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1. "Liberty sets the mind free, fosters independence and unorthodox thinking and ideas. But it does not offer instant prosperity or happiness and wealth to everyone. This is something that politicians in particular must keep in mind." ~ Boris Yeltsin, as quoted in "Russia and the Independent States" (1993) by Daniel C. Diller, p. 446
"A sense of proportion and humanitarian action are not issues for terrorists. Their aim is that of killing and destroying." ~ Boris Yeltsin: Speech at a summit of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Istanbul, Turkey, as quoted in BBC World Service (19 Nov 1999)
"It is especially important to encourage unorthodox thinking when the situation is critical: At such moments every new word and fresh thought is more precious than gold. Indeed, people must not be deprived of the right to think their own thoughts." ~ Boris Yeltsin, "Against the Grain: An Autobiography" (1990)
"A rebellion against a tyrant is only immoral when it hasn't got a chance." ~ Muriel Spark, 'The Abbess of Crewe: A Modern Morality Tale' (1974)
"Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance." ~ Muriel Spark, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' (1961)
2. "Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification." ~ Hannah More (1777)
"Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel." ~ John Quinton (1921-1951)
"A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually." ~ Abba Eban (1915-2002)
"When the common good of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals." ~ Ayn Rand: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others." ~ Ayn Rand: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
"Economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear." ~ Ayn Rand: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966)
"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)
3. "An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." ~ James A. Michener, 'Space' (1982)
"I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril." ~ James A. Michener, 'The World Is My Home' (1991)
"Governments always need enemies, even when they're not at war. If you don't have a real enemy, you make one up and spread the word. It scares the population, and when the people are scared, they tend not to step out of line. " ~ Paul Auster, 'Oracle Night' (2003)
"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards." ~ Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)
"Human nature is said by many to be good; if so, where have social evils come from? For human nature is the only moral nature in that corrupting thing called "society." Every example set before the child of to-day is the fruit of human nature. It has been planted on every possible field — among the snows that never melt; in temperate regions, and under the line; in crowded cities, in lonely forests; in ancient seats of civilization, in new colonies; and in all these fields it has, without once failing, brought forth a crop of sins and troubles." ~ William Arthur (1819-1901)
4. "Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession." ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'The Cost of Discipleship' (1937)
"The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil." ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 'Letters and Papers from Prison' (1943-1945)
"The absurdity of politics is not new. Satire is always possible. The execution of satirists by enraged politicians is also always possible." ~ Robert Coover (b. 1932)
"Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future." ~ Charles Lindbergh, New York Times Magazine (23 May 1971)
"The improvement of our way of life is more important than the spreading of it. If we make it satisfactory enough, it will spread automatically. If we do not, no strength of arms can permanently impose it." ~ Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974)
"When you want to believe in something, you also have to believe in everything that's necessary for believing in it." ~ Ugo Betti (1892-1953)
5. "Most of the trouble in the world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind." ~ William S. Burroughs (1985)
"Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of succeeding at something that doesn't really matter." ~ D.L. Moody (1837-1899)
"The whole notion of loyalty inquisitions is a national characteristic of the police state, not of democracy. The history of Soviet Russia is a modern example of this ancient practice. I must, in good conscience, protest against any unnecessary suppression of our rights as free men. We must not burn down the house to kill the rats." ~ Adlai Stevenson, Voicing opposition to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950
"We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present." ~ Adlai Stevenson: Speech, Richmond, Virginia (20 Sep 1952)
