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1. "We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place." ~ Joseph de Maistre, 'Considerations on France' (1796)
"False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing." ~ Joseph de Maistre, 'Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg' (1821)
"Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians." ~ Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)
"The statesman's task is to hear God's footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to His coattails as He marches past." ~ Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898)
"A valuable qualification of a modern politician seems to be a capacity for concealing or explaining away the truth." ~ Dorothy Nevill, 'My Own Times' (1912)
"I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools." ~ Samuel A. Alito, Jr, dissenting in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. ___ (26 June 2015)
2. "Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan's egg." ~ Hans Christian Andersen, 'The Ugly Duckling' (1835)
"If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way." ~ Emile Zola (1840-1902)
"The maxim, "An unexamined life is not worth living," is the priceless legacy of Socrates to the generations of men who have followed him upon this earth. The beings who have stood on humanity's summit are those, and only those, who have heard the voice of Socrates across the centuries. The others are a superior kind of cattle." ~ Nicholas Murray Butler, lecture at Columbia University (4 March 1908)
"Education is in no small measure preparing the way for the intellectual life and pointing to it. Those who cannot enter in at its gates are doomed, in Leonardo da Vinci's words, to "possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world." For them life must be short, however many its years, and barren, however plentiful its acts. Their ears are deaf to the call of the indwelling Reason, and their eyes are blind to all the meaning and the values of human experience." ~ Nicholas Murray Butler, lecture at Columbia University (4 March 1908)
"When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling." ~ Kenneth Tynan, 'Tynan Right and Left' (1967)
"How far should one accept the rules of the society in which one lives? To put it another way: at what point does conformity become corruption? Only by answering such questions does the conscience truly define itself." ~ Kenneth Tynan, 'Tynan Right and Left' (1967)
3. "Great minds have great purposes, others have wishes. Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune; but great minds rise above them." ~ Washington Irving, 'The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon' (1819-1820)
"History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?" ~ Washington Irving, 'The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon' (1819-1820)
"I do not look at the country and pray for the Senators. I look at the Senators and pray for the country." ~ Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)
"Sometimes your medicine bottle has on it, 'Shake well before using.' That is what God has to do with some of His people. He has to shake them well before they are ever usable." ~ Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do." ~ Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909)
"Happiness comes most to persons who seek it least, and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought, it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you, and not you overtake it." ~ John Burroughs (1837-1921)
"We have thought, and we think, that there is a world of meaning still to be realized from the principles which gave this country birth. A world of meaning for us and, equally, a wealth of meaning for the world." ~ Henry Luce (1963)
4. "I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us." ~ Dorothea Dix (1802-1887)
"A politician is a man who thinks of the next election; while the statesman thinks of the next generation." ~ James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888)
"All the strength and force of man comes from his faith in things unseen. He who believes is strong; he who doubts is weak. Strong convictions precede great actions." ~ James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888)
"He who never looks up to a living God, to a heavenly presence, loses the power of perceiving that presence, and the universe slowly turns into a dead machine, clashing and grinding on, without purpose or end. If the light within us be darkness, how great is that darkness!" ~ James Freeman Clarke (1810-1888)
"A military man can scarcely pride himself on having smitten a sleeping enemy; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack." ~ Isoroku Yamamoto, Reply to Ogata Taketora, Editor of 'Asahi Shimbun' (9 Jan 1942)
"Americanism does not mean enforced and circumscribed belief; it cannot mean this. Our job is to educate free, independent and vigorous minds capable of analyzing events, of exercising judgment, of distinguishing facts from propaganda, and truth from half-truths and lies." ~ Nathan M. Pusey, response to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (1954)
"There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind." ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938-1989)
5. "To lay with one hand the power of government on the property of a citizen, and with the other to bestow it on favored individuals ... is none the less robbery because it was done under the forms of law and is called taxation." ~ Samuel Freeman Miller (1816-1890)
