Assorted Quotations

09.6

These are just assorted quotes picked up over the years.  Current 6-18-09. There is no order here, except that the last group has already been published in my Yijing Commentary and towards the end I've made a beginning of sorting quotes by author.

The  link below is the best search engine I know for finding quotes or verifying authors. It's not the simple search engine: 

http://www.google.com/advanced_search  Pick a string of the four or five words most likely to be unique to the quote and the least likely to have been altered in the retelling.  Then enter these in the box "Contains the entire phrase".

If you found this page through a quote search and not my website, this is also available as a zipped .rtf file at

http://www.hermetica.info/AllQuotes.zip

New Rule: Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn't make you spiritual. It's right above the crack of your ass. And it translates to "beef with broccoli." The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren't pregnant. You're not spiritual. You're just high. 

Bill Maher

New Rule: The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the asshole. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low and one NutraSweet," ooh, you're a huge asshole.

Bill Maher

Dao is the dynamic field of natural law in whose context all else takes place

Bruce Hamerslough

A man is exactly as great as the tide surging beneath him

Bismarck

The injustice we seed grows a poison fruit, one that we inevitably end up eating. 

Gerry Spence

"Secret? There is no secret.

"Anyone with eyes can see the way to live: by watching life, observing nature and cooperating with it, making common cause with the process of existence.

"By living life for itself, don't you see, deriving pleasure from the gift of pure being.

"Life is its own answer. Accept it and enjoy it day by day. Live as well as possible; expect no more. Destroy nothing; humble nothing; look for fault in nothing. Leave unsullied and untouched all that is beautiful. Hold that which lives in all reverence; for life is given by the sovereign of our universe, given to be savored, to be luxuriated in, to be respected.

"But that's no secret. You're intelligent. You know, as well as I, what has to be done.

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

Americans have a curiosity a mile wide and an inch deep.

Russian visitor

Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges! 

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) 

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Seventeen times of trying to commit suicide, I think it’s time to give up.

Sam Ross, a disabled Iraq veteran now in a mental hospital.

God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, "Sit up!" "See all I've made," said God, "the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars." And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. The Last Rites of the Bokononist faith, Kurt Vonnegut, jr., Cat’s Cradle

Freedom and equality require some capacities internal to the individual, and these the more removal of external barriers can never assure.

Lawrence M. Mead, Beyond Enlightenment

Rich enough to buy another, poor enough to sell oneself

Rousseau

As Nietzsche himself observed, the flip side of an urge to dominate is an urge to submit and then to construe victimization as a claim to privilege. 

National Review, 1992, p 25

668: the neighbor of the Beast

The test of anything in the Victorian mind was "does society approve?"

Pirsig

They conferred, as against the government, the right to be left alone - the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men 

Justice  Brandeis

It is my belief that there are absolutes in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put  there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be absolute.

Justice Hugo Black

It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed.  

Lenin

Ethical values cannot be separated from biological facts

Potter, Bioethics

Whether a democracy addicted to excesses can reform itself

Richard Lamm

The general rule is that a democratic politician had better not be right too soon.

Walter Lipmann

Where they make a desert, they call it peace. 

Tacitus.

Strange game, professor Falkan. The only winning move is not to play.

War Games

The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting. 

David Nolan.

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn's rain.

When you awaken in the morning's hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush

of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there, I did not die . . .

Mary Elizabeth Frye

I take a bottle of wine and I go drink it among the flowers.

We are allways three ... counting my shadow and my friend the shimmering moon

Happily the moon knows nothing of drinking, and my shadow is never thirsty

When I sing, the moon listens to me in silence. When I dance, my shadow dances too.

After all festivities the guests must depart. This sadness I do not know.

When I go home, the moon goes with me and my shadow follows me.

Li Po, The Little Fete

Quis hic locus? Quae regio? Quae mundis plaga? What world is this? What Kingdom? What shores of what worlds?

Lucius Annaeus Seneca Minor

Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?  ubi sum? sub ortu solis, an sub cardine glacialis ursae?

What place is this, what region, what quarter of the world? Where am I? Under the rising of the sun or beneath the wheeling course of the frozen bear?

Seneca, _Herucles Furens_ line 1138

Quoted in T.S. Eliot's "Marina"

It's what Hercules says when he comes to his senses after killing his wife & children. I've wondered how such lines made their way to Hollywood. 

Probably through Eliot's "Marina," where Eliot quotes Seneca. 

It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

found on a tombstone

Biological man does not create his society any more than soil creates a tree....Biological man is exploited and devoured by social patterns that are essentially hostile to his biological values.

Robert Pirsig

Representative government in the United States represents money, not people, and therefore forfeited our allegiance and moral support.

Edward Abby

And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.

Jeremiah 2:7

Bioethics - ethical values cannot be separated from biological facts.

Van Rensselaer Potter

If a builder build a house for some one and complete it, he shall give him a fee of two shekels in money for each sar of surface.  If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death. If it kill the son of the owner the son of that builder shall be put to death. If it kill a slave of the owner, then he shall pay slave for slave to the owner of the house. If it ruin goods, he shall make compensation for all that has been ruined, and inasmuch as he did not construct properly this house which he built and it fell, he shall re-erect the house from his own means. If a builder build a house for some one, even though he has not yet completed it; if then the walls seem toppling, the builder must make the walls solid from his own means.

First Building Code, Hammurabi, c. 1810 BCE – 1750 BCE

Thou knowest I am not wicked ... yet thou dost destroy me.

Job

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts -- for support rather than for illumination.

Andrew Lang (oft quoted as history for statistics) 

The Invisible Foot

term coined by Milton Friedman

Everything not forbidden is compulsory.

T. H. White

The authority of a chief is permanently established by continuity of war.

Herbert Spencer

There are no phenomena which a society presents but what have there origins in the phenomena of individual human life, which again have their roots in vital phenomena at large.

Herbert Spencer

A large class of officiously humane people, can never see any social evil, but they propose to pass some law for its future prevention. It never strikes them that the misfortunes of one are lessons for thousands - that the world generally learns more by its mistakes than by its successes.

Herbert Spencer

Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control.

Jack Hugh, Cato Institute

People smart enough to want to learn are smart enough to tune the selector button to the channel that has what they want. 

Mary Ruwart

It is wrong to demand that the individual subordinate himself to the collectivity or merge in it, because it is by its most advanced individuals that the collectivity progresses and they can really advance only if they are free.... The individual is indeed the key of the evolutionary movement.

Sri Aurobindo, The Future Evolution of Man

The law, aspiring to the perfect housing abode, has accumulated so many good ideas that the only type of new building that is permitted must satisfy middl- class standards. A law that dictates either a model home or no home is probably fine for some, but what about those trying to provide housing for the poor?   

Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense 

We have invented a hybrid government form that achieves near perfect inertia. No one is in control. No one makes decisions. Only the massive weight of accumulated laws keeps everyone in check. 

Philip K. Howard

Just as life preservers are not the preferred means of keeping passengers afloat, judicial review was not the preferred means of protecting the liberties of the people.

Randy E. Barnett

All the varied rights of man were threatened with submergence in a single right, that of belonging to a popular majority, or more accurately, of being represented by a legislative majority.

Randy E, Barnett

Law sufficiently complex is indistinguishable from no law at all.

Charles Murray

An essential element of lawfulness is law which is simple, objective and consistently applied.

Charles Murray

What is deadening to the soul is not to lose but to be forbidden to win.

Charles Murray

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested - Frank Rizzo

A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged - Tom Wolfe

Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. 

I don't have to show you any stinking badges!

Treasure of the Sierra Madre, film quote

When you look at the long an gloomy history of man, you will find far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ben committed in the name of rebellion.

C. P. Snow "Either-Or"

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I loved, I loved alone. 

Poe

The astrological zodiac was not founded on the stars, but on symbolic motifs of our inner nature.

Aratos (3rd cent. BCE)

Little people are entitled to little justice.

Gerry Spence

God against man. Man against man. Man against woman. Man against nature. Very strange religion. 

D. T. Suzuki, on Christianity

History is a long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  

M.L King

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community what they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.

Abraham Lincoln, 1854

If you don't know where you're going, slow down.

Herman E. Daley and John B. Cobb, Jr. For the Common Good

What has posterity ever done for me?

Kenneth Boulding

It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose.

William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism

Generals always prepare for the last war

proverb, author unknown

How lucky it is for tyrants that one half of mankind doesn't think 

and the other half doesn't feel.

J. G. Seume, quoted by Auden

The censorial power is in the people over government, not the government over the people.

James Madison

From each according to his ability, to each according to his work

Gorbachev

The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved.

Gay Talese

Long experience has taught us that it is dangerous in the interest of truth to suppress opinions and ideas; it has further taught us that it is foolish to imagine that we can do so. It is far easier to meet an evil in the open and defeat it in fair combat in people's minds, than to drive it underground and have no hold on it or proper approach to it. Evil flourishes far more in the shadows than in the light of day.

Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India, 1937

To live and work as bid by conscience

Political maturity of the people

Gorbachev phrases

There is no limit to the good you can do if you don't care who gets the credit.

General George C. Marshall 

It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous, wrong; he may still have other concerns to properly engage him, but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it.

Thoreau

The censorial power is in the people over the government, not in the government over the people.

James Madison

From time to time it is necessary that pestilence, famine and war prune the luxuriant growth of the human race. 

Aristotle

Tough Love

Garret Hardin

We do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be

Vercours, You Shall Know Them

Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Frederick Douglass:

A poor man shames us all

Gambra saying

We shall achieve justice in Athens when those who are not wronged are more

indignant than those who are.

Unknown Greek philosopher

aprender en cabeza ajena - Spanish saying, to learn in another's head

If we keep on learning at this rate well soon know nothing at all.

