People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest.
-- Herman Hesse
If you don't stand for something, you will fall for something.
-- Nguni Proverb
Paranoid people are harder to kill than regular people.
-- Kaff Tagon, in "Schlock Mercenary" by Howard Tayler
If I wanted to destroy a culture, I'd build a free-market system and give it television, and you'd be guaranteed everything would sink to the lowest common denominator. Fundamentally, TV exists to sell razor blades.
-- Peter Coyote
Everything I've heard from the American media is either information, misinformation or error,and I don't have the criteria to distinguish. I live my life like an espionage agent, putting together webs of probability.
-- Peter Coyote
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
-- Samuel Johnson
Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
-- John Locke
Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
-- Flannery O'Connor
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
-- Louis Nizer
The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.
-- Gary Zukav
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.
-- Thomas Jefferson
You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.
-- Rwandan Proverb
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
-- Noam Chomsky
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.
-- Lord Chesterfield
Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel.
-- H.L. Mencken
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
-- John F. Kennedy
If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
-- Charles Darwin
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.
-- Thomas Carlyle
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
-- Bertrand Russell
If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.
-- Will Rogers
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
-- Charles Darwin
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.
-- Edward De Bono
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
-- Susan B Anthony
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
-- Richard Francis Burton
All know that the drop merges into the ocean but few know that the ocean merges into the drop.
-- Kabir
One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
-- James Earl Jones
In the faces of men and women I see God.
-- Walt Whitman
To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.
-- Saadi
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
-- Albert Einstein
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
-- Galileo Galilei
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
-- Harper Lee
There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
-- Dalai Lama
The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
-- George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
-- Mark Twain
He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.
-- Michel De Montaigne
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
-- John F. Kennedy
No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
-- Niels Bohr
He who would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
-- Thomas Paine
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
-- Abraham Lincoln
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
-- H.L.Mencken
We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.
-- Mark Twain
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
-- Samuel Johnson
Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.
-- Samuel Johnson
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
-- Kahlil Gibran
Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
-- Peter T. McIntyre
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
-- Lois McMaster Bujold
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
-- Albert Einstein
There are two kinds of fool. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.” And one says, “This is new, and therefore better.”
-- John Brunner
Sometimes I think we’re alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
-- Arthur C Clarke
A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.
-- Blaise Pascal
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.
-- Confucius
People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea , at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.
-- Saint Augustine
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
God has no religion.
-- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
-- William Pitt
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
-- Johann von Goethe
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
-- Hungarian proverb
Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
-- Josh Billings
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
-- Kahlil Gibran
Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty.
-- Jefferson Davis
There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
-- Mark Twain
So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
-- Kahlil Gibran
If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.
-- John Bunyan
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
-- Ambrose Bierce
I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
-- Voltaire
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
-- William Butler Yeats
Never confuse motion with action.
-- Benjamin Franklin
War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.
-- Rita Mae Brown
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
-- Carl Sandburg
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than “try to be a little kinder.”
-- Aldous Huxley
Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.
-- Dale Spender
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
-- Elie Wiesel
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?
-- Edward Young
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out - it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.
-- Robert Service
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
-- Louis Dembitz Brandeis
The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.
-- C. Northcote Parkinson
If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.
-- Oscar Wilde
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-- Edith Wharton
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-- Blaise Pascal
We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
-- Michel Montaigne
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality: They discourse like angels but they live like men.
-- Samuel Johnson
Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.
-- Friedrich W. Nietzsche
Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.
-- Albert Schweitzer
Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.
-- Benjamin Franklin
A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives—of approving of some and disapproving of others.
-- Charles Darwin
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
-- Anais Nin
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
-- Alice Walker
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
-- Thomas Carlyle
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Just remember-when you think all is lost, the future remains.
-- Bob Goddard
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
He who allows oppression, shares the crime.
-- Erasmus Darwin
If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.
-- Abraham Lincoln
The refusal to choose is a form of choice; disbelief is a form of belief.
-- Frank Barron
You will soon break the bow if you keep it always stretched.
-- Phaedrus
The squirrel that you kill in jest, dies in earnest.
-- Henry David Thoreau
The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.
-- G.C. Lichtenberg
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
-- Mark Twain
The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.
-- Arthur Koestler
A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished.
-- Johann Christoph Schiller
If words are to enter men’s minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men’s defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds.
-- J.B. Phillips
If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire - then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.