"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." ~ Adlai Stevenson: Speech in Detroit (7 Oct 1952)
"The only real Jesus is one who is larger than life, who escapes our categories, who eludes our attempts to reduce Him to manageable proportions so that we can claim him for our cause." ~ Andrew M. Greeley (1928-2013)
6. It is faith among men that holds the moral elements of society together, as it is faith in God that binds the world to his throne." ~ William M. Evarts (1818-1901)
"There is a maxim, 'Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.' It is a maxim for sluggards. A better reading of it is, 'Never do today what you can as well do tomorrow,' because something may occur to make you regret your premature action." ~ Aaron Burr (1756-1836)
"A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist." ~ Louis Nizer, 'Between You and Me' (1948)
"There is an aphorism about a farmer who before sunrise on a cold and misty morning, saw a huge beast on a distant hill. He seized his rifle and walked cautiously toward the ogre to head off an attack on his family. When he got nearer, he was relieved to find that the beast was only a small bear. He approached more confidently and when he was within a few hundred yards the distorting haze had lifted sufficiently so that he could recognize the figure as only that of a man. Lowering his rifle, he walked toward the stranger and discovered he was his brother." ~ Louis Nizer, 'My Life in Court' (1961)
"Every great turn of history's wheel takes us in a new direction, but the destination is not easily discernible because the lessons of history are not fixed and immutable." ~ Tom Brokaw, 'Into an Unknowable Future' op-ed in The New York Times (28 Sep 2001)
7. "One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated." ~ Thomas More (1478-1535)
"The true secret of giving advice is after you have honestly given it, to be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in trying to set people right." ~ Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911)
"The real things haven't changed. It is still best to be honest and truthful; to make the most of what we have; to be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong." ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
"The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they're organized for." ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867-1957)
"I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. " ~ Sinclair Lewis, 'Main Street' (1920)
"Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens are proud of that achievement of ignorance which is so easy to come by. To be 'intellectual' or 'artistic' or, in their own word, to be 'highbrow,' is to be priggish and of dubious virtue." ~ Sinclair Lewis, 'Main Street' (1920)
"Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive." ~ Sinclair Lewis, 'It Can't Happen Here' (1935)
"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." ~ Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951)
8. "As amber attracts a straw, so does beauty admiration, which only lasts while the warmth continues: but virtue, wisdom, goodness, and real worth; like the loadstone, never lose their power. These are the true graces, which, as Homer feigns, are linked and tied hand in hand, because it is by their influence that human hearts are so firmly united to each other." ~ Robert Burton, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy' (1621) (1801 ed. p. 233)
"Inequalities of wealth, unjustly established, have assuredly injured the nation in which they exist during their establishment; and, unjustly directed, they injure it yet more during their existence. But inequalities of wealth justly established, benefit the nation in the course of their establishment; and, nobly used, aid it yet more by their existence." ~ John Ruskin, 'Unto This Last' (1860)
"I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here.
Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is Hell!" ~ William Tecumseh Sherman, address to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy (19 June 1879)
"A great many people fall in love with or feel attracted to a person who offers the least possibility of a harmonious union." ~ Rudolf Dreikurs, 'The Challenge of Marriage'(1946)
"Children never learn to think for themselves if we do it all for them and hand it down ready-made." ~ Rudolf Dreikurs
9. "There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it.... Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it." ~ Thomas Paine
"When men yield up the exclusive privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon." ~ Thomas Paine: Common Sense (1776)
"Because our lives are cowardly and sly,
Because we do not dare to take or give,
Because we scowl and pass each other by,
We do not live; we do not dare to live."