Mark Twain

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong

Lord Acton

Freedom is the luxury of self-discipline

Lord Acton ???

The State has our instincts without our restraints

Will &Ariel Durant, Lessons of History

Government has been a giant pyramid scheme, a chain letter to the future

Richard Lamm

On the tablet of history we will have ti confess "It happened on our watch"

Richard Lamm

Hell is truth seen to late

John Locke

Immortality is one of the qualities we ascribe to people without having a sufficient understanding of their meaning.  Other qualities of this kind are individuality, in the sense of an inner unity, a permanent and unchangeable I, consciousness and will. All these qualities can belong to man, but this certainly does not mean that they do belong to him, or belong to each and every one.

Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, p. 39

Man is not born with the finer bodies ... they can only be artificially cultivated in him provided favorable conditions but internal and external are present.

Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search, p. 41

What may be called the astral body is obtained by means of fusion, that is, by means of terribly hard inner work and struggle, Man is not born with it. And only very few men acquire an astral body. If it is formed it may continue to live after the death of the physical body, and it may be born again in another physical body. This is reincarnation. If it is not reborn, then in the course of time it also dies.

Gurdjieff, quoted by Ouspensky, In Search, p. 32

One cannot "explain" pressure and stress themselves. one cannot get free of the actio in distans - one has lost the belief in being able to explain at all, and admits with a wry expression that description, and not explanation, is all that is possible, that the dynamic interpretation of the world, with its denial of "empty space" and its little clumps of atoms, will shortly come to dominate physics... . There is nothing for it, one is obliged to understand all motion, all "appearances," all "laws," only as symptoms of an inner event and to employ man ass an analogy to this end.

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1885

The mechanistic concept of motion is already a translation of the original process into the sign language of sight and touch.

The concept "atom," the distinction between the seat of a driving force and the frce itself, is a sign language derived from our logical-psychical world.

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1888

The mechanistic world is imagined only as sight and touch imagine a world (as "moved") - so as to be calculable - thus causal entities are invented ... . If we eliminate these additions, no things remain, but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation to all other quanta, in their effect upon the same.

Nietzsche, Will to Power, 1888

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

George Washington, letter, Oct. 31, 1786

A man of truth must also be a man of care

Gandhi

I do not seek redemption from the consequences of my sin

Gandhi

We win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party

Gandhi

A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution.

Gandhi

Character building is the proper foundation of education

Gandhi

It is my rule as a Satyagrahi to understand the viewpoint of the party I propose to deal with, 

and to try to agree with him as far as may be possible.

Gandhi

It is my duty to place before the people all the legitimate remedies for grievances. A nation that wants to come into its own ought to know all the ways and means to freedom... . Satyagraha is a sovereign remedy.

Gandhi

When the symbol is made into a fetish and an instrument of proving the superiority of one's religion over others, it is fit only to be discarded.

Gandhi

It is an inalienable right of the people to withhold cooperation.

Gandhi

Those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics does not know what religion means.

Gandhi

No rules can tell us how this disobedience may be done, and by whom, when and where, nor can they tell us which laws foster untruth.  It is only experience that can guide us.

Gandhi

I see dead people

walking around like regular people

they don't see each other

they only see what they want to see

they don't know they're dead

The Sixth Sense

I see dumb people

walking around like regular people

they don't see each other

they only see what they want to see

they don't know they're dumb

anon

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

Upton Sinclair

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Paul Dirac

A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested

Georgios Seferis, via Maria

Year after year in Washington, budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need. 

Jeff Kallman

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.

Aristotle

Evolution is recklessly opportunistic

Ernst Mayer

One could almost define life as the organized disobedience to the law of gravity.

Pirsig

Wilderness was just a scenic consideration, just a decoration at the edges of the human world. 

Dave Foreman 

Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots! 

Giulio Giorello, Italian philosopher 

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.

Jack Handey

OCEAN, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.

Ambrose Gwinett Bierce

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Carl Sagan

Be willing to have it so.  Acceptance of what has happened is the first step in overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.

William James

Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.

Vaclav Havel

Making a living is not the same thing as making a life.  

Maya Angelou

Adversity is the trial of principle.  Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not. 

Fielding

Sanctified afflictions are spirititual promotions.  

Matthew Henry

Anybody can become angry - that is easy.  But to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.  

Aristotle

A man may smile, and smile, and be a villain.  

Shakespeare

Greatness of soul is shown as well by what is attempted as by what is achieved.

C. Nestell Bovee

In the power of fixing the attention lies the most precious of the intellectual habits.  

Robert Hall

Well begun is half done.  

Horace

Carpe Diem.  

Horace

The world has narrowed into a neighborhood before it has broadened into a brotherhood.  

Lyndon B. Johnson

Caution, though very often wasted, is a good risk to take.  

H.W. Shaw

Chance favors the prepared mind.  

Louis Pasteur

If we don't change our direction we'll end up where we're headed.  

Chinese Proverb

Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you'll understand how hard it is to change others.

Arnold Glasow

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.  

Gandhi

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.   

John Kenneth Galbraith 

Christ has no body now on earth but yours.  Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks out upon the world, yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good, yours are the hands with which he is to bless us now.  

St. Theresa

To me it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.  

George Santayana

Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.  

Emerson

Be sincere, be brief, be seated.  

FDR

Are you out to win an argument or an agreement? 

Jim Lytle

A conservative is a man who does not think that anything should be done for the first time.  

Alfred E. Wiggam

Conservatives are not ncessarily stupid people, but most stupid people are conservative.

J.S. Mill

Formula for contentment:  just think how happy you would be if you lost everything you had right now - and then got it back again.  

Frances Rodman

No member of a crew is praised for the rugged individualty of his rowing.  

Emerson

True contentment is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.  

Linus Pauling

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.  

A. Jay

In a calm sea every man is a pilot.  

John Ray (1627-1705)

To escape criticism: do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.  

Elbert Hubbard

The trouble with most people is that that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds.

Walter Duranty

First deserve, then desire.  

Proverb

Enthusiasm- etym. en theos, possessed by a god

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.  

Anatole France

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty when these attributes are considered in the purest sense.  

Emerson

Experience is the name people give to their mistakes.  

Jewish proverb

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.  

Theodore Hesburgh

He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.  

Horace

Genius is the capacity for seeing relationships where other men see none.  

William James

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.  

G.B. Shaw

God is conscience.  He is even the atheism of the atheist.  

Gandhi

Everone desires long life, not one old age.  

Johnathan Swift

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

John Milton

A cottage will hold as much happiness as would stock a palace.  

James Hamilton

Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we think up to hide them.  

La Rouchefoucauld

Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.

O.W. Holmes

It is not enough to aim - you must hit.  

Italian proverb

How many joys are crushed because people look up at the sky and disregard what is at their feet.  

Goethe's mother

Justice: a decision in your favor.  

Harry Kaufman 

He who laughs, lasts.  

Mary Pettibone Poole

Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence.

Conservatism, distrust of the people tempered be fear.  

Gladstone

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.  

George Orwell

You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.  

Evan Esar

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.  

Wilson Mizner

Men do not trip on mountains, they trip on small stones.  

Chinese

Luck - where preparation meets opportunity.   

Earl Nightengale

The harder you work the luckier you get.  

Gary Player

Learn from the mistakes of others- you can't live long enough to make them all yourself.  

Martin Vanbee

Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think and thinking where we ought to feel.  

J. Collins

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.  

Annie Dillard

Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.  

Henry Ford

An optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it is.  

Robert J. Oppenheimer

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

Reginald Mansell

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.  

Talmud QBLH

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.  

Elbert Hubbard

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.  

Thomas La Mance

People are not afraid of death per se, but of the incompleteness of their lives.  

Lisel Marburg Goodman

There has been a lot of progress during my lifetime, but I'm afraid it's heading in the wrong direction.  

Ogden Nash

In leaving nothing to chance you will do few things wrong.  You will also do few things.  

???

Reason is a very light rider, and easily shook off.  

Johnathan Swift

People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.  

John Wanamaker

True repentance is to cease from sin.  

St. Ambrose

One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.  

Andrew Gide

Nothing splendid was ever achieved except by those who dared to believe that something within them was superior to circumstances.  

Bruce Barton

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness.  The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.  

Eric Hoffer

Rabbi Zusya said that on the day of judgment God would ask him not why he had not been Moses but why he had not been Zusya.

Rabbi Zusya

If you ever need a helping hand, you'll find one at the end of your arm.  

Proverb quoted by Sam Levinson

The hands that help are holier than the lips that pray.  

Ingersoll

It is a pleasure to have someone to whom we can say, from time to time, that solitude is a fine thing.  

Balzac

A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.  

William James

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.  

Winston Churchill

Joyous distrust is a sign of health.  Everything absolute belongs to pathology.

Nietzsche

The cost of a thing is that amount of life which must be exchanged for it.  

Thoreau

Wisdom is knowing what to do next.  Virtue is doing it.  

David Starr Jordan

Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.  

Wordsworth

These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people; they call a spade a spade.

Plutarch

On the endless path in God

Don't stay in any of the stations,

Don't stay in any station you have won--

Go on! Go on!  Desire more and more!

The person who has dropsy can never have enough water.

The Divine Courtyard is an infinite plane;

Leave behind you the place of honor.

What is the real place of honor? The path itself. 

Rumi

No one can ascend onto a higher step until he places another man in his own place.  What a man received he must immediately give back; only then can he receive more.  Otherwise from him will be taken even what he has already been given.