"In any country, regardless of what its laws say, wherever people act upon the idea that the disadvantage of one man is the good of another, there slavery exists. Wherever, in any country the whole people feel that the happiness of all is dependent upon the happiness of the weakest, there freedom exists." ~ Booker T. Washington, In An Address on Abraham Lincoln before the Republican Club of New York City (12 February 1909)
"Government is too big and important to be left to the politicians." ~ Chester Bowles (1951)
"And why should we, of all people, expect the proud new developing nations to see the world precisely as we see it? Was any new nation ever more outspoken, independent and unaligned than the young America of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln?" ~ Chester Bowles, 'The Conscience of a Liberal' (1962)
"Worry a little every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything." ~ Mary Welsh Hemingway (1908-1986)
"You cannot defeat your enemies until you know who they are." ~ Anthony Horowitz (b. 1955)
"He who fights monsters must take care that he doesn't become one himself." ~ Anthony Horowitz (b. 1955)
6. "Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid." ~ Nicolas Chamfort, 'Maxims and Considerations' (1796)
"Few people are prepared to use their reason without fear or favor, or bold enough to apply it relentlessly to every moral, political and social issue: to kings and ministers, to men in high places.... And if we don't, we're doomed to remain mediocre." ~ Nicolas Chamfort, 'Maxims & Thoughts' (1805)
"It is safe to wager that every public idea and every accepted convention is sheer foolishness, because it has suited the majority." ~ Nicolas Chamfort, 'Maxims & Thoughts' (1805)
"Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men." ~ Alexander Herzen (1812-1870)
"False gods must be repudiated, but that is not all: The reasons for their existence must be sought beneath their masks." ~ Alexander Herzen (1812-1870)
"That what is true of business and politics is gloriously true of the professions, the arts and crafts, the sciences, the sports. That the best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul." ~ Lincoln Steffens (1932)
7. "It is not the actual physical exertion that counts toward a man's progress, nor the nature of the task, but the spirit of faith with which it is undertaken." ~ Francis Xavier (1506-1552)
"Anxiety is the poison of human life ; the parent of many sins and of more miseries. — In a world where everything is doubtful, and where we may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, why this restless stir and commotion of mind? — Can it alter the cause, or unravel the mystery of human events?" ~ Hugh Blair (1718-1800)
"A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor." ~ William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798-1800)
"Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women." ~ Charles Fourier (1772-1837)
"The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men opportunity to work out happiness for themselves." ~ William Ellery Channing (1780-1842)
"Let us teach that the honor of a nation consists not in the forced submission of other states, but in equal laws and free institutions, in cultivated fields and prosperous cities; in the development of intellectual and moral power, in the diffusion of knowledge, in magnanimity and justice, in the virtues and blessings of peace." ~ William Ellery Channing, 'War' discourse at The Congregational Ministers of Masachusetts, Boston (1816)
"Intellectuals are people who believe that ideas are of more importance than values. That is to say, their own ideas and other people's values." ~ Gerald Brenan, 'Thoughts in a Dry Season: A Miscellany' (1978)
8. "A great deal of the adverse criticism and unfavorable advertising that Hollywood and the motion-picture business have had has been in large measure due to the sudden acquisition of a great deal of money on the part of a few persons who never had it before. You cannot spend a large income wisely if you have not saved or handled a small one well." ~ Mary Pickford (1893-1979)
"I am a rebel by birth. I contest anything that is unjust, that causes suffering in humanity. My feelings about that are so strong, I don't think I could live with myself if I weren't honest." ~ Yip Harburg (1896-1981)
"A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity. " ~ Emil Cioran, 'The Trouble With Being Born' (1973)
"We are not mere gatekeepers and doorkeepers of humanity's heritage. We also must protect its dissemination. We must beware of all censorship in whatever form it comes, because to censor, to tamper with truth, to tamper with our memory, is to commit a historical sin. We, as librarians, have a major duty that we must all share all over the world, in order not to allow anybody to control, to twist, and most important of all, to manipulate our human will and through it our free institutions." ~ Vartan Gregorian (b. 1934)
"Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated." ~ Kofi Annan (b. 1938)
"The idea that there is one people in possession of the truth, one answer to the world's ills, or one solution to humanity's needs, has done untold harm throughout history — especially in the last century." ~ Kofi Annan, Nobel lecture (10 Dec 2001)
"Savage, despicable evil. That’s what we were fighting in Iraq. That’s why a lot of people, myself included, called the enemy "savages." There really was no other way to describe what we encountered there." ~ Chris Kyle, 'American Sniper' (2012)
9. "But the American people are willing to listen to any one who has attained prominence. The main fact is that we've heard a man's name a great many times; that makes us ready to accept whatever he says." ~ Charles Proteus Steinmetz (1865-1923)