~ James Stephens, 'The Road in Songs from the Clay' (1915)
"Physicists and astronomers see their own implications in the world being round, but to me it means that only one-third of the world is asleep at any given time and the other two-thirds is up to something." ~ Dean Rusk
"The notion of the free market is a myth. All markets are shaped by laws and regulations, and unfortunately our laws and regulations are shaped in order to create more inequality and less opportunity." ~ Joseph Stiglitz, '10 Questions' - Time (11 June 2012)
"The real question is whether all your pondering and analyses will convince you that life is worth living. That's what it all comes down to." ~ Brian Greene, 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' (2004)
10. "The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's part of our physical body, and our souls exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in the mouth. It can't forever be violated with impunity." ~ Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
"The main misfortune, the root of all evil to come, was loss of the confidence in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that it was out of date of follow their own moral sense, that they must all sing in chorus, and live by other people's notions, notions that were crammed down everybody's throat." ~ Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
"I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats of any kind, whether of jail or retribution, then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer, not the prophet who sacrificed himself.... What for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but the irresistible power of unarmed truth." ~ Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago (1957)
"Knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. Yet it is not to be despised, since by it we reach up groping fingers to touch the hem of the garment of the Most High." ~ Mary Agnes Clerke, 'A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century' (1885)
"The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend." ~ Charles Lamb, 'Essays of Elia' (1823)
11. "Perhaps the greatest danger of our global community is that the person in LA thinks he knows Cambodia because he's seen 'The Killing Fields' on-screen, and the newcomer from Cambodia thinks he knows LA because he's seen 'City of Angels' on video." ~ Pico Iyer (b. 1957)
"A great mind can attend to little things, but a little mind cannot attend to great things." ~ Lydia Maria Child, 'The Mother's Book' (1831)
"The civilization of any country may always be measured by the degree of equality between men and women; and society will never come truly into order until there is perfect equality and copartnership between them in every department of human life." ~ Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)
"I consider Paine our greatest political thinker. As we have not advanced, and perhaps never shall advance, beyond the Declaration and Constitution, so Paine has had no successors who extended his principles." ~ Thomas Edison, 'The Philosophy of Paine' (1925)
"You have two choices. you can keep running and hiding and blaming the world for your problems, or you can stand up for yourself and decide to be somebody important." ~ Sidney Sheldon (1917-2007)
"Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better. ~ Sidney Sheldon (1917-2007)
12. "I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong." ~ Abraham Lincoln
"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty." ~ Abraham Lincoln
"We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner." ~ Omar Bradley, Armistice Day speech (11 Nov 1948)
"It's not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers." ~ Judy Blume (b. 1938)
"Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it." ~ Judy Blume, 'Tiger Eyes' (1981)
"Some Americans don't understand why I should be this concerned about the power of government. But talking to people in Eastern Europe, you don't have to explain it to them. They already get it — and they don't understand why we don't." ~ Phil Zimmermann (b. 1954)
13. "The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored." ~ Justice Robert H. Jackson, American Communications Association v. Douds, 339 U.S. 382, 442-43 (1950)
"Civil liberties had their origin and must find their ultimate guaranty in the faith of the people. If that faith should be lost, five or nine men in Washington could not long supply its want." ~ Justice Robert H. Jackson, Douglas v. Jeannette, 319 U.S. 157, 182 (1943)
"It is not just a matter of "doing the right thing" but of figuring out what the right thing is." ~ R.C. Sproul (b. 1939)
"Everyone has the right to do his own thing. This slogan is as crass as it is silly. If it were followed by everyone resolutely, society itself would be an impossibility. No one would have any true rights protected, because it at any given moment my rights could trample your rights." ~ R.C. Sproul (b. 1939)
"If I think of the ballot as a potential bullet, I will be more careful when I vote. The word vote comes from the Latin word votum, which means "will." When I cast my vote, I express my will. Indeed, if my vote is decisive or a part of the winning majority, then I am not merely expressing my will but imposing my will on others. Many people think that the vote is merely a means to express personal desires or to seek personal gain, usually at the expense of others. On the contrary, to be ethically scrupulous in the casting of votes, we must vote only for what is just. To vote for a vested interest without just cause is to exercise tyranny." ~ R.C. Sproul (b. 1939)
14. "A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it." ~ Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1995)
"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them." ~ Frederick Douglass (c. 1818-1995)
"You cannot be pro-jobs and anti-business at the same time. You cannot love employment and hate employers." ~ Paul Tsongas, Democratic National Convention (1992)
"Everything we hope to do, depends on an expanding economic pie. And only a vibrant, competitive, thriving private sector can create that. Government is a necessary partner, but it is the junior partner. Only the private sector can produce the revenues for the social programs that we Democrats care so much about. The financing of those programs through ever more public debt violates our generation responsibility." ~ Paul Tsongas, Democratic National Convention (1992)
"The lowest form of popular culture — lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives — has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage." ~ Carl Bernstein (1992)
15. "There are those who reason well, but they are greatly outnumbered by those who reason badly." ~ Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state." ~ Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"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, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)
"Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order." ~ Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
"Whenever you are about to be oppressed, you have a right to resist oppression: whenever you conceive yourself to be oppressed, conceive yourself to have a right to make resistance, and act accordingly." ~ Jeremy Bentham, 'Anarchical Fallacies' (1843)