G. I. Gurdjieff

"More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads.  One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.  Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly." -- 

Woody Allen, Side Effects

There was once a Wise Sage who wandered the countryside. One day, as he passed near a village, he was approached by a woman who saw he was a Sage, and told him of a sick child nearby. She beseeched him to help this child, as he may. The Sage came to the village, and a crowd gathered around him, for such a man was a rare sight. One woman brought the sick child to him, and he

said a prayer over her.

"Do you really think your prayer will help her, when medicine has failed?" yelled a man from the crowd.

"You know nothing of such things! You are a stupid fool!" said the Sage to the man.

The man became very angry with these words, and his face grew hot and red. He was about to say something, or perhaps strike out at him, when the Sage walked over to him and said: "If one word has such power as to make you so angry and hot, may not another

have the power to heal?" And thus, the Sage healed two people that day.

Unknown

If there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they can't be very important gods.

Arthur C. Clarke

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb till your life has illustrated it. -- 

John Keats

When we lose the right to be different, we lose the privilege to be free.

  Charles Evans Hughes 

There in the water

Color of water moves 

fishes...

Raizan 

The Baptists believe in The Right to Life before you're born.  They also believe in Life After Death, but that is a privilege and you have to earn it by spending the interim in guilt-ridden misery.  At an early age I decided that living a life of pious misery in the hope of going to heaven when it's over is a lot like keeping your eyes shut all through a movie in the hope of getting your money back at the end.

A. Whitney Brown, "The Big Picture"

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.

Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.

Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)

I know not, sir whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

J.M. Barrie (1860 - 1937)

We realize too late that we never taught our students what ducks know without knowing, that "we must love life before loving its meaning," as Dostoyevsky told us.  We must love life, and some meaning may grow from that love.  A marsh at nightfall is life loving itself.  Nothing more. But nothing less, either, and we should not be fooled into thinking this is a small thing.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Holdfast

Political and social institutions of all kinds, as viewed by Chuang Tzu, serve only to impose suffering on man. This is because the natures of different things are not identical, and each individual has its own special likings. Hence, they neither need be, nor should they be, forcibly made identical.  Since things are thus different, it is right  that they should remain different.  In this way uniformity is made out of difference.  All political and social institutions, however, decide upon a single Good as a standard for conduct, and make all men follow this standard.  This is to constrain difference to a forced uniformity, in which case what is intended to help people results only in harming them.

Fung Yu-Lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy

Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting.

Alan Dean Foster, "To the Vanishing Point"

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), 'Out of My Later Years,' 1950

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

William Pitt

Liberty don't work as good in practice as it does in speeches.

Will Rogers (1879 - 1935)

Black drinks the sun and draws all colours to it.  

Robert Graves

Remember the generational battles twenty years ago? Remember all the screaming at the dinner table about haircuts, getting jobs and the American dream? Well, our parents won. They're out living the American dream on some damned golf course in Vero Beach, and we're stuck with the jobs and haircuts.

P. J. O'Rourke

If we had less statemanship we could get along with fewer battleships.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.

Sally Kempton

on the twelfth floor

a life's work holds open

the book-reviewer's door

Martin Burke

I think it would be a good idea.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948), 

when asked what he thought of Western civilization

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

 For every living creature that succeeds in getting a footing in life there are thousands or millions that perish.  There is an enormous random scattering for every seed that comes to life. This does not remind us of intelligent human design. "If a man in order to shoot a hare, were to discharge  of guns on a great moor in all possible directions; if in order to get into a locked room,  he were to buy ten thousand casual keys, and try them all; if, in order to have a house, he were to build a town, and leave all the other houses to wind and weather - assuredly no one would call such proceedings purposeful and still less would anyone conjecture behind these proceedings a higher wisdom, unrevealed reasons, and superior prudence.

J.W.N. Sullivan

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are,  curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags  and tiny blasts of tiny trumpets, we have met the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

Walt Kelly

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

David Riesman

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Frank Herbert 

Suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

Mark Twain  (1835-1910)

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

General Colin Powell

Why is it that we entertain the belief that for every purpose odd numbers are the most effectual?

Pliny the Elder (23 AD - 79 AD)

To us, the moment 8:17 A.M. means something - something very important, if it happens to be the starting of our daily train. To our ancestors, such an odd eccentric instant was without significance - did not even exist.  In inventing the locomotive, Watt and Stevenson were part inventors of time.

Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.  It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.

Carl G. Jung, intro to Frances G. Wickes' "Analysis der 

Kinderseele" (The Inner World of Childhood), 1931

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 1966

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.  To make a goal of comfort or happiness has never appealed to me; a system of  ethics built on this basis would be sufficient only for a herd of cattle.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Lillian Hellman (1907 - 1984)

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.  His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), "On Liberty", 1859

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Aldo Leopold

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.    

SNL ???

The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.

Alexander Jablokov, The Place of No Shadows

Ring the bells that still can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That's how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.  

W. B. Yeats

Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them to see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

Peter De Vries

One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.

A. A. Milne

We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)å

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design abuilding, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, giveorders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. 

Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Robert Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love"

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes. Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings-- they are so trite, so threadbare. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot be far wrong. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others?  Not since the world began! He must pass through fire.

Norman Douglas

When you determined what you want, you have made the most important decision of your life. You have to know what you want in order to attain it.

Douglas Lurtan

We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.  I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin.  My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000.  It will show them what we are really like.

Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980)

Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practise charity.

Albert Camus, The Fall

Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.

Christopher Darlington Morley

Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  (But who will guard the guards?)

Juvenal

There was a young woman named Jenny,

Whose limericks weren't worth a penny.

Her rhythm and rhyme

Were perfectly fine

But whenever she tried to write any,

She always had one line too many.

Anonymous

There once was a man from Dundoo

Whose limericks stopped at line two.

Anonymous

Hypocrisy is the vaseline of political intercourse.

Billy Connolly on ABC's "Head Of the Class"

The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.

William James (1842 - 1910)

The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given "disease." The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.

Dr. Thomas Arnold Mindell

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that one word is 'to be prepared'.

Dan Quayle, 12/6/89

To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man.

Alan Paton

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Paul Valery (1871 - 1945)

Truth springs from argument amongst friends.

David Hume (1711 - 1776)

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

Daniel Boorstin

After several minutes of utterly dull conversation I began to think of her not as a woman but as a human, then not as a human but as an animal, then not as an animal but as a source of high-grade protein.

Mark Gooley

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.

P.J. O'Rourke

Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,  Meditations

[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system.

Dan Quayle

I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Richard Feynman

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.

G. H. Hardy

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual.  But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.

Katherine Anne Porter, 1989

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling into at night.  I miss you like hell.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950), Letters, 1952

The great French Marshall Lyautey once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years.  The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose; plant it this afternoon!'

John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)

He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.

Edward Everett Hale

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

Herbert Bayard Swope

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.

Saki

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626)

It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger than the previous record.

John Blasik

God does not play dice with the universe; he plays an ineffible game of his own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Gaiman and Pratchett's "Good Omens"

In Biblical times, a man could have as many wives as he could afford. Just like today.

Abigail Van Buren

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork.

Edward Abbey

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.

Moses Hadas (1900 - 1966)

Sometimes when I look at my children I say to myself, "Lillian, you should have stayed a virgin."

Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy and Billy

Sex is the biggest nothing of all time.

Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987)

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

It cost about 75 cents to kill a man in Ceasar's time. The price rose to about $3,000 per man during the Napoleonic wars; to $5,000 in the American Civil War; and then to $21,000 per man in World War I.  Estimates for the future wars indicate that it may cost the warring countries not less than $50,000 for each man killed.

  Senator Homer T. Bone

It is a very lonely life that a man leads, who becomes aware of truths before their times.

Thomas Brackett Reed

A well cultivated mind is made up of all the minds of preceding ages; it is only the one single mind educated by all previous time.

Fontenelle

It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before.

Author Unknown

 A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the full value of time and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.

Rambler

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.

Albert Schweitzer

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by a dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in a magnificient glow,  than a sleepy and permanent planet.  The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Jack London, Personal Credo

Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death.

Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey, 'A Woman of Independent Means'

Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1809 - 1894)

That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt....but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience.

Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804)

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

Arthur Koestler

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Douglas Adams

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

Ralph Nader

To emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line.

Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All

A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.

Charles Peguy

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers.  The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Justice Louis D. Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States (1928)

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

When shit becomes valuable, the poor will be born without assholes.

Henry Miller (1891 - 1980)

Somewhere on this globe, every ten seconds, there is a woman giving birth to a child. She must be found and stopped.

Sam Levenson (1911 - 1980)

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

Justice William O. Douglas

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen.  If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

Dan Quayle, 8/11/89

I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.

Dan Quayle, 5/22/89

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

Hermann Hesse

Models are to be used, not believed.

H. Theil `Principles of Econometrics'

Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. "Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck?".

"Of course not," Bohr replied, "but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not."

Neils Bohr

Etymology, n.:   Some early etymological scholars come up with derivations that were hard for the public to believe. The term "etymology" was formed from the Latin "etus" ("eaten"), the root "mal" ("bad"), and "logy" ("study of").  It meant "the study of things that are hard to swallow."

Mike Kellen

Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

Tom Robbins

Nobody believes the official spokesman... but everybody trusts an unidentified source.

Ron Nesen

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.

Richard Feynman

 Politicians are like diapers. They both need changing regularly and for the same reason.

Unknown

A word to the wise ain't necessary -- it's the stupid ones that need the advice.

Bill Cosby

Free speech is intended to protect the controversial and even outrageous word; and not just comforting platitudes too mundane to need protection.

General Colin Powell

I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race.  That's bad enough for me.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Stay away from needle drugs.  Richard Nixon is the only dope worth shooting.

Abbie Hoffman

You teach best what you most need to learn.