"When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled." ~ J. William Fulbright, speech in the Senate (2 Feb 1954)
"A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend." ~ J. William Fulbright, 'The Arrogance of Power' (1966)
"In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest." ~ J. William Fulbright (1905-1995)
"We are anxious when there is a dissonance between our "knowledge" and the perceivable facts. Since our "knowledge" is not to be doubted or questioned, it is the facts that have to be altered." ~ Nathaniel Branden (b. 1930)
"The continued existence of wildlife and wilderness is important to the quality of life of humans. Our challenge for the future is that we realize we are very much a part of the earth's ecosystem, and we must learn to respect and live according to the basic biological laws of nature." ~ Jim Fowler (b. 1932)
10. "An honest man speaks the truth, though it may give offence; a vain man, in order that it may." ~ William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
"Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols - it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them." ~ William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
"The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; It makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands." ~ William Hazlitt, in 'The Plain Speaker' (1826)
"Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams." ~ Lew Wallace, 'Ben-Hur (1880)
"It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?" ~ William Booth, 'In Darkest England, and the Way Out' (1890)
"Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations." ~ Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911)
"If you're a reporter, the easiest thing in the world is to get a story. The hardest thing is to verify. The old sins were about getting something wrong, that was a cardinal sin. The new sin is to be boring." ~ David Halberstam (1934-2007)
11. "Love may exist without jealousy, although this is rare; but jealousy may exist without love, and this is common; for jealousy can feed on that which is bitter, no less than on that which is sweet, and is sustained by pride as often as by affection." ~ Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549)
"Beneath a free government there is nothing but the intelligence of the people to keep the people's peace. Order must be preserved, not by a military police or regiments of horse-guards, but by the spontaneous concert of a well-informed population, resolved that the rights which have been rescued from despotism shall not be subverted by anarchy." ~ Edward Everett (1794-1865)
"Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope." ~ Charles Evans Hughes, Speech to the American Bar Association (2 September 1925)
"Emergency does not create power. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency." ~ Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948)
"No people in history have ever survived who thought they could protect their freedom by making themselves inoffensive to their enemies." ~ Dean Acheson (1893-1971)
"The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem." ~ Theodore Isaac Rubin (b. 1923)
12. "We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do. And I cried because I knew what was going to happen." ~ John Gunther Dean, on the April 12, 1975 U.S. evacuation of Phnom Penh
"Evidently there are plenty of people in journalism who have neither got what they liked nor quite grown to like what they get. They write pieces they do not much enjoy writing, for papers they totally despise, and the sad process ends by ruining their style and disintegrating their personality, two developments which in a writer cannot be separated, since his personality and style must progress or deteriorate together, like a married couple in a country where death is the only permissible divorce." ~ Francis Claud Cockburn (1904-1981)
"Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed." ~ Tom Clancy (1947-2013)
"Countries that do not control knowledge and information tend to do better because the average guy who is exposed to a lot of information can get ideas and profit from them." ~ Tom Clancy (1947-2013)
"There's been historical conflict between China and Russia for well over 1,000 years. … People forget that the Mongols came all the way to the Baltic Sea and all the way to where St. Petersburg is today … And the Russians have a good sense of history and they remember that." ~ Tom Clancy, CNN interview (22 Aug 2000)
"What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else." ~ Tom Clancy, Kudlow & Cramer interview (2 Sep 2003)
13. "Truth will do well enough if left to shift for herself. She seldom has received much aid from the power of great men to whom she is rarely known & seldom welcome. She has no need of force to procure entrance into the minds of men. Error indeed has often prevailed by the assistance of power or force. Truth is the proper & sufficient antagonist to error." ~ Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Religion (Oct 1776)
"Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on." ~ Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison (28 Oct 1785)
"He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions." ~ Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr (1785)
"Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul." ~ Samuel Ullman, 'Youth' (ca. 1900)
"Government is like fire. If it is kept within bounds and under the control of the people, it contributes to the welfare of all. But if it gets out of place, if it gets too big and out of control, it destroys the happiness and even the lives of the people." ~ Harrold Stassen (1907-2001)