"When a teacher of the future comes to point out to the youth of America how the highest rewards of intellect and devotion can be gained, he may say to them, not by subtlety and intrigue; not by wire pulling and demagoguery; not by the arts of popularity; not by skill and shiftiness in following expediency; but by being firm in devotion to the principles of manhood and the application of morals and the courage of righteousness in the public life of our country; by being a man without guile and without fear, without selfishness, and with devotion to duty, devotion to his country." ~ Elihu Root (1845-1937)
16. "True genius without heart is a thing of nought - for not great understanding alone, not intelligence alone, nor both together, make genius. Love! Love! Love! that is the soul of genius." ~ Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin (1727-1817)
"From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame." ~ Henry Adams (1838-1918)
"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today.... The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow." ~ George Macaulay Trevelyan, 'Autobiography of an Historian' (1949)
"Criticizing others is a dangerous thing, not so much because you may make mistakes about them, but because you may be revealing the truth about yourself." ~ Harold Medina (1888-1990)
"The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning." ~ George F. Kennan, as quoted in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
"Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith — a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will — but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world — faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity." ~ George F. Kennan: as quoted in The New York Times (27 May 1984)
17. "Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity." ~ Thomas J. Watson (1874-1956)
"Nothing so conclusively proves a man's ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself." ~ Thomas J. Watson (1939)
"If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two week's vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days." ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958)
"One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young." ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958)
"As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them – "ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is." ~ Chaim Potok, 'The Chosen' (1967)
"Everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future." ~ Chaim Potok, 'Davita's Harp' (1985)
"While most of the things you've worried about have never happened, it's a different story with the things you haven't worried about. They are the ones that happen." ~ Ruth Rendell (b. 1930)
18. "In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great men in various parts of the world, I have yet to find the man, however great or exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than he would ever do under a spirit of criticism." ~ Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939)
"I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom." ~ Nikos Kazantzakis, 'The Saviors of God' (1923)
"All the political, social, and economic improvements, all the technical progress cannot have any regenerating significance, so long as our inner life remains as it is at present. The more the intelligence unveils and violates the secrets of Nature, the more the danger increases and the heart shrinks." ~ Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957)
"Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin." ~ Wendell Willkie (1892-1944)
"One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery." ~ Wallace Stegner, 'The Sound of Mountain Water' (1969)
"Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization." ~ A.R. Ammons (1926-2001)
19. "I am not so enamored of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them. I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgment of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavor to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. Yet I hold that completely erroneous views should be shunned." ~ Nicolaus Copernicus, 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' (1543)
"Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the conception that the earth remains at rest in the middle of the heavens as its center, would, I reflected, regard it as an insane pronouncement if I made the opposite assertion that the earth moves." ~ Nicolaus Copernicus, 'De revolutionibus orbium coelestium' (1543)
"I submit to you that an ignorant child is as sure a victim of child abuse as one that arrives in school with bruises and welts. These are harsh words but necessary ones. The vast majority of undereducated people on this planet are destined to lives of misery and unhappiness. And why? Because they lacked a teacher who cared enough, or a parent who wanted enough for them, or lacked within themselves the native capacity to wonder, to strive, to need knowledge." ~ Homer Hickam, open letter to teachers (29 Oct 1999)
"If you're a parent, and your child is of reading age is not reading at least one book a month outside schoolwork, I think you need to get to work. You must somehow find a way to make that start happening. There is nothing out there on television, radio, and film, for the most part, but stupefying dullness. To pretend otherwise is to do a disservice to you and your child. They must read!" ~ Homer Hickam, open letter to teachers (29 Oct 1999)
"No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached." ~ Amy Tan (b. 1952)
"As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another." ~ Jonathan Lethem, 'Men and Cartoons' (2004)
20. "Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival. This quest for enlightenment must begin now. It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late." ~ Richard Matheson (1999)
"It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear." ~ E. H. Harriman (railroad baron, 1848-1909)
"There is no mask that temptation cannot wear, and the idea that Satan is purely a logician is an illusion held by not a few naive people. Many a shifty old man sees him as an opponent in an academic argument, but if he does the observer is still at the stage of games and trifles. Sometimes, though not often, the black desire to harm wins out over quicker and less bitter delights. When that happens, evil shows itself for what it truly is, not a way of life, but an attack on life itself." ~ Georges Bernanos, 'The Impostor' (1927)
"Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit." ~ Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
"If photography were difficult in the true sense — that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster." ~ Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
"You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved." ~ Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
21. "There's an experienced rebel, Time,
And in his squadron's Poverty;
There's Age that brings along with him
A terrible artillery:
And if against all these thou keep'st thy crown,
The usurper Death will make thee lay it down."