Richard Bach

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)

Daniel Dennett, from Consciousness Explained

Penicillin was indeed the product of accidental discovery, but the discovery was made, and the knowledge developed, because certain scientists had definite goals in mind. "Chance," Pastuer wrote, "favors only the prepared mind." The mind must be prepared not only by scientific training and technological know-how,  but also by the awareness of social needs.

Saturday Review

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

Storm Jameson

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views...which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.

Doctor Who

Not even the gods fight against necessity.

The Seven Sages (650 BC - 550 BC), from Diogenes 

Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged)  Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime.  But I have a great vocabulary.

Jules Feiffer

Pluralitas non ponenda est sine necessitate

Occam, alternate phrasing

Necessity knows no law.

Publilius Syrus

First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Doctor Who

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

He who would rise in the world should veil his ambition with the forms of humanity.

Chinese Proverb

The world is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet everyone has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the affairs, of his neighbor.

Benjamin Franklin

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1890

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955), On Education

POCKET, n. The cradle of motive and the grave of conscience. In woman this organ is lacking; so she acts without motive, and her conscience, denied burial, remains ever alive, confessing the sins of others.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

Mary Ellen Kelly

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.

Baron Henry Peter Brougham

Every man serves a useful purpose: A miser, for example, makes a wonderful ancestor.

Laurence J. Peter

The prime purpose of eloquence is to keep other people from talking.

Louis Vermeil

The only true happiness comes from squandering ourselves for a purpose.

William Cowper

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Helen Keller

The atom, being for all practical purposes the stable unit of the physical plane, is a constantly changing vortex of reactions.

Unknown

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

James Baldwin

As long as anyone believes that his ideal and purpose is outside him, that it is above the clouds, in the past or in the future, he will go outside himself and seek fulfillment where it cannot be found. He will look for solutions and answers at every point except where they can be found--in himself.

Erich Fromm

After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party?  Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.

P. J. O'Rourke

The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we hold of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us.

Quentin Crisp

Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.

Bertrand Russell

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

Malcolm S. Forbes

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

I am not sure that God always knows who are his great men; he is so very careless of what happens to them while they live.

Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934)

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Irving Caesar

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Eric Hoffer

...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.

Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall, 1965

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

George Washington

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

Stendhal

It shouldn't be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics.

Denise Caruso, (New York Times)

He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires and fears is more than a king.

John Milton

He that fears your presence will hate you absence.

Thomas Fuller

A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace.

Gersonides

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616)

Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of power are feared; but only men of character are trusted.

Arthur Friedman ???  Alfred Adler ???

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.  If your mind isnt clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

Wu-Men

A View of T'ai-Shan

What shall I say of the Great Peak? --

The ancient dukedoms are everywhere green,

Inspired and stirred by the breath of creation,

With the Twin Forces balancing day and night.

. . . I bear my breast toward opening clouds,

I strain my sight after birds flying home.

When shall I reach the top and hold

All mountains at a single glance?

Tu Fu

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.

William James (1842–1910),

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. Men will believe what they see.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

The gods, likening themselves to all kinds of strangers, go in various disguises from city to city, observing the wrongdoing and the righteousness of men.

Homer (~700 BC)

People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours.  The inference is  false, a gift confers no rights.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

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.

Joseph Campbell

The right to vote is a *consequence*, not a primary cause, of a free social system -- and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny.

Ayn Rand

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Claude Levi-Strauss

I really wonder what gives us the right to wreck this poor planet of ours.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

James Russell Lowell

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.

Honore de Balzac (1799 - 1850)

Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right.

PJ O'Rourke

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality; the inequality of success; the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world.

Felix Emmanuel Schelling

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up save in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

C.S. Lewis

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)

The individual's whole experience is built upon the plan of his language.

Henri Delacroix

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

Whoever is not a misanthrope at forty years can never have loved mankind.

Sebastien Chamfort

Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying No to any authority--literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political.

Ignazio Silone, The God That Failed (1950)

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.  

Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Shakespeare

In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.

John C. Sawhill

Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an important source of protein.

Guindon cartoon caption

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

National Health Insurance:

The compassion of the IRS

The efficiency of the Postal Service

All at Pentagon prices!!!!

Seen on a bumper sticker

To fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise, without being wise: for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For anything that men can tell, death may be the greatest good that can happen to them:  but they fear it as if they knew quite well that it was the greatest of evils. And what is this but that shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not know?

Socrates (469–399 B.C.), 

I've never understood why women love cats. Cats are independent, they don't listen, they don't come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, and when they're home they like to be left alone and sleep. In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat.

Jay Leno

At night, the moon is hunting

wearing silver

Indians are its easy prey

Arthur Sze "Lament"

If you think you're too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.

Bette Reese

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.  That's the essence of inhumanity.

GB Shaw

Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity.  Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have! But they have one thing you haven't got - a diploma. Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeatum E Pluribus Unum, I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th. D...that's Doctor of Thinkology.  

The Wizard of Oz

Time and again the passion for understanding has led to the illusion that man is able to comprehend the objective world rationally by pure thought without any empirical foundations- in short, by metaphysics.

Albert Einstein

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

Gandhi

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end one has no more to offer by way of advice than "try to be a little kinder."

Aldous Huxley

Never contend with a man who has nothing to lose.

Baltasar Gracian

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

Jeanette Rankin

The best things in life are not things.

Ann Landers

To me life is tough enough without having someone kick you from the inside.

Rita Rudner

You have to be very religious to change your religion.

Comtesse Dianne,  Maximes de a Vie

What we call reality is an agreement that people have arrived at to make life more livable. Louise Nevelson

Like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.

Sartre

Men hate those to whom they have to lie.

Victor Hugo

Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the 20th century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.

Solzhenitsyn

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.

James Russell Lowell

If men could forsee the future they would still behave as they do now.

Russian proverb

A man with no future will always run to his past.

Due South

Experience is something you do not get until just after you need it.

Oliver's law

It is easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Stuart's law of retroaction

You can't fall off the floor.

Paul's law

An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

Weber's definition

This I believe: to oppose

Is the only fine thing in life.

To oppose is to live.

To oppose is to get a grip on the very self.

Kaneko Mitsuharu

I am this world and I eat this world.  Who knows this knows.

Taittreya Upanishad

The strongest are those who renounce their own times and become a living part of those yet to come.  The strongest, and the rarest.

Milovan Djilas

To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee.

William Walton

Many promising reconciliations have broken down because while both parties came prepared to forgive, neither party came prepared to be forgiven.

Charles William

There is no escape - man drags man down or man lifts man up.

Booker T. Washington

There are two ways to slice easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything.  Both save us from thinking.

Alfred Korzybski

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.

John Locke

The soul has more diseases than the body.

Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw)

Water tells a tale as it goes.

Busson

There must be more to life than having everything.

Maurice Sendak

Things are not untrue just because they never happened.

Dennis Hamley

The answers aren't important really.  What's important is knowing all the questions.

Zilpha Keatley Snyde

Deep Peace of the Running Wave to You

Deep Peace of the Flowing Air to You

Deep Peace of the Quiet Earth to You

Deep Peace of the Shining Stars to You

Deep Peace of the Gentle Night to You

Moon and Stars pour their Healing Light on You

Deep Peace to You

Celtic Blessing

Man is stark raving mad.  He cannot make a worm, but he makes gods by the dozen.

Montaigne

Every nation has the government it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created.  You have to rise above it to the next level.

Alber Einstein

Woe is wondrously clinging: the clouds ride by.

Anon.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

C. S. Lewis

I can’t understand why people are frignhtened of new ideas.  I’m frightened of the old ones. John Cage

Nothing can be attained without suffering, but at the same time we must begin by sacrificing suffering.

Gurdjieff

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Frank Zappa

Pay no attention to what the critics say... Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!

Jean Sibelius

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

George Bernard Shaw

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

William Gibson

The denunciation of the young is a necessary part of the hygiene of older people, and greatly assists in the circulation of their blood.

Logan Pearsall Smith

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

Peter Drucker

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

John Kenneth Galbraith

You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

John J. Plomp

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. 

Andre Gide

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.

Walter Lippmann

The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.

Ralph W. Sockman

When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created a wheel, which does not resemble a leg. 

Apollinaire

You don't get anything clean without getting something else dirty.

Cecil Baxter

All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.

Benjamin Franklin

The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.

Andre Malraux

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

Abraham Lincoln

Everyone has their first date and the object is to hide your flaws.

And then you're in a relationship and it's all about hiding your disappointment.

And then you're married and it's about hiding your sins.

The Dollhouse

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Bertrand Russell

Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.

John Andrew Holmes

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bill Cosby

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

Will Rogers

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.

Rene Descartes

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.

Leonardo da Vinci

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

Frank Herbert

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

Ralph Hodgson

God's an imaginary friend for grownups.

Elmore Leonard, Big Bounce

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham Maslow

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

Will Rogers

In just two days from now, tomorrow will be yesterday.

Unknown

I may be schizophrenic, but at least I have each other..

Unknown

Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy green meat is bad for you.

Unknown

Heaven is Where:

The Police are British,

The Chefs are Italian,

The Mechanics are German,

The Lovers are French

and It's all organized by the Swiss. 

Hell is Where:

The Police are German,

The Chefs are British,

The Mechanics are French,

The Lovers are Swiss

and It's all organized by the Italians.

Making duplicate copies and computer printouts of things no one wanted even one of in the first place is giving America a new sense of purpose.

Andy Rooney

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.

Alice Kahn

worth paraphrasing

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.

Doug Larson

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Charles Mackay

I have seen the future and it doesn't work.

Robert Fulford

Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?

Jay Leno

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Flaubert

Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.

Nikola Tesla

Whoso would be a man must  be a nonconformist.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's Third Law

A poem is no place for an idea.

Edgar Watson Howe

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

Friedrich Nietzsche

For every one of them that dies, ten of us may die and in the end it is they who will tire of war.

