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1. "Among the curious tales of insane persons with which I was entertained in my youth was one of a man who called himself an Octagon. To my father, who met him in a routine visit that he paid as director to an asylum, the patient explained that he had a front side and a back side, a top side and a bottom side, an inside and an outside, a right side and a left side. That makes eight sides or an octagon." ~ Henry J. Cadbury
2. "So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it." ~ Aaron Copland
3. "In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
4. "If you find many people who are hard and indifferent to you in a world that you consider to be unhospitable and cruel—as often, indeed, happens to a tender-hearted, stirring young creature—you will also find there are noble hearts who will look kindly on you, and their help will be precious to you beyond price." ~ Thomas Carlyle
5. "Once a man has tasted freedom he will never be content to be a slave. That is why I believe that this frightfulness we see everywhere today is only temporary. Tomorrow will be better for as long as America keeps alive the ideals of freedom and a better life. All men will want to be free and share our way of life.... I thank God and America for the right to live and raise my family under the flag of tolerance, democracy and freedom." ~ Walter Elias Disney
6. "A man's honest, earnest opinion is the most precious of all he possesses: let him communicate this, if he is to communicate anything." ~ Thomas Carlyle
7. "Men are like wine - some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age." ~ Pope John XXIII
8. "A law is something which must have a moral basis, so that there is an inner compelling force for every citizen to obey." - Chaim Weizmann
9. "I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
10. "They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did." ~ Red Cloud
11. "Politics is very much like taxes - everybody is against them, or everybody is for them as long as they don't apply to him." ~ Fiorello Henry La Guardia
12. "Whether our religion permits Christians to vote for infidel rulers is a question which merits more consideration than it seems yet to have generally received either from the clergy or the laity. It appears to me that what the prophet said to Jehoshaphat about his attachment to Ahab ["Shouldest thou help the ungodly and love them that hate the Lord?" [2 Chronicles 19:2] affords a salutary lesson." ~ John Jay, 1st Chief Justice, SCOTUS
13. "I learned in business that you had to be very careful when you told somebody that's working for you to do something, because the chances were very high he'd do it. In government, you don't have to worry about that." ~ George P. Shultz
14. "My creed is that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation with full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy and consideration, that constructive criticism is not only to be expected but sought, that smears are not only to be expected but fought, that honor is to be earned but not bought." ~ Margaret Chase Smith
15. "My father said: 'You must never try to make all the money that's in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money too, because if you have a reputation for always making all the money, you won't have many deals.'" ~ Jean Paul Getty
16. "A faith which cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
17. "Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague."
~ William Safire
18. "I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this - who will count the votes, and how." ~ Joseph Stalin
19. "An egalitarian educational system is necessarily opposed to meritocracy and reward for achievement. It is inevitably opposed to procedures that might reveal differing levels of achievement." ~ Robert Bork
20. "I cannot, and will not, sign an oath to vote for an individual whose identity I do not know and whose principles and policies are thus unknown. To sign such a blank check would be, I feel, the height of irresponsibility and unworthy of a member of the United States Senate... I would rather be a free man than a captive senator." ~ Sen. Harry F. Byrd, Jr.
21. "If there are any lessons to be learned from history, it is that we should be skeptical of all points of view, including those of the skeptics. No one is infallible, and no one can claim a monopoly on truth or virtue. It would be contradictory for skepticism to seek to translate itself into a new faith. One must view with caution the promises of any new secular priest who might emerge promising a brave new world—if only his path to clarity and truth is followed. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to temper the intemperate and to tame the perverse temptation that lurks within." ~ Paul Winter Kurtz
22. "Any one of a million things could fail and cause our complex civilization to collapse for an hour, for a day, or however long. That's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology and don't even know it. That's when you see that it's so interdependent, that if you take one thing away, the whole thing falls down and leaves you with nothing." ~ James Burke
23. "The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice." ~ Samuel Smiles
24. "Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and admiration." ~ Matthew Arnold
25. "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, and explosions, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy; and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is, that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone." ~ Rod Serling
26. "In this age, which believes that there is a short-cut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way, in the long run, is the easiest." ~ Henry Valentine Miller
27. "I have lived long enough to come to the conclusion, that if a man believes in one particular principle, or one particular creed and thinks it is the best, it is not for me to interfere with his conscience, nor do I think any one else should interfere with his conscience, or with the course which he may think proper to pursue, so long as he does not attempt to interfere with others." – Sir Mackenzie Bowell (5th Prime Minister of Canada)
28. "The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks." ~ Mortimer J. Adler
29. "You should avoid needless and entangling engagements. You may boast about them, you may brag about them, you may say you are procuring consideration of the country. You may say that an Englishman may now hold up his head among the nations. But what does all this come to, gentlemen? It comes to this, that you are increasing your engagements without increasing your strength; and if you increase your engagements without increasing strength, you diminish strength, you abolish strength; you really reduce the empire and do not increase it. You render it less capable of performing its duties; you render it an inheritance less precious to hand on to future generations." ~ William Ewart Gladstone
30. "More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies." ~ Rudyard Kipling
31. "The most important thing for the world today in my opinion is a spiritual regeneration which would reestablish a feeling of good faith among men generally. Discouraged people are in sore need of the inspiration of great principles. Such leadership can be the rallying point against intolerance, against distrust, against that fatal insecurity that leads to war. It is to be hoped that the democratic nations can provide the necessary leadership." ~ Gen. George C. Marshall
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