-- Robert Fulghum
It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.
-- Bertrand Russell
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
-- Henry David Thoreau
To see things in the seed, that is genius.
-- Lao-tzu
Noise proves nothing—often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
-- Mark Twain
Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something.
-- Plato
The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.
-- Marcus Aurelius
Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
-- Voltaire
The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
-- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The more I study physics, the more I am drawn to metaphysics.
-- Albert Einstein
One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer.
-- Stephen Hawking
Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
-- William Somerset Maugham
When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld
No person of faith should be threatened by science, nor should science be subverted to serve one particular religious belief.
-- Beverly Friedenberg
(letters to the editor, TIME magazine, 9/5/2005)
Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice-if not whether, then how, they may endure.
-- Cazaril, in Lois McMaster Bujold's "The Curse of Chalion"
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-- Galileo Galilei
If a man does his best, what else is there?
-- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)
The covers of this book are too far apart.
-- Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
After I am dead, I would rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
-- Cato the Elder (234-149 BC; AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)
Tolerance implies a respect for another person, not because he is wrong or even because he is right, but because he is human.
-- John Cogley Commonweal
Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He removes the greatest ornament of friendship, who takes away from it respect.
-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)
Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person, the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I did not go to his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.
--Mark Twain
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
-- James D. Nicoll
Nemo me impune lacessit.
(No-one provokes me without punishment)
-- Motto of the Montresors from "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
-- F. Kafka
...but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience...To be 'cured' against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will.
-- C. S. Lewis
If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
--Catherine Aird
Difficulties show men what they are. In case of any difficulty God has pitted you against a rough antagonist that you may be a conqueror, and this cannot be without toil.
--Epictetus
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
--Howard Zinn
Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
-- H.L. Mencken
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, 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.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
-- Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775.
Shame is an improper emotion invented by pietists to oppress the human race.
-- Robert Preston, Toddy, "Victor/Victoria"
You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged.
--Michael Shirley
Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound
--unknown
I would prefer to live in a free society than a drug free society - even if the latter could actually be achieved.
-- unknown
In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen. The dogma of science is that the will cannot possibly affect external forces, and I think that's just ridiculous. It's as bad as the church. My viewpoint is the exact contrary of the scientific viewpoint. I believe that if you run into somebody in the street it's for a reason. Among primitive people they say if someone was bitten by a snake he was murdered. I believe that.
-- William S. Burroughs
Burke's Postulates:
Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.
Don't create a problem for which you do not have the answer
He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.
-- Albert Camus
To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.
-- Abraham Lincoln
He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
-- Unknown
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
-- Albert Einstein
Every person, all the events in your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
-- Messiah's Handbook : Reminders for the Advanced Soul
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and by men who are equally certain that they represent the divine will. I am sure that either the one or the other is mistaken in the belief, and perhaps in some respects, both. I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed he would reveal it directly to me.
--Abraham Lincoln
Never let someone who says it cannot be done interrupt the person who is doing it.
-- Unknown
If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others.
-- the Dalai Lama
Mater artium necessitas.
[Necessity is the mother of invention].
-- Unknown
My right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
-- Thomas Jefferson
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Real programmers don't draw flowcharts. Flowcharts are, after all, the illiterate's form of documentation. Cavemen drew flowcharts; look how much good it did them.
-- Unknown
Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
-- Unknown
Dear Lord: Please make my words sweet and tender, for tomorrow I may have to eat them.
-- Unknown
A ship, berthed at harbor, will never hit the rocks, will never wash up on reefs, will never be sunk or lost in bad weather. But that's not what a ship is for.
-- J. Michael Straczynski
The human race never solves any of its problems. It merely outlives them.
-- David Gerrold
"Everywhere on earth there are people of our kind. That for a small part of them, I can be a focal point, the nodal point in the net, is the burden and the joy of my life." (private letter, 1955)
-- Hermann Hesse
Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
--Unknown
You don't stop laughing because you grow old; You grow old because you stop laughing.
--Michael Pritchard
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice Doggie" while you look for a big rock.
-- Unknown
Nosce te Ipsum (Know thyself)
-- Unknown
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the Masters; seek what they sought.
-- Zen proverb
Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed.
-- Tom Robbins
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature cannot be fooled.
-- R.P. Feynman
What you do is of little significance. But it is very important that you do it.
-- Mahatma Gandhi
Never doubt that a small group of thoughful, committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.
-- Margaret Mead
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