is
it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is,
first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over
them --- and then, the opportunity to choose.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved.
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated
simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.
Human civilization is not something achieved against nature; it is rather
the outcome of the working of the innate qualities of man.
I would not live forever because we should not live forever, because
if we were supposed to live forever then we would live forever, but
we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was.
A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he
gets to know something.
To overcome evil with good is good, to resist evil by evil is evil.
It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which
we are accountable.
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man at last knows that he is alone in
the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by
chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.
Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in
the name of reason.
I despise the pleasure of pleasing people that I despise.
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does
not make any progress.
An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists
on boring future generations.
Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
I take the view, and always have, that if you cannot say what you are going
to say in twenty minutes you ought to go away and write a book about it.
The ingenuity of self-deception is inexhaustible.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day,
something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would
be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.
Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind
anyway. If you are successful you will win some false friends and true
enemies; Succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat
you; Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone
could destroy overnight; Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness,
they may be jealous; Be happy anyway. The good you do today, people
will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway.
America's corporate and political elites now form a regime of their own and
they're privatizing democracy. All the benefits - the tax cuts, policies
and rewards flow in one direction: up.
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own
facts.
To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an
equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot,
into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of
personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color
of the blot itself.
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences
of what never happened.
Money is like manure. If you spread it around, it does a lot of good, but if
you pile it up in one place, it stinks like hell.
The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble
to put makeup on two faces.
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't
mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
If you choose the lesser of two evils, you will get the evil of two lessers.
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
Tell me and I'll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and
I'll understand.
Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is
wrong?
Fortune does not change men, it unmasks them.
Of those who say nothing, few are silent.
Photography, as we all know, is not real at all. It is an illusion of reality
with which we create our own private world.
Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of social intercourse.
I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
When I was young I thought I knew all the answers, but as I became
older I discovered I was not asking the right questions.
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.
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem
those who think alike than those who think differently.
Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.
Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again;
and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.
I made my mistakes, but in all my years of public life, I have never profited,
never profited from public service. I've earned every cent. And in all of my
years in public life I have never obstructed justice... I welcome this kind of
examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is
a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
In the wake of five decades of information revolution, people are now working
longer hours, under worsening conditions, with greater anxiety and stress,
less skills, less security, less power, less benefits, and less pay.
Information technology has clearly been developed and used during these years
to deskill, discipline, and displace human labor in a global speed-up of
unprecedented proportion.
Reading this book is like waiting for the first shoe to drop.
Self-awareness has never been the strong suit of those who choose to become
doctors. When so much fuel is readily available for stoking the fires of ego,
there is little inclination to apply it in raising the candlepower of the
searching light that might illumine the inner man or woman.
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Never increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to
explain anything.
Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Beliefs: Those things we hold to be true despite evidence to the contrary.
The more evolved an animal is, the more time it spends playing.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Critics are a dissembling, dishonest, contemptible race of men. Asking a
working writer what he thinks of critics is like asking a lamppost what it
feels about dogs.
There are, in truth, no specialties in medicine, since to know fully many of
the most important diseases a [physician] must be familiar with their
manifestations in many organs.
We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes
an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will
reach to himself.
Education is not merely a means for earning a living or an instrument for the
acquisition of wealth. It is an initiation into life of spirit, a training of
the human soul in the pursuit of truth and the practice of virtue.
Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness
or have gone stark raving mad.
It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person, in its first
meaning, is a mask. It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is
always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role.
There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be
found to vouch for it.
The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins
to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction.
Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the
torch which illuminates the world.
In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he
sees it.
When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will
abate it.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Misquotation is, in fact, the pride and privilege of the learned. A widely-
read man never quotes accurately, for the rather obvious reason that he has
read too widely.
Doubt is often the beginning of wisdom.
It is quite unlawful to demand, defend, or to grant unconditional freedom
of thought, or speech, of writing or worship, as if these were so many
rights given by nature to man.
Optimism is a psychological disorder exhibited by those out of touch with
reality.
Investigators seem to have settled for what is measurable instead of
measuring what they would really like to know.
Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.
I am not in this world to live up to other people's expectations, nor
do I feel that the world must live up to mine.
Life is like a cobweb, not an organization chart.
Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty
like riches, and tears like pearls.
Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of
the beholder.
If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven't figured
it out yet.
We trained very hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to
form into teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that
we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and a wonderful method
it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion,
inefficiency and demoralization.
Photos are our autobiography, a way of telling who we are.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.
Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish
each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not
as important as how we have lived.
In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how
to do it.
Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is
adaptive, but sometimes it is not. Conflicts of interest are inherent to
the human condition, and we are apt to want our version of the truth,
rather than the truth itself, to prevail.
--Steven Pinker
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning
over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul.
What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing
generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.
The learning and knowledge that we have, is, at the most, but little compared
with that of which we are ignorant.
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about
what's really going on to be scared.
In these matters the only certainty is that nothing is certain.
You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that
have answers.
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient
solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.
We know more than we know we know.
Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to
make proper use of their victories.
A statesman is a politician who places himself at the service of the nation.
A politician is a statesman who places the nation at his service.
Everyone is entitled to a reality of their own choosing.
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been wrong, which is but
saying that he is wiser today than he was yesterday
God said "Let Newton be!" and all was light.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain;
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a
sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it
was intended to solve.
Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because
you stop laughing.
A cat that has been scalded is afraid of cold water.
The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of
messenger boys.
I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the fine line between sanity and madness
gotten finer?
You don't stop laughing because you grow old. You grow old because you stop
laughing.
Man is the measure of all things: of those which are, that they are; of those
which are not, that they are not.
The discoveries of one generation are the follies of the next. It would be
folly to go to a physician if it were not even more folly not to.
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially
under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.
We're still quite far from understanding the mechanisms of affective illness
and of our treatments. We're in the position of kicking a malfunctioning
machine: Sometimes that gets it working and sometimes it causes damage.
Discovering where and how to kick a particular machine effectively is based
on trial and error and doing it relatively safely and well comes with
experience; but sometimes things go really wrong.
A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.
It isn't pollution that is hurting the environment, it's the impurities in
our air and water that are doing it.
The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them.
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or give 'em
a date, but never give 'em both at once.
We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.
Science is best defined as a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge
about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best
available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon
discovery of better evidence. What's left is magic. And it doesn't work.
I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking
the time to plant some.
In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better
time on the trip.
Facts are stupid things.
He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.
To express unafraid and unashamed what one really thinks and feels is one of the
great consolations of life.
There is only infinity to give us an idea of the extent of human stupidity
I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He
didn't.
There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no
literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology
too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too
contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no
conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too
offensive for a paper to end up in print.
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find
it elsewhere.
All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
Do more than exist, live.
Do more than touch, feel.
Do more than look, observe.
Do more than read, absorb.
Do more than hear, listen.
Do more than listen, understand.
Do more than think, ponder.
Do more than talk, say something.
So little done, so much to do. [Last words]
From a historical perspective it can be undeniably stated that history teaches
us that history teaches us nothing . . . that we are doomed to repeat history
regardless of whether we learn the history of the world or not.
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements
trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that
men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so
endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the
contempt inherent in the political lie.
You are what you think. You are what you go for. You are what you do!
Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless
you're scared.
It is necessary for us to learn from others' mistakes. You will not live
long enough to make them all yourself.
It's easier facing loss, if you care little about losing face.
The process of diagnosis may be regarded as an attempt to make adequate
decisions using inadequate information.
Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober,
responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious,
and immature.
In general, indulgence for those we know is rarer than pity for those we know
not.
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so
heinous that the public will not forgive it.
When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it
elsewhere.
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an
obligation; every possession a duty.
I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God,
who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
When I look at the world I'm pessimistic, but when I look at people I am
optimistic.
Everybody thinks of changing humanity, but nobody things of changing himself...
because that takes effort not hot-air.
Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even
one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.
Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds
discuss personalities.
Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.
When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to
answer "Present" or "Not Guilty."
If a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, a liberal is a
conservative who has been indicted.
We are not naïve enough to ask for pure men; we ask merely for men whose
impurity does not conflict with the obligations of their job.
Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
To complain about dying is to complain about being human.
Those that are most slow in making a promise are the most faithful in the
performance of it.
A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble
in the hand of a fool.
You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days
on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either.
