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1. "Kind-hearted people might of course think there was some ingenious way to disarm or defeat the enemy without too much bloodshed, and might imagine this is the true goal of the art of war. Pleasant as it sounds, it is a fallacy that must be exposed: War is such a dangerous business that mistakes that come from kindness are the very worst." ~ Carl von Clausewitz
2. "However firmly thou holdest to thy opinions, if truth appears on the opposite side, throw down thy arms at once." ~ John Lancaster Spalding
3. "The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination." ~ Marion Zimmer Bradley
4. "I was the last to consent to the separation; but the separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power." ~ King George III
5. "Labour was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it, and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is precisely equal to the quantity of labour which it can enable them to purchase or command." ~ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
6. "There are two kinds of fools: one says, 'This is old, therefore it is good'; the other says, 'This is new, therefore it is better.'" ~ William Ralph Inge
7. "If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without." ~ Henry Miller
8. "A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call 'democracy' is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it." ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
9. "Neither conscience nor sanity itself suggests that the United States is, or should or could be the global gendarme." ~ Robert McNamara
10. "Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn’t even get out of committee." ~ F. Lee Bailey, Newsweek, 17 April 1967
11. "When someone is giving you his opinion, you should receive it with deep gratitude even though it is worthless. If you don't, he will not tell you the things that he has seen and heard about you again. It is best to both give and receive opinions in a friendly way." ~ Yamamoto Tsunetomo
12. "I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again." ~ Anne Frank, 3 May 1944
13. "Real knowledge, like every thing else of the highest value, is not to be obtained easily. It must be worked for, — studied for, — thought for, — and, more than all, it must be prayed for." ~ Thomas Arnold
14. "Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God. Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chosen, a covenant between radically different partners." ~ Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, Presidential Address to the 13th meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council, 20 Jun 2005
15. "Responsibility's like a string we can only see the middle of. Both ends are out of sight." ~ William McFee
16. "Bromidic though it may sound, some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn." ~ Katharine Graham
17. "Habits of thought are not less tyrannical than other habits, and a time comes when return is impossible, even to the strongest will." ~ Alexandre Vinet
18. "The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation. It is the prolonged sacrifice of the rights of some persons at the bidding and for the satisfaction of other persons. The ruling idea of the politician - stated rather bluntly - is that those who are opposed to him exist for the purpose of being made to serve his ends, if he can get power enough in his hands to force these ends upon them." ~ Auberon Herbert
19. "Anyone who idolizes you is going to hate you when he discovers that you are fallible. He never forgives. He has deceived himself, and he blames you for it." ~ Elbert Hubbard
20. "Love is an affection which carries the attention of the mind beyond itself, and is the sense of a relation to some fellow creature as to its object." ~ Adam Ferguson
21. "My personal attitude toward atheists is the same attitude that I have toward Christians, and would be governed by a very orthodox text: "By their fruits shall ye know them." I wouldn't judge a man by the presuppositions of his life, but only by the fruits of his life. And the fruits — the relevant fruits — are, I'd say, a sense of charity, a sense of proportion, a sense of justice. And whether the man is an atheist or a Christian, I would judge him by his fruits, and I have therefore many agnostic friends." ~ Reinhold Niebuhr
22. "The aim of those who try to control thought is always the same. They find one single explanation of the world, one system of thought and action that will (they believe) cover everything; and then they try to impose that on all thinking people." ~ Gilbert Highet
23. "'The only true law is that which leads to freedom,' Jonathan said. 'There is no other.'" ~ Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
24. "There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. ...The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced." ~ Norman Cousins
25. "At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals." ~ George Orwell
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious." ~ George Orwell
26. "There was an old abbot in one temple and he said something of which I think often and it was this, that when men destroy their old gods [idols] they will find new ones to take their place." ~ Pearl S. Buck
27. "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing." ~ Helen Keller
28. "To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts. Finally, it is an empty and contradictory convention that sets up, on the one side, absolute authority, and, on the other, unlimited obedience." ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau
29. "The great advantage of our system of government over all others, is, that we have a written constitution, defining its limits, and prescribing its authorities; and that, however, for a time, faction may convulse the nation, and passion and party prejudice sway its functionaries, the season of reflection will recur, when calmly retracing their deeds, all aberrations from fundamental principle will be corrected." ~ Henry Clay, Speech in the Senate on the National Bank Charter (February 11, 1811)
30. "But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime." ~ Frédéric Bastiat