~ Thomas Flatman, 'The Defiance' (1686)
"Good is never accomplished except at the cost of those who do it, truth never breaks through except through the sacrifice of those who spread it." ~ John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
"God has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission — I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next." ~ John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
"We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe." ~ John Henry Newman (1801-1890)
"Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods." ~ W. H. Auden (1962)
"I remember thinking how often we look, but never see ... we listen, but never hear ... we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive." ~ Erma Bombeck (1993)
22. "Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation." ~ George Washington, letter to nephew Bushrod Washington (15 Jan 1783)
"A man of correct insight among those who are duped and deluded resembles one whose watch is right while all the clocks in the town give the wrong time." ~ Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
"It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested." ~ James Russell Lowell, 'Abraham Lincoln' (1864).
"Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave." ~ Christian Nestell Bovee (1820-1904)
"Progress — progress is the dirtiest word in the language — who ever told us — And made us believe it — that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always A good idea?" ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, 'We Have Gone Too Far' (1949)
"Fortunately, somwhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce or kill it off altogether." ~ Luis Bunuel (1900-1983)
"If we set the precedent of limiting the First Amendment, in order to protect the sensibilities of those who are offended by flag burning, what will we say the next time someone is offended by some other minority view, or by some other person's exercise of the freedom the Constitution is supposed to protect?" ~ Ted Kennedy (1932-2009)
23. "Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor will threats of a "halter" intimidate. For, under God, we are determined that wheresoever, whensoever, or howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will die free men." ~ Josiah Quincy II, 'Observations on the Boston Port Bill' (1774)
"There is always a certain glamour about the idea of a nation rising up to crush an evil simply because it is wrong. Unfortunately, this can seldom be realized in real life; for the very existence of the evil usually argues a moral weakness in the very place where extraordinary moral strength is called for." ~ W. E. B. Du Bois (1897)
"The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience." ~ W. E. B. Du Bois (1915)
"Chamberlain's stubborn, fanatical insistence on giving Hitler what he wanted, his trips to Berchtesgaden and Godesberg and finally the fateful journey to Munich rescued Hitler from his limb and strengthened his position in Europe, in Germany, in the Army, beyond anything that could have been imagined a few weeks before. It also added immeasurably to the power of the Third Reich vis-à-vis the Western democracies and the Soviet Union." ~ William L. Shirer (1904-1993)
"Living in a totalitarian land taught me to value highly — and fiercely — the very things the dictators denied: tolerance, respect for others and, above all, the freedom of the human spirit." ~ William L. Shirer (1904-1993)
"Government has ceased to mean upholding and reinforcing the traditional rights and morals of the governed; it now means compulsion in the service of social engineering." ~ Joseph Sobran, Jr. (1946-2010)
24. "Thus we have reached the point, it is painful to recognize, where the only persons accounted wise are those who can reduce the pursuit of wisdom to a profitable traffic." ~ Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)
"Let a certain saving ambition invade our souls so that, impatient of mediocrity, we pant after the highest things and (since, if we will, we can) bend all our efforts to their attainment." ~ Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)
"The richest endowments of the mind are temperance, prudence, and fortitude. Prudence is a universal virtue, which enters into the composition of all the rest and where she is not, fortitude loses its name and nature." ~ Vincent Voiture (1597-1648)
"A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle; and patriotism is loyalty to that principle." ~ George William Curtis (1824-1892)
"Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his." ~ George Moore, 'Confessions of a Young Man' (1886)
"There is always a right and a wrong way, and the wrong way always seems the more reasonable." ~ George Moore, 'The Bending of the Bough' (1900)
25. "To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them." ~ Pierre-Auguste Renoir ((1841-1919)
"We are products of the past and we live immersed in the past, which encompasses us. How can we move towards the new life, how create new activities without getting out of the past and without placing ourselves above it? And how can we place ourselves above the past if we are in it and it is in us? There is no other way out except through thought, which does not break off relations with the past but rises ideally above it and converts it into knowledge." ~ Benedetto Croce (1866-1952)