Ho Chi Minh?

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.

Arthur Schopenhauer

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Love like green signal in traffic jam, Sahib

From a movie "My Faraway Bride"

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.

If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.

Emerson Pugh

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Mark Twain

"Life's tough... it's even tougher if you're stupid."

John Wayne

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

Sir Winston Churchill

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

William Ralph Inge

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Aristotle

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Soren Kierkegaard

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.

Kurt Vonnegut

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas A. Edison

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions, including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.

Doug Larson

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.

George F. Will

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Samuel Johnson

One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.

Andrew Carnegie

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. This 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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech, 1953

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

Martin Luther King Jr.

From The New Atlantis, 1626

We have also furnaces of great diversities, and that keep great diversity of heats; fierce and quick, strong and constant, soft and mild, blown, quiet, dry, moist, and the like. But above all we have heats, in imitation of the sun's and heavenly bodies' heats, that pass divers inequalities, and as it were orbs, progresses, and returns whereby we produce admirable effects. Besides, we have heats of dungs, and of bellies and maws of living creatures and of their bloods and bodies, and of hays and herbs laid up moist, of lime unquenched, and such like. Instruments also which generate heat only by motion. And farther, places for strong insulations; and, again, places under the earth, which by nature or art yield heat. These divers heats we use as the nature of the operation which we intend requireth.

We have also perspective houses, where we make demonstrations of all lights and radiations and of all colors; and out of things uncolored and transparent we can represent unto you all several colors, not in rainbows, as it is in gems and prisms, but of themselves single. We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distance, and make so sharp as to discern small points and lines. Also all colorations of light: all delusions and deceits of the sight, in figures, magnitudes, motions, colors; all demonstrations of shadows. We find also divers means, yet unknown to you, of producing of light, originally from divers bodies. We procure means of seeing objects afar off, as in the heaven and remote places; and represent things near as afar off, and things afar off as near; making feigned distances. We have also helps for the sight far above spectacles and glasses in use; we have also glasses and means to see small and minute bodies, perfectly and distinctly; as the shapes and colors of small flies and worms, grains, and flaws in gems which cannot otherwise be seen, observations in urine and blood not otherwise to be seen. We make artificial rainbows, halos, and circles about light. We represent also all manner of reflections, refractions, and multiplications of visual beams of objects.

We have also precious stones, of all kinds, many of them of great beauty and to you unknown, crystals likewise, and glasses of divers kind; and among them some of metals vitrificated, and other materials, besides those of which you make glass. Also a number of fossils and imperfect minerals, which you have not. Likewise loadstones of prodigious virtue, and other rare stones, both natural and artificial.

We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances. ...

We have also engine-houses, where are prepared engines and instruments for all sorts of motions. There we imitate and practise to make swifter motions than any you have, either out of your muskets or any engine that you have; and to make them and multiply them more easily and with small force, by wheels and other means, and to make them stronger and more violent than yours are, exceeding your greatest cannons and basilisks. We represent also ordnance and instruments of war and engines of all kinds; and likewise new mixtures and compositions of gunpowder, wild-fires burning in water and unquenchable, also fire-works of all variety, both for pleasure and use. We imitate also flights of birds; we have some degrees of flying in the air. We have ships and boats for going under water and brooking of seas, also swimming-girdles and supporters. We have divers curious clocks and other like motions of return, and some perpetual motions. We imitate also motions of living creatures by images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, and serpents; we have also a great number of other various motions, strange for equality, fineness, and subtilty. ...

These are, my son, the riches of Salomon's House.

Frances Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1626

We tend to scoff at the beliefs of the ancients. But we can't scoff at them personally, to their faces, and this is what annoys me.

Jack Handey

When you're riding in a time machine way far into the future, don't stick your elbow out the window, or it'll turn into a fossil.

Jack Handey

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

James M. Barrie

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

William Feather

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.

Ellen Goodman

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.

Sir Winston Churchill

Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.

Bertrand Russell

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

Steven Weinberg

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

e e cummings

The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

Anatole France

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Sir Francis Bacon

Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same figures to draw different conclusions.

Evan Esar

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

James Russell Lowell

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

George Bernard Shaw

In all recorded history there has not been one economist who has had to worry about where the next meal would come from.

Peter Drucker

For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.

H. L. Mencken

The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.

Kilgore Trout

The government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

Ronald Reagan

To survive is sometimes a leap into madness. The fingers of saints are still hot from miracles, but can they save themselves?

Joy Harjo, In Mad Love and War

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

George (Santayana 

If the Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me

Jimmy Buffett

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

Martin Gardner

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.

Umberto Eco

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

HL Mencken

My work is a game, a very serious game.

MC Escher

The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.

Marquis de Vauvenargues

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.

EH Gombrich

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

PJ O'Rourke

If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst.

Thomas Hardy 

Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Friedrich von Schiller

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.

William G. McAdoo

Every politician on earth claims to support freedom. The problem is so few of them understand the simple meaning of the word.

Ron Paul 

The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.

John Hospers

We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.

Walt Kelly, From Pogo

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Philip K. Dick

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.

Harry S. Truman

Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.

Faith Whittlesey

What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.

Sydney J. Harris

Never knock on Death's door: ring the bell and run away! Death really hates that!

Matt Frewer

Today's Tip for Fiction Writers:

A good way to 'liven up" the plot of a novel is to add some romantic interest.

Wrong: Doreen entered the room.

Right: Doreen entered the room and had sex with Roger.

Dave Barry

I like coconuts, you can break them open they smell like ladies lyin in the sun

Panic Widespread

The first day was golden and she colored the Sun

and she named it Hyperion

and she made it a day of light and healing

The second was silver and she colored the Moon

and she named it Phoebe

and she made a day of enchantment and the living waters

And the third was many-colored and she colored the Earth

and she made a day of joy

with the scarlet strength of seed

In the fourth the black and white were mingled into quicksilver

and she colored Mercury

and she made a day of wisdom

and the signs that are placed in the firmament

The fifth was bright blue and she envisaged Jupiter

and she made a day of awe and circles, circles

and she set it to dye the blood of the universe

The sixth was burning with icy green flames that glowed white

and of her beauty she made Venus

and she made a day of love

whereby all beings are united

The seventh was rich purple, of the mollusks

and she colored Chronos

and she made a day of idleness and repose

whereby all beings cease from struggle

Incredible String Band

Asking which contributes more to intelligence, heredity or environment, is like asking which contributes more to the area of a field - its length or it width? Neither can contribute anything by itself.

Donald Hebb

Nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. (S.M.W. P. 80)

A.N. Whitehead

A man with no future will always run to his past

Due South (TV show)

If this were a church, you could shush me.

Since this is a bar, these are my genitals.

Steve Pagano

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

Diogenes the Cynic

He wrapped himself in quotations- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.

Rudyard Kipling

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.

Bertrand Russell

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.

Douglas Adams

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

Kurt Vonnegut

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

George Bernard Shaw

What was there in those sovereigns to entitle them to your laudatory mention? Their sophistical reasonings (resembled) the reckless breaking down of walls and enclosures and planting the wild rub us and wormwood in their place; or making the hair thin before they combed it; or counting the grains of rice before they cooked them . They would do such things with careful discrimination; but what was there in them to benefit the world? If you raise the men of talent to office, you will create disorder; making the people strive with one another for promotion; if you employ men for their wisdom, the people will rob one another (of their reputation) 1. These various things are insufficient to make the people good and honest. They are very eager for gain;--a son will kill his father, and a minister his ruler (for it). In broad daylight men will rob, and at midday break through walls. I tell you that the root of the greatest disorder was planted in the times of Yâo and Shun. The branches of it will remain for a thousand ages; and after a thousand ages men will be found eating one another.

Zhuangzi, Ch 23

One of the great dreams of man must be to find some place between the extremes of nature and civilization where it is possible to live without regret.

Barry Lopez

I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.

Jane Wagner (and Lily Tomlin)

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.

Josh Billings (1818 - 1885)

The trouble ain't that people are ignorant. It's that they know so much that ain't so.

Josh Billings

Common sense and sense of humor are the same thing moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

Clive Jones

I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.

James M. Barrie (1860 - 1937)

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Ayn Rand

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.

Benjamin Franklin 

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this counrty is closely related with this.

Albert Einstein 

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.

Alfred North Whitehead   

The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity.

Helen Rowland

It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodelling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the directions of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.

Thomas H. Huxley

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

Do not wait for extraordinary circumstances to do good; try to use ordinary situations.

Jean Paul Richter 

The imperfect is our paradise.

Note that, in this bitterness, delight,

Since the imperfect is so hot in us,

Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Wallace Stevens

As the bonfires of knowledge grow brighter, the more the darkness is revealed to our startled eyes. 

Terrence McKenna

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Albert Einstein

One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

Albert Einstein

The success of the masterpieces seems to lie not so much in their freedom from faults – indeed we tolerate the grossest errors in them all – but in the immense persuasiveness of mind which has completely mastered its perspective.

Virginia Woolf

The universe is made of stories, not atoms.

Muriel Rukeyser

What you cannot know in your body you can know nowhere else.

The Upanishads

“There is no use trying,’ said Alice. ‘One can't believe impossible things.’ ‘I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’”

Lewis Carroll

To change a major paradigm is to change our definition of what is possible.

Mark B. Woodhouse

Broad, wholesome, charitable views ... can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.

Mark Twain

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

Abraham Lincoln

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

Sean O'Faolain

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Martin Luther King Jr.

"Reality" is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.

Unknown

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

Richard Feynman

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.

Albert Einstein

Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge.

Aristotle

When a thing is new, people say: 'It is not true.' Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: 'It is not important .' Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say: 'Anyway, it is not new.' " 

William James

Dear dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night. Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost remember feeling a little different.