The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn't
commit when he had the opportunity.
Flags are bits of colored cloth which governments use first to shrink-wrap
people's brains and then later as a burial shroud for the dead.
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the
beginning of wisdom.
You will launch many projects, but have time to finish only a few. So think,
plan, develop, launch and tap good people to be responsible. Give them
authority and hold them accountable. Trying to do too much yourself creates
a bottleneck.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to
exist.
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little
consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
We must be skeptical even of our skepticism.
We live in a Newtonian world of Einsteinian physics ruled by Frankenstein
logic.
Lord, rescue me against friends, against enemies I could rescue myself.
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Whoever interrupts the conversation of others to make a display of his fund
of knowledge, makes notorious his own stock of ignorance.
Death is more universal than life: everyone dies but not everyone lives.
One should never generalize.
The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve
everything they've stolen.
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is
invisible to the eye.
Life is an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
American womanhood is blasting its way through the debris of crumbling moral
and religious systems toward freedom.
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so,
and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily
require happiness.
Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.
We must not allow other people's limited perceptions to define us.
The New Right is even more undisciplined than the liberal middle classes, which
have redefined personal freedom as the privilege not to give of themselves when
it comes to protecting or advancing the public good. Throughout the West they
have gradually withdrawn from public life, claiming that politics is too
damaging to their private lives. These lives tend now to be devoted to
careerism, travel, holidays, sport, exercise and the caressing of a private
state of mind which might be described as an obsession with their personal
well-being. For both the New Right and the middle-class liberals,
individualism has come to mean self-indulgence.
Of all cruelties, those are the most intolerable that come under the name
of condolence and consolation.
Feeling is what you get for thinking the way you do.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say "elevator'" we say
"lift" . . . they say "President," we say "stupid psychopathic git."
One difference between death and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every
time Congress meets.
If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things
are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our
intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own
mind and conscience in a room by himself.
Craziness knows no bounds.
Happiness consists in frequent repetition of pleasure.
I can give you perfect information, I can give you perfect knowledge and
it won't change your behavior one iota. People choose not to change
their behavior because the culture and the imperatives of the organization
make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge. Knowledge is not the
power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is power.
Most people do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess.
The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to
think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
I love mankind, it's people I can't stand.
The test of a successful person is not an ability to eliminate all problems
before they arise, but to meet and work out difficulties when they do arise.
We must be willing to make an intelligent compromise with perfection lest we
wait forever before taking action. It's still good advice to cross bridges
as we come to them.
Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well.
You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is
when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted;
the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the
voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil
to triumph.
If the cost of failure is high, optimism is the wrong strategy. On the
other hand, if the cost of failure is low, use optimism.
Skepticism is the chastity of the mind. It should not be surrendered too
readily, nor to the first comer.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false,
and by rulers as useful.
Next to power without honor, the most dangerous thing in the world is
power without humor.
Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.
The unthinkable is possible when medicine deviates from the physician's
personal oath to patients to "do no harm." When medicine serves
government or corporate agendas illegitimate medical practices are
concealed by a veil of secrecy and protected by a fraternal culture of
silence.
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.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, we aren't really living.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight,
the Lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.
Skepticism is inclined toward toleration, since in its doubts
it cannot choose among the competing beliefs that swirl
around it, so often in murderous rage. Whether the
skeptic seeks personal tranquility in retreat or tries to
calm the warring factions around her, she must prefer a
government that does nothing to increase the prevailing
levels of fanaticism and dogmatism.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of
its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of
attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a
competent historian.
In the face of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with hope.
The man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics
because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by
the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to be
perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not, and never persist in trying
to set people right.
The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you can only do a
little. Do what you can.
Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to
avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.
A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic who never owned a car.
Science is the refusal to believe on the basis of hope.
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance
comes when we are in the majority.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority;
they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children
are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when
elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company,
gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its
being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of
affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.
Money: There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.
If you're never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any
chances.
A vision without action is called a daydream; but then again, action without a
vision is called a nightmare.
The doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient and laborious mind is worthy of
respect. In such doubt may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds.
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding,
because to understand is to be free.
Learn to say no. It will be more use to you than to able to read Latin.