"Journalism is the only profession explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, because journalists are supposed to be the check and balance on government. We're supposed to be holding those in power accountable. We're not supposed to be their megaphone. That's what the corporate media have become." ~ Amy Goodman (b. 1957)
14. "It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!" ~ Anne Sullivan (1866-1936)
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." ~ James Branch Cabel (1879-1958)
"Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee, 'A Study of History' Vol IV (1939)
As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is up to us." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975)
"Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975)
"History teaches us that when a barbarian race confronts a sleeping culture, the barbarian always wins." ~ Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975)
"Without imagination, we merely see or hear, and even if we see or hear that the objects of the senses are beautiful, we cannot feel that they are so. The difference is this: in feeling the beauty of objects, we enjoy not only the common, shared pleasures of the senses, but also the private pleasures of the imagination, peculiar to ourselves, and such that we have to struggle to articulate them." ~ Mary Warnock (b. 1924)
15. "Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason." ~ Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
"The church which ceases to be evangelistic will soon cease to be evangelical." ~ Alexander Duff (1806-1878)
"We can give without loving, but we cannot love without giving." ~ Alexander Duff (1806-1878)
"There is only one way in the world to be distinguished. Follow your instinct! Be yourself, and you'll be somebody. Be one more blind follower of the blind, and you will have the oblivion you desire." ~ Bliss Carman (1861-1929)
"Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel." ~ Corrie ten Boom, 'The Hiding Place' (1971)
"Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the door of resentment and the handcuffs of hatred. It is a power that breaks the chains of bitterness and the shackles of selfishness." ~ Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983)
"Be united with other Christians. A wall with loose bricks is not good. The bricks must be cemented together." ~ Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983)
16. "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!" ~ Anatole France (1844-1924)
"I am not a political man and I have no political convictions. I am an individual and a believer in liberty. That is all the politics I have. On the other hand I am not a super-patriot. Super-patriotism leads to Hitlerism — and we've had our lesson there. I don't want to create a revolution — I just want to create a few more films." ~ Charlie Chaplin, in response to US Attorney General revoking his re-entry visa (23 Sept 1952)
"Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it." ~ Howard Mumford Jones (1892-1980)
"While it is true that we in this nation remain free to be idiotic, it does not necessarily follow that we must be idiotic in order to be free!" ~ Howard Mumford Jones (1 Feb 1954)
"Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use." ~ Wendell Johnson (1906-1965)
"In a society, in a culture, which all too often makes relativism its creed - relativism has become a sort of dogma - in such a society the light of truth is missing; indeed, it is considered dangerous and authoritarian to speak of truth, and the end result is doubt about the goodness of life - is it good to be a person? is it good to be alive? - and in the validity of the relationships and commitments in which it consists." ~ Pope Benedict XVI (b. 1927)
17. "It is the peculiar nature of the forest, that life and death may ever be found within its bounds, in immediate presence of each other; both with ceaseless, noiseless advances, aiming at the mastery; and if the influences of the first be most general, those of the last are the most striking." ~ Susan Fenimore Cooper, 'Rural Hours' (1887)
"No problem can be solved until it is reduced to some simple form. The changing of a vague difficulty into a specific, concrete form is a very essential element in thinking." ~ J. P. Morgan (1837-1913)
"A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes." ~ Ray Stannard Baker, 'Following the Color Line' (1908)
"Did you think you could have the good without the evil? Did you think you could have the joy without the sorrow? ... I have been thinking much about pain. How could I help it? ... Sooner or later, regardless of the wit of man, we have pain to face; a reality; a final inescapable, immutable fact of life. What poor souls, if we have then no philosophy to face it with! This pain will not last; it never has lasted. I'll think about what I am going to write tomorrow — not about me, not about my body." ~ Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946)
"To be lonely is a state of mind, something completely other than physical solitude; when modern authors rant about the soul's intolerable loneliness, it is only proof of their own intolerable emptiness." ~ Karen Blixen, 'Out of Africa' (1937)
"That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness." ~ Thornton Wilder, 'Our Town' (1938)
"The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure." ~ Thornton Wilder, 'The Matchmaker' (1954)
18. "Se gli uomini sapessino le ragioni della paura mia, Capir potrebbero il mio dolor. (If people knew the reasons for my fears, they would be able to understand my pain.)" ~ Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519)