Lewis Carroll

Things are not as they appear to be. Nor are they otherwise.

The Lankavatara Sutra

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. 

Niels Bohr

The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct “actuality” of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however. 

Werner Heisenberg

The smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or— in Plato's sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics. 

Werner Heisenberg

We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Werner Heisenberg

Observation plays a decisive role in the event and . . . the reality varies, depending upon

whether we observe it or not. 

Werner Heisenberg

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, ' Bu t how can it be like that?' because you will go 'down the drain' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Richard Feynman

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on

in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances that they want, and if they can't find them, make them. 

George Bernard Shaw

The last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Viktor Frankl

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.

John Lilly

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

Henry David Thoreau

Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To know ourselves as this free, creative energy is to know the meaning of life in this world.

Bruno Barnhart

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is awaiting us. . . . The old skin has to be shed before the new one is to come.

Joseph Campbell

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.

Buddha

Of all the creatures of earth, only human beings can change their patterns. Man alone is the architect of his destiny. . . . Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

William James

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it . . . and change it as times change, truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.

Salman Rushdie

It's never too late to have a happy childhood

Tom Robbins

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."

Alexander Pope

"What Semiramis Said"

The moon's a steaming chalice

Of honey and venom-wine.

A little of it sipped by night

Makes the long hours divine.

But oh, my reckless lovers,

They drain the cup and wail,

Die at my feet with shaking limbs

And tender lips all pale.

Above them in the sky it bends

Empty and gray and dread.

To-morrow night 'tis full again,

Golden, and foaming red.

Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931)

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

You dangle a carrot in front of her nose

And she goes wherever the carrot goes.

Aleister Crowley

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so ;

For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy picture[s] be,

Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou'rt slave to Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well,

And better than thy stroke ; why swell'st thou then ?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And Death shall be no more ; Death, thou shalt die.

John Donne (1572-1631)

May God us keep from Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

William Blake

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered.  But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue . . . "No good in a bed, but fine against a wall."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen.  I have since been visited

by her sister . . and now wish to withdraw that statement.

Mark Twain

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the

two as close together as possible.

George Burns

Santa Claus has the right idea .. Visit people only once a year. 

Victor Borge

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

Mark Twain

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir. Mighty scarce.

Mark Twain

By all means, marry.  If you get a good wife, you'll become happy;  if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

Socrates

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.

Alex Levine

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing.  It was here first.

Mark Twain

Money can't buy you happiness . but it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery. 

Spike Milligan

What's the use of happiness?   It can't buy you money.                 

Henny Youngman

I am opposed to millionaires........but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. 

Mark Twain

Youth would be an ideal state if it came a little later in life.                

Herbert Henry Asquith

I don't feel old.  I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.

Bob Hope

We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress. 

Will Rogers

The cardiologist's diet:  If it tastes good ... spit it out.

Unknown

Today Americans would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well being granted to them by their world government.

Henry Kissinger

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle.

Ayn Rand

You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no results.

Gandhi

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

Buddha

None are more hopelessly enslaved, than those who falsely believe themselves to be free.

Goethe

A free people should be armed and disciplined and ought to have sufficient arms and ammunition to protect themselves from all who might abuse them, including their own government.

General George Washginton

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.

Benito Mussolini

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an underground dictatorship... To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a republic... The Constitution of this republic should make special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom."

Dr Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller

It is enough that the people know there was an election;. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

Joseph Stalin

Loyalty is the realization that America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation. Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past while we silence the rebels of the present.

Henry Steele Commanger

 I can't begin to tell you how much I love my country. I love it enough to risk its wrath by pointing out the things that will destroy it, harm it very deeply

Martin Sheen, Actor

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism and find criticism subversive.

Henry Steele Commager

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, brave, hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot...

Mark Twain

When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.

Albert Einstein

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Albert Einstein

The first casualty when war comes, is Truth.

Senator Hiram Johnson (1917)

Why of course the people don't want war.... But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to 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 any country.

Goering

The greatest threat to our world and its peace comes from those who want war, who prepare for it, and who, by holding out vague promises of future peace or instilling fear of foreign agression, try to make us accomplices to their plans.

Herman Hesse (1877-1962)

Mental floss prevents Truth decay.

St. Germain

Blame keeps wounds open. Only forgiveness heals.

O Pioneer

If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.

Mark Twain

War is a confession that we don't believe in ourselves, that we have more belief in the instruments of violence.

Dennis J. Kucinich

Truth is often stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to make sense.

Mark Twain

He who fails to assert his rights - has none.

Author Unknown

What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.

Theordore Roethke

If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for life is even greater than their fear. People who can open to the web of life that called us into being, and who can rest in the vitality of that larger body...

Joanna Macy

When they came for the communists,

I remained silent;

I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;

I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I did not speak out;

I was not a Jew.

When they came for me,

there was no one left to speak out.

Martin Niemöller (1892-1984)

The only weapon that can save the world is nonviolence.

Gandhi

An old Navajo was telling his grandson about the fight that is going on inside of him. He said it is between two wolves: one is evil (anger,

envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, superiority, etc) and the other is good (joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, etc). The grandson thought about it and asked, "Which wolf wins?" He replied, "The one I feed."

Anon

He who dies in the Lie is destined to repeat it.

Cmdr. Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn

There is no such thing as a friendship between nations. No nation can be trusted beyond its perceived self-interest.

George Washington

The greatest purveyor of violence on the planet is my own government.

Dr. Martin Luther King

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate (but) that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light - not our darkness - that frightens us. We ask ourselves Who am I to be brilliant/gorgeous/talented/fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be! You are a child of god. Your playing small does not save the world. We are born to manifest the glory of God within us. (It is) within everyone.

Marianne Williamson

The measure of our lives does not depend solely on how we have lived, but upon how much we leave behind.

Charlton Heston

All the water in the sea can't sink the ship that doesn't let the water in.

Mary Baker Eddy

We are forgetting that we are a part of that which we mindlessly destroy and, as such, we will be our own last victims.

Paul Watson, Co-Founder, Greenpeace.

We cannot allow the state an autocratic right to govern outside the Constitution.

Boyd E. Graves, J.D

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

H.H. the Dalai Lama

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.

Adolph Hitler

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Voltaire

Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs. 

Ludwig von Mises

All of us necessarily hold many casual opinions that are ludicrously wrong simply because life is far too short for us to think through even

a small fraction of the topics that we come across. 

Julian Simon

What Goes Around...

His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.

The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved. "I want to repay you," said the nobleman. "You saved my son's life.

"No, I can't accept payment for what I did," the Scottish farmer replied, waving off the offer.

At that moment, the farmer's own son came to the door of the family hovel.

"Is that your son?" the nobleman asked.

"Yes," the farmer replied proudly.

"I'll make you a deal. Let me provide him with the level of education my own son will enjoy. If the lad is anything like his father, he'll no doubt grow to be a man we both will be proud of." And that he did. Farmer Fleming's son attended the very best schools and in time, he graduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin.

Years afterward, the same nobleman's son who was saved from the bog was stricken with pneumonia. What saved his life this time? Penicillin.

The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill. His son's name? Sir Winston Churchill. 

He who does not enjoy solitude will not enjoy freedom.

Arthur Schopenhauer

This assembly of life took a billion years to evolve.  It has eaten the storms - folded them into its genes - and created the world that created us. 

E.O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life

The big bang of the human psyche - the recognition of death.

Northern Exposure

Clouds are so beautiful I could bite my toes!

Matthew Howe (age 4) 

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you:

totally to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady I swear by all flowers. Dont cry

-the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life's not a paragraph

And death I think is no parenthesis

ee cummings

"You are a great and powerful nation. Are you not ashamed that you give so much time to the pursuit of money, and reputation, and honors, and care so little for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul?" 

Socrates, Apology

'And he said unto them, "If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?"

"Of course, Master!" cried the many. "It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!"

"No matter what those tortures, no matter how difficult the task?"

"Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked," said they.

"And what would you do," the Master said unto the multitude, "if God spoke directly to your face and said, 'I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.' What would you do then?"

And the multitude was silent, not a voice, not a sound was heard upon the hillsides, across the valleys where they stood.'

Richard Bach, Illusions

Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing. 

Anon

To speak of the love of humanity is meaningless. There is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need. As an abstract, it has no reality whatsoever

Howard Thurman

There once was a secluded village in the middle of a forest. Ocassionally travelers came by and it was decided they should have a wise old person standing at the crossroads greeting strangers. The first day a traveler came by. The traveler asked the old person, "I am looking for a new village to live in. What kind of people do you have in your village?" The greeter replied, "What kind did you have in

your old village?" 

"Oh, they were mean and rotten, they were just awful horrible people. I couldn't wait to leave." 

The greeter said, "we have the same kind here." 

The next day another traveler came by and asked the same question, "what kind of people do you have here?" Again the greeter answered, "what kind did you have in your old village?" The traveler answered, "they were just wonderful people, fully loving caring, I just hated to leave." 

The wise old greeter said, "We have same kind here."

???

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

William Gibson

They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety... deserve neither safety nor liberty.

Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

And as a private citizen, believe me, you are looked on as a major nuisance. The facts are, you now have a government that comes at you and you're supposed to have a government that comes from you. 

Ross Perot, presdential debates, 1992

Politicians are the easiest to operate on. There's no guts, no heart, no balls, no brains and no spine, and the head and the ass are interchangeable.

???

Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream in its course. It  will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find  the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it  out of your sight. It will take you. 

Sheng-yen 

2 Blondes

A blond woman is driving her car and gets pulled over at an intersection by a blond woman cop.