If I had my life to live over again, I'd dare to make more mistakes the next
time.
Only place on earth where all people are of the same opinion is the cemetery.
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way
of woman's emancipation.
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical
advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses
truth to deceive the public.
The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each to himself. And
that is the most complicated thing on earth.
There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has
been an answer. That's the answer.
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and
pretty soon you have a dozen.
It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now
in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward
systems don't try to make it posthumous.
The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends
. . . that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will
stop telling the truth about them.
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I
finally won out over it.
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a
hallmark of an authoritarian regime.
An expert is a person who avoids small error as he sweeps on to the grand
fallacy.
You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them.
But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power.
Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.
You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever
enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms. Sometimes
it involves being misunderstood or rejected by one's peers. Those who are not
too dependent upon, or too closely involved with, others, find it easier to
ignore convention. Primitive societies find it difficult to allow for
individual decisions or varieties of opinion. When the maintenance of group
solidarity is a prime consideration, originality may be stifled.
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone.
My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
I did the necessary thing, that is not always the same as the right thing...
Silence will save me from being wrong (and foolish), but it will also deprive
me of the possibility of being right.
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to
the garage makes you a car.
Each group thinks its own folkways the only right ones, and if it observes
that other groups have other folkways this excites its scorn.
Truth, like surgery, may hurt, but it cures.
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's
mind there are few.
If the world was without any natural evil and suffering we wouldn't
have the opportunity, or nearly as much opportunity, to show courage,
patience and sympathy.
Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a
triple.
Lastly, [the physician] must remember that he himself hath no exemption from
the common lot, but that he is bound by the same laws of mortality, and liable
to the same ailments and afflictions with his fellows.
The fear of death is to be more dreaded than death.
When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to
laugh at him.
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what
no one else has thought.
Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose
Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and
then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt
that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a
war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of
this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
You will not find in semantics any remedy for decayed teeth or illusions of
grandeur or class conflict.
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Bald people can always find a comb.
The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from
the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact,
are better in the morning.
No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel, and
no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than
his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man
to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
Photographs of people are often frozen motion - the moment made eternal.
In nature photography, the opposite applies ... eternity is frozen and
made into a moment. We are granted a glimpse of eternity itself.
We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them.
There is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.
The real world is not user-friendly
We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action
always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.
Loneliness is a word to express the pain of being alone . . .
solitude is a word to express the glory of being alone.
Experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is
usually just as its starting on reform.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way.
Reality is a crutch for people who can't handle drugs.
Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.
There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any
art.
Life is not an easy matter. You cannot live through it without falling
into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea
which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds
of perfidy and baseness.
If we watch ourselves honestly we shall often find that we have begun to
argue against a new idea even before it has been completely stated.
If we do not abolish war on this earth, then surely, one day war will abolish
us from the earth.
Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a
remarkable role in individuals. It consists in assessing a situation in terms
of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.
It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected
by the facts. It is epitomized in a historians statement about Phillip II
of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns "No experience of
the failure of the policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty,
a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture.
If only I had a little humility, I would be perfect.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns
of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
If you can find something everyone agrees on, it’s wrong.
True science teaches, above all, to doubt and be ignorant.
You're codependent for sure if, when you die, someone else's life flashes
in front of your eyes.
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the
enemy of well-being.
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that
of an expert saying it can't be done.
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.
Fifty years from now our grandchildren will look at early PC's and say,
"Isn't that funny, they thought computers should look like typewriters."
If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist,
it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard
of nonconformity.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two
questions grow where only one grew before.
Science . . . is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is
useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.
Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class,
an entire nation, or the entire human race.
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and
there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we
must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.
Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it
touches meaningless. Love and hate don't stand a chance against it.
Infatuation is when you think he's as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as
Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, as funny as Woody Allen, and
as athletic as Jimmy Conners. Love is when you realize that he's as sexy
as Woody Allen, as smart as Jimmy Connors, as funny as Ralph Nader, as
athletic as Henry Kissinger and nothing like Robert Redford – but you'll
take him anyway.
If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.
Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider
a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile!
Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad.
Some folks go through life pleased that the glass is half full. Others spend
a lifetime lamenting that it's half-empty. The truth is: There is a glass
with a certain volume of liquid in it. From there, it's up to you!