"We shall not understand the history of men and of other times unless we ourselves are alive to the requirements which that history satisfied, nor will our successors understand the history of our time unless they fulfill these conditions." ~ Benedetto Croce (1866-1952)
"Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace." ~ John Foster Dulles (1888-1959)
"The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith." ~ John Foster Dulles (1888-1959)
"Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man." ~ Anthony Burgess, 'A Clockwork Orange' (1962)
"If you believe in an unseen Christ, you will believe in the unseen Christlike potential of others." ~ Anthony Burgess (1917-1993)
26. "We may have an excellent Ear in Musick, without being able to perform in any kind. We may judg well of Poetry, without being Poets, or possessing the least of a Poetick Vein: But we can have no tolerable Notion of Goodness, without being tolerably good." ~ Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1711)
"You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. Do not bother yourself about it; disdain. Keep your mind serene as you keep your life clear." ~ Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
"God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art." ~ Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
"Social problems overstep frontiers. The sores of the human race, those great sores which cover the globe, do not halt at the red or blue lines traced upon the map." ~ Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
"Here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew — not an exterior force, nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odor of sanctity." ~ Theodore Sturgeon, 'More Than Human' (1953)
"I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion — against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas." ~ Johnny Cash (1997)
27. "Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number." ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'Hyperion' (1839)
"Age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day."
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'Morituri Salutamus' (1874)
"It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first. The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self." ~ Hugo Black (1886-1971)
"Our Constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind." ~ Hugo Black (1886-1971)
"We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." ~ David Sarnoff (1891-1971)
"Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems." ~ Ralph Nader (b. 1934)
28. "God might grant us riches, honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus ipsa me consolata sunt. "Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me," he does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand." ~ Michel de Montaigne, 'Essais', Book II (1580)
"For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits." ~ Michel de Montaigne, 'Essais', Book III (1595)
"I have been young and am now old, and have not yet known an untruthful man to come to a good end." ~ Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882)
"Jesus came proclaiming the Kingdom, and what arrived was the Church." ("Jésus annonçait le Royaume et c'est l'Église qui est venue.") ~ Alfred Firmin Loisy (1902)
"A wise man will not trust too much those who admire him, even for his wisdom. He knows that an admirer is never truly satisfied until he can substitute pity for his admiration and disdain for his applause. Our admirers are always on the lookout for evidence of our collapse. They find a solace in the fact that our superiority was transitory and that we end as they do—old and useless." ~ Ben Hecht (1894-1964)
"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good." ~ Alice May Brock, 'Alice's Restaurant Cookbook' (1969)
29. "Self-help must precede help from others. Even for making certain of help from heaven, one has to help oneself." ~ Morarji Desai (1896-1995)
"The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself." ~ Dee Brown (1908-2002)
"To the Indians it seemed that these Europeans hated everything in nature — the living forests and their birds and beasts, the grassy grades, the water, the soil, the air itself." ~ Dee Brown, 'Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee' (1970)
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely; and if you surrender your personal responsibility to a government which promises to take care of you, they will only take care of themselves." ~ Howard Nemerov (1929-1991)
"History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without." ~ Howard Nemerov (1929-1991)
"The sweet reward for preparation often does not come in the youthful twenties or staid thirties. It arrives — with accrued interest — in the mature years." ~ Mary Ellen Snodgrass, 'Late Achievers' (1992)
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