The blond lady cop walks up to the blond driver's car and says, "May I see your license, please?"  The blond driver asks, "Excuse me, officer, but what does it look like?" The cop says, "It has your picture on it." After rifleing through her purse for several minutes, the driver hands the cop her compact.

 The cop opens the compact, looks at the mirror, hands it back to the driver and says, "Well, ma'am, I stopped you because you failed to come to a complete stop at that stop sign behind you; but, I am going to let you go with a warning this time as a professional courtesy."

The blond driver says, "Thank you very much, officer, but why is it a 'professional courtesy'?"

The blond cop says, "I didn't realize you were a police officer until I saw your license!"

???

Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out.

But I can usually shut the bitch up with cookies.

???

Old age ain't no place for sissies.

Bette Davis

I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.

Jennifer Unlimited

Heaven has French cooks, English police, German mechanics, Italian lovers, and it’s all run by the

Swiss. Hell, in contrast, has English cooks, German police, French mechanics, Swiss lovers and the whole damn place is run by the Italians.

???

Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Howard Thurman

Start with the Sun, and everything else will slowly, slowly happen.

D.H. Lawrence

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Political ability is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, and next year.  And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.

Winston Churchill

Bigamy is having one wife too many.  Monogamy is the same thing.

Oscar Wilde

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work.  I want to achieve immortality through not dying.   

Woody Allen.

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.

H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare.

Love ... The delightful interval between meeting a beautiful girl and discovering she looks like a haddock.

John Barrymore

I always keep a stimulant handy in case I see a snake - which I also keep handy.

W.C. Fields

The important thing is not to stop questioning.  

Albert Einstein 

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.  

Robert Maynard Hutchins 

Education ... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.  

G.M. Trevelyan 

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  

Arthur C. Clarke 

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson 

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Thomas Huxley 

We live and we learn. But, sadly, at different rates.  

Alan Magid 

Man's mind stretched by a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.

Oliver Wendell Holmes 

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bill Cosby 

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

Vernor Sanders 

People only see what they are prepared to see.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

Words are tools which automatically carve concepts out of experience.  

Julian S. Huxley 

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Albert Einstein 

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

G.K. Chesterton

Adults are obsolete children.  

Dr. Seuss

If a child can't learn the way we teach, maybe we should teach the way they learn.

Ignacio Estrada 

Teaching should be such that what is offered is perceived as a valuable gift and not as a hard duty.  

Albert Einstein 

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

Norman Douglas

If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.  

Chinese proverb 

The best teachers are those that show you where to look but don't tell you what to see. 

Alexandra K. Trenfor

The pupil who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do.  

John Stuart Mill 

A teacher affects eternity; no one can tell where his influence stops.  

Henry Adams

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  

H.G. Wells

The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.  

Jean Piaget 

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value to its scarcity.   

Samuel  Butler

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.   

Sir Francis Bacon

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.  

Edward Everett

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.  

Anthony Jay

I like a teacher who gives you something to take home to think about besides homework.

Edith Ann [Lily Tomlin]

 It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer. 

Albert Einstein

I forget what I was taught. I only remember what I have learnt.   

Patrick White

Let early education be a sort of amusement, you will then better be able to find out the natural bent of the child.  

Plato

I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.   

Woodrow Wilson

Don't worry that children are never listening to you. Worry that they are always watching you.

Robert Fulghum

All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop our talent.  

John F. Kennedy

 The freedom to make mistakes provides the best environment for creativity.

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 There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.  

Buckminster Fuller

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future.   The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.  

Eric Hoffer

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want

and then advise them to do it.  

Harry S. Truman

 Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. 

Leonardo da Vinci

Education is understanding relationships.   

George Washington Carver

Education's responsibility is to replace an empty mind with an open one. 

Malcolm Forbes

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. 

Derek Bok, President, Harvard University

Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out.   

Cardinal Wolsey

Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.  

Mark Twain

What is the greatest sign of success for a teacher...?  It is to be able to say "the children are now working as if I did not exist.   

Maria Montessori

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.

Amos Bronson Alcottl

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said. 

Peter F. Drucker

One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.

    Stephen Hawking

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.  

Mark Twain

Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a flame.  

W.B. Yeats

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. 

Mahatma Gandhi

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.  

Alvin Toffler

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

    G.K. Chesterton

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought. 

Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education...The human mind is our fundamental resource.    

John F. Kennedy

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.

    Robert Green Ingersoll

 It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.  

Frederick Douglass

The aim of education should be to teach us how to think, rather than what to think.  To improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, rather than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.  

Bill Beattie

Much education today is monumentally ineffective. All too often we are giving young people cut flowers when we should be teaching them to grow their own plants.  

John W. Gardner

Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.  

Chinese Proverb

The essence of teaching is to make learning contagious, to have one idea spark another.

Marva Collins

Never help a child with a task that they feel they can complete themselves.  

Maria Montessori

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.  

Henri L. Bergson

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

Mahatma Gandhi

Inside every older lady is a younger lady -- wondering what the hell happened.

Cora Harvey Armstrong

Inside me lives a skinny woman crying to get out. But I can usually shut her up with cookies.

Cora Harvey Armstrong

Whatever women must do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.

Charlotte Whitton

I try to take one day at a time -- but sometimes several days attack me at once.

Jennifer Unlimited

If you can't be a good example -- then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.

Catherine

When I was young, I was put in a school for retarded kids for two years before they realized I actually had a hearing loss. And they called ME slow!

Kathy Buckley

Behind every successful man is a surprised woman.

Maryon Pearson

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.

Eleanor Roosevelt

There are 2 theories to arguing with a woman...neither works.

Will Rogers

Never miss a good chance to shut up.

Will Rogers

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

Will Rogers

Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.

Will Rogers

 The older we get, the fewer things seem worth waiting in line for.

Will Rogers

Some people try to turn back their odometers.  Not me, I want people to know "why" I look this way.  I've traveled a long way and some of the roads weren't paved.

Will Rogers

 I don't know how I got over the hill without getting to the top.

Will Rogers

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Nothing in the entire universe ever perishes, believe me, but things vary, and adopt a new form. The phrase "being born" is used for beginning to be something different from what one was before, while "dying" means ceasing to be the same. Though this thing may pass into that, and that into this, yet the sums of things remains unchanged.

Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD), Metamorphoses

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.

Barry Switzer

Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.  Peacemaker, founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, (ca. 1000 AD)

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.

Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self.

Agnes Repplier

Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Helen Keller

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

David Riesman

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of 'crap.'  Our intellectual history is a chronicle of the anguish and suffering of men who tried to help their contemporaries see that some part of their fondest beliefs were misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions, and even outright lies. 

Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

Gerry Spence

The mind can assert anything and pretend it has proved it. My beliefs I test on my body, on my intuitional consciousness, and when I get a response there, then I accept.

D. H. Lawrence

Belief is the death of intelligence.

Robert Anton Wilson

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

Some things have to be believed to be seen.

Ralph Hodgson, on ESP

It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses.  And we need to throw the old ones away.

Kenich Ohmae

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

James Feibleman

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.

Lord Salisbury

Believe those who are seeking the truth.  Doubt those who find it.

Andre Gide

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll 

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.

Demosthenes (384 BC - 322 BC), Third Olynthiac

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.

Gerald W. Johnston

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 are near the enemy, make him believe you are far from him.  If you are far from the enemy, make him believe you are near.

Sun-Tzu, The Art of War

To believe with certainty we must begin by doubting.

King Stanislas I of Poland

We are slow to believe that which if believed would hurt our feelings.

Ovid

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

William James (1842 - 1910)

The source of Pyrrhonism comes from failing to distinguish between a demonstration, a proof and a probability. A demonstration supposes that the contradictory idea is impossible; a proof of fact is where all the reasons lead to belief, without there being any pretext for doubt; a probability is where the reasons for belief are stronger than those for doubting.

Andrew Michael Ramsay (1686–1743), Scottish philosopher

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as I live it is my privilege - my *privilege* to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I love. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me; it is a sort of splendid torch which I've got a hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.  

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

The only thing you will ever be able to say in the so-called 'social' sciences is: "some do, some don't.

Ernst Rutherford

A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange...Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship. Aristotle 

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one from another; therefore, let all take heed as to the society in which they mingle, for in a little while they will be like it. Shakespeare, King Henry IV

When you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. When you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life.

Geoffrey F. Abert

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.  

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public!

Bryan White, Reader's Digest Magazine 1999

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.  

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.

Sir Francis Bacon 

Conscience, in most men, is but the anticipation of the opinions of others.

Taylor's Statesman

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life.  Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Conventionality is not morality.  Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

Charlotte Bronte

Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids

Aristotle

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947)

Without a doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth.  For, sooner or later,  myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears.  Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

Lord Samuel, "Romanes Lecture", 1947

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; 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 (1879 - 1955)

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

Anais Nin

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. That he has to leave the nest, the security, and go out to do battle. He has to lose everything that is lovely and fight for a new loveliness of his own making, and it's a tragedy. A lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

Helen Hayes, in Roy Newquist, Showcase, 1966

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

Daniel Boorstin

Would you like me to give you a formula for success?  It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't as all. You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you will find success.

Thomas J. Watson

Conscience is the root of all true courage; if a man would be brave let him obey his conscience.

James F. Clarke

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.

Raymond Lindquist

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams, 'The Dilbert Principle'

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

William Plomer

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created--created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.

John Schaar, futurist

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

Karl Menninger

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Ray Bradbury

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self.

Carl Rogers

The heatlh of an environmental system is directly proportionate to its diversity.

An Axiom in Ecology

There never was in the world two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains; the most universal quality is diversity. 

Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne (1533–1592)

There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and other people.

Montaigne

The war we have to wage today has only one goal and that is to make the world safe for diversity.

