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
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.
-- 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
-- Arab Proverb
-- 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.
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
People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy
themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes
anyway, free and happy.
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
-- 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 institutionalised,
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
-- 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
-- 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
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
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 illegitimite about honest differences of opinion honestly
expressed by honest men.
-- J. William Fulbright
-- Robert Fulford
-- Thomas Fuller
-- 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
-- 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
-- Murray Gell-Mann
-- Ernest Gellner
He who conquers his anger has conquered an enemy.
--German Proverbs
-- Glen O. Gabbard
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.
-- Rabbi Hillel
-- Lewis Hine
-- Hippocrates
It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to
know what sort of disease a person has.
-- 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.
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
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 assemply 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.
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
you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, 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.
Laughter is inner jogging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
verything 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 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.
Learning gives birth to knowledge, and assumption generates ignorance.
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.