Luck happens when opportunity encounters the prepared mind.
Being happy is not the only happiness.
An intellectual is someone who has found something more interesting than sex.
Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.
Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.
Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not
giving it.
I am a deeply superficial person.
It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would
sanction the subversion of one of those liberties which make the defense of
our nation worthwhile.
No explaining computers, they do what they want to do, often without rhyme or
reason.
I have learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or
misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances.
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to
the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a
goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just
stupid.
Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the
dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot'
than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you,
stand up and be counted at any cost.
The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe
is that it has never tried to contact us.
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are
doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too
many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and
the only thing that's wrong is to get caught.
I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There
were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were
selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.
A complete idiot who has an idiotic original thought is more a philosopher than
an educated person who merely parrots the words of their intellectual superiors.
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts
human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of
tragedy.
Preserve your peace of mind. There is not much time; all things end in
death. Do not lament the past too much, or fear the future too acutely,
or waste too much energy on other peoples' woes, in case the present
dissolves altogether.
Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they
have, and the ones they expect to have.
Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's.
A good snapshot stops a moment from running away.
Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways
you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all
the people you can. As long as ever you can.
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier
to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to
treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
It is queer how it is always one's virtues and not one's vices that
precipitate one into disaster.
Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.
If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much
of a day.
Nothing guarantees our freedom. Deny it often enough and one day it will
be gone, and we will not know how or when.
This "telephone" has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a
means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.
We should all do what, in the long run, gives us joy, even if it is only
picking grapes or sorting the laundry.
The state of mind of a photographer while creating is a blank...For those who
would equate "blank" with a kind of static emptiness, I must explain that this
is a special kind of blank. It is a very active state of mind really, a very
receptive state of mind, ready at an instant to grasp an image, yet with no
image pre-formed in it at any time.
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people
you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid
order.
The saddest thing of word or pen, To know the things that might have been.
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as
good. Luckily this
is not difficult.
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there
must never be a time when we fail to protest.
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the
first time.
Better to be hated for one's successes than pitied for one's mistakes.
Discomfort is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say
to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were
sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is
when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.
Make voyages! Attempt them...there's nothing else.
You are responsible for the world that you live in. It is not the government's
responsibility. It is not your school's or your social club's or your church's
or your neighbor's or your fellow citizen's. It is yours, utterly and
singularly yours.
The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world,
but to change it.
If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it.
When the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet
and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those
millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so
the conscious mind carries on?
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.
If you look at what you have in life, You'll always have more. If you look at
what you don't have in life, You'll never have enough.
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things
American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful,
patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not
want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
Those who don't study the past will repeat its errors; those who do study
it will find other ways to err.
Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows.
One of the first rules of the scientific temperament involves an alertness
to one's own possible fallibility.
There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its
own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested
in money, compliments, or publicity.
Why are women . . . so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
The little unremembered acts of kindness and love are the best parts of a
person's life.
Most of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if we didn't
spend half our time wishing.
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we
don't believe in it at all.
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris. No known motor
can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping.
Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give
up some truth with it.
The future belongs to those who prepare for it today.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can't, you
do the next best thing. You back up but you don't give up.
The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as
you're learning you're not old.
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the
situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh
thought is more precious than gold.
Maturity is reached the day we don't need to be lied to about anything.
To believe in one's dreams is to spend all of one's life asleep.
An imaginary ailment is worse than a disease.
The best remedy for anger is delay.
Support the strong, give courage to the timid, remind the indifferent,
and warn the opposed.
When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in
contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by
the other; regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages,
of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is
complex.
If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.
Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are
too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers,
there is no justice.
Some Scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the
basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more
stupidity than hydrogen, and that THAT is the basic building block of the
universe.
Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid
those that open when you don't want them to.
If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand,
things are just as they are.
If God had meant for us to travel tourist class, He would have made us
narrower.
Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane.
But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
Those who refuse to make New Year's resolutions because they always break
them anyway miss the point. Making resolutions is a cleansing ritual of
self-assessment and repentance that demands personal honesty and, ultimately,
reinforces humility. Breaking them is part of the cycle.
He who hates, hates himself.
Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds
the universe together.
people.