U Thant, Burma, UNSecretary-General

Variety's the very spice of life, 

That gives it all its flavour.

William Cowper, The Task, Bk ii, `The Timepiece', 606

Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Hell is other people.

Jean Paul Sartre

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.  

Edmund Burke

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

William Plomer

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created--created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.

John Schaar, futurist

Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

Karl Menninger

Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things.

Ray Bradbury

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky. The glory of science is not in a truth moreabsolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

As it must not, so genius cannot be lawless; for it is even that constitutes its genius-- the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

The war we have to wage today has only one goal and that is to make the world safe for diversity.

U Thant, Burma, UNSecretary-General

Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.  

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), 

Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town. The broad ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which preach an election or favoritism.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882),

Everywhere, the ethical predicament of our time imposes itself with an urgency which suggests that even the question “Have we anything to eat?” will be answered not in material but in ethical terms.

Hugo Ball (1886–1927),

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as that of his fellow men, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. Albert Schweitzer

It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly.

Margaret Mead 

Honor isn't about making the right choices. It's about dealing with the consequences.

Midori Koto 

Give to every other human being every right that you claim for yourself.

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833 - 1899)

The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

Susan Sontag (b. 1933), 

The man of character, sensitive to the meaning of what he is doing, will know how to discover the ethical paths in the maze of possible behavior.  

Earl Warren

My belief is that no being and no society composed of human beings ever did, or ever will, come to much unless their conduct was governed and guided by the love of some ethical ideal.  

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) 

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

It is not enough to do good; one must do it the right way.

John Viscount Morley, of Blackburn

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Mark Twain 

MORAL, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

Maria Montessori

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), "The Merchant of Venice"

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it. Francis, Duc de La Rochefoucauld.  Maxim 22.

Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues, we write in water.

Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Evil is unspectacular and always human 

And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

W(ystan) H(ugh) Auden, Herman Melville

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.

Helen Keller, My Religion

Nothing is evil which is according to nature.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

There are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room.

Blaise Pascal, Pensées

There is no law of progress. Our future is in our own hands, to make or to mar. It will be an uphill fight to the end, and would we have it otherwise? Let no one suppose that evolution will ever exempt us from struggles. 'You forget,' said the Devil, with a chuckle, 'that I have been evolving too.'

William Ralph Inge

This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."

Herbert Spencer: Principles of Biology. Indirect Equilibration..

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, Ch. 4

The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

Albert Einstein

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting. Samuel Johnson

Long ailments wear out pain, and long hopes, joy.

Stanislaus I of Poland

A man's character is his fate.

Heraclitus (540 BC - 480 BC)

How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Nature is at work..  Character and destiny are her handiwork. She gives us love and hate, jealousy and reverence. All that is ours is the power to choose which impulse we shall follow.

David Seabury

Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster they call destiny.

John Oliver Hobbes

DESTINY, n. A tyrant's authority for crime and fool's excuse for failure.

Ambrose Bierce The Devil's Dictionary

Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)

One can always point to a time, a choice, an act that set the tone for a life and changed a personal destiny.

Carol O'Connel

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

Laurence J. Peter

Fortune favors the brave.

Virgil (70 BC - 19 BC), Aeneid

He who finds Fortune on his side should go briskly ahead, for she is wont to favor the bold. Baltasar Gracian

I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.

Hermann Hesse

Fate is unalterable only in the sense that given a cause, a certain result must follow, but no cause is inevitable in itself, and man can shape his world if he does not resign himself to ignorance.

Pearl S. Buck 

The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every path but your own is the path of fate.  Keep on your own track.

Henry David Thoreau

Fear is a question: What are you afraid of, and why? Just as the seed of health is in illness, because illness contains information, your fears are a treasure house of self-knowledge if you explore them.

Marilyn Ferguson

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.

James F. Byrnes

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Plato (427 AD - 347 AD)

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.

Bertolt Brecht (1898 - 1956), The Mother, 1932

We promise according to our hopes and perform according to our fears.

Author Unknown

The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.

Thomas Merton

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, 1933

I saw that all things I feared, and which feared me, had nothing good or bad in them save insofar as the mind was affected by them.

Spinoza, Dutch Philosopher

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The trouble with most people is that that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than their minds,  

Walter Duranty

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.

Jean de La Fontaine

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

George Eliot (1819 - 1880)

The highest proof of civility is that the whole public action of the State is directed on securing the greatest good of the greatest number.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), 

The service we render to others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth. It is obvious that man is himself a traveler; that the purpose of this world is not "to have and to hold" but "to give and serve." There can be no other meaning.

Sir Wilfred T. Grenfell

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

One kernel is felt in a hogshead; one drop of water helps to swell the ocean; a spark of fire helps to give light to the world. None are too small, too feeble, too poor to be of service. Think of this and act.

Hannah More

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.

  Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

We find comfort among those who agree with us--growth among those who don't.

Frank A Clark

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

George Eliot (1819 - 1880)

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Edward Abbey

You know that children are growing up when they start asking questions that have answers.

John J. Plomp

If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening, if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you, you have not found your place.

Orison Swett Marden

Love does not dominate; it cultivates.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both.

James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Albert Camus (1913 - 1960)

One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.

Andrew Carnegie

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help, the good deed is usually done by somebody on whom I have no claim.

William Feather, The Business of Life

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery

Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate. - All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, `Inferno', iii. 9

Expecting something for nothing is the most popular form of hope.

Arnold H. Glasow

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.

Francis Bacon, Apothegms, 36

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords.

Dr Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson

My doctor gave me two weeks to live. I hope they're in August.

Ronnie Shakes

Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future.

Charles F. Kettering

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for .success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Vaclav Havel

Take hope from the heart of man, and you make him a beast of prey.

Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramee)

Hope is the last thing that dies in man; and though it be exceedingly deceitful, yet it is of this good use to us, that while we are traveling through life it conducts us in an easier and more pleasant way to our journey's end.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

HOPE, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Ambrose Bierce (1842 - 1914), The Devil's Dictionary

The test of a first-fate 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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1895)

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. Nietzsche 

It is only to the individual that a soul is given.  

Albert Einstein 

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. Nietzsche 

It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities... interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible....  

C. G. Jung

Responsiblity is a unique concept. It can only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it.

Admiral Hyman Rickover

Everything without tells the individual that he is nothing; everything within persuades him that he is everything. X. Doudan

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general.  Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique.  

John Dewey

MULTITUDE, n. A crowd; the source of political wisdom and virtue. In a republic, the object of the statesman's adoration. "In a multitude of consellors there is wisdom," saith the proverb. If many men of equal individual wisdom are wiser than any one of them, it must be that they acquire the excess of wisdom by the mere act of getting together. Whence comes it? Obviously from nowhere -- as well say that a range of mountains is higher than the single mountains composing it. A multitude is as wise as its wisest member if it obey him; if not, it is no wiser than its most foolish.

Ambrose Bierce,  The Devil's Dictionary

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. Oscar Wilde 

I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction.

Ayn Rand, Anthem, 1946

True education makes for inequality; the inequality of individuality; the inequality of success; the glorious inequality of talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual superiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress of the world.

Felix Emmanuel Schelling

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

You can't build a reputation on what you intend to do.

Liz Smith

Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.

Philip Dormer Chesterfield (1694 - 1773)

We would frequently be ashamed of our good deeds if people saw all of the motives that produced them.

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

Claude A. Helvetius

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.

Harriet Braiker

The man who is intent on making the most of his opportunities is too busy to bother about luck.

B. C. Forbes

The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.

George Stephanopolous

You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.

Barry LePatner

Everyone complains of his lack of memory, but nobody of his want of judgment.

La Rochefoucauld

A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.

Charles Peguy

One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty councils. The thing is to supply light and not heat Woodrow Wilson 

The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

Walt Whitman

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others.  The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white. Eric Hoffer

He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and control to hold to his deliberate decision.

John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873), On Liberty, 1859

I have made good judgements in the Past.  I have made good judgements in the Future.

Dan Quayle

Non Judgment: In our world where it seems we are taught to judge everything all around and about us and we spend so much of our time doing just that, it might be wise to ask if we can judge anything. To judge anything with any degree of clarity and accuracy we would need all the information past, present and future and how it will affect all concerned to make a perfect judgment. Since no one has that skill, ability or information, you might agree, it may be unwise to judge. This idea may be hard to accept, but when you look back over your life and the judgments you made, ask yourself. How many of your judgments, when you made them, were you perfectly sure they were correct, would you want to change now with the benefit of 20 20 hindsight? Since every judgment is only an opinion based on the limited information at hand, filtered through one's personal value system, it might be safe to assume no two people will judge anything exactly the same. Even concepts of right and wrong, good or bad, good or bad morals and ethics are only opinions, for what may be good in one case may be a disaster in another.

Sidney Madwed

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? 

Mat 7:3

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. 

Mat 7:6

You can protect your liberties in this world only by protecting the other man's freedom. You can

be free only if I am free.                 

Clarence Darrow

If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other.

Carl Schurz

Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.

Theodor W. Adorno

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.

Ghandi, 1931

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so efforts to obtain it.  Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

J.S.Mill, On Liberty

Fiat Lux

Deus

In the beginning, there was nothing. And God said, 'Let there be Light.' And there was still nothing. But, you could see it.

Dave Weinstein (dweinste@isis)

You are the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. Ifyou seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency, your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end, and remain purely as a means.

Dag Hammarskjold

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.

Arlo Guthrie

Thus is the light of your virtue still on its way, even when its work is done.  Be it forgotten and dead, still its ray of light liveth and

travelleth.

Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Man is not born to solve the problem of the universe, but to find out what he has to do; and to restrain himself within the limits of his comprehension.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.

Nido Qubein

Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900)