"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free." ~ Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
"The Constitution is a delusion and a snare if the weakest and humblest man in the land cannot be defended in his right to speak and his right to think as much as the strongest in the land." ~ Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
"As long as the world shall last, there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever." ~ Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)
"No first step can be really great; it must of necessity possess more of prophecy than of achievement; nevertheless it is by the first step that a man marks the value, not only of his cause, but of himself." ~ Katherine Cecil Thurston (1875-1911)
"I hope that when machines finally take over, they won't build men that break down, as soon as they're paid for." ~ Bob Kaufman, 'Golden Sardine' (1967)
"It is not now, nor was it ever the law, that before submitting to a lawful arrest, a fleeing felon is entitled to a fair fistfight." ~ Carlos Bea (b. 1934)
19. "God often visits us, but most of the time we are not at home." ~ Joseph Roux, 'Meditations of a Parish Priest' (1866)
"Has there ever been a revolution which didn't end in less freedom? Because, has there ever been a revolution which wasn't essentially just one more desperate wriggle by mankind to escape from freedom." ~ Richard Hughes, 'The Fox in the Attic' (1961)
"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves." ~ Glenn T. Seaborg, 'A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform' (1983)
"Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply." ~ Stanley Fish (b. 1938)
"It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales." ~ Stanley Fish, 'How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One' (2011)
"Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead." ~ Stanley Fish, 'How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One' (2011)
20. "The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best." ~ David Brainerd (1718-1747)
"Moral conduct includes every thing in which men are active and for which they are accountable. They are active in their desires, their affections, their designs, their intentions, and in every thing they say and do of choice; and for all these things they are accountable to God." ~ Nathaniel Emmons (1745-1940)
"When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why." ~ Dinah Maria Craik (1826-1887)
"The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions." ~ Robert Wilson Lynd (1879-1949)
"The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about." ~ Robert Wilson Lynd (1926)
"I suppose I was lucky enough to be educated at a time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge. They trusted us. Then there came a time when they decided that because not every kid in the class could understand or remember those things they wouldn't teach them anymore because it wasn't fair on the less good ones. So they withheld knowledge. Then I suppose the next lot of teachers didn't have the knowledge to withhold." ~ Sebastian Faulks, 'A Week in December' (2009)
21. "We cannot embrace His cross, and yet refuse our own. We cannot raise the cup of His remembrance to our lips, without a secret pledge to Him, to one another, to the great company of the faithful in every age that we, too, hold ourselves at God's disposal, that we will ask nothing on our own account, that we will pass simply into the Divine hand to take us whither it will." ~ James Martineau (1805-1900)
"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns." ~ Charlotte Bronte, 'Jane Eyre' (1847)
"Not only does the State do the work badly on a domain not its own, bunglingly, at greater cost, and with less fruit than spontaneous organizations, but, again, through the legal monopoly which it deems its prerogative, or through the overwhelming competition which it exercises, it kills or paralyzes these natural organizations or prevents their birth; and hence so many precious organs, which, absorbed, atropic or abortive, are lost to the great social body." ~ Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893)
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." ~ John Muir, 'My First Summer in the Sierra' (1911)
"No portion of the world is so barren as not to yield a rich and precious harvest of divine truth." ~ John Muir (1838-1914)
"In many churches Christianity has been watered down until the solution is so weak that if it were poison it would not hurt anyone, and if it were medicine it would not cure anyone!" ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897-1963)
"One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always." ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897-1963)
22. "A tender-hearted and compassionate disposition, which inclines men to pity and feel for the misfortunes of others, and which is, even for its own sake, incapable of involving any man in ruin and misery, is of all tempers of mind the most amiable; and though it seldom receives much honor, is worth of the highest." ~ Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
"Freedom is the alone unoriginated birthright of man, and belongs to him by force of his humanity; and is independence on the will and co-action of every other in so far as this consists with every other person’s freedom." ~ Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
"Men will not understand ... that when they fulfil their duties to men, they fulfil thereby God's commandments; that they are consequently always in the service of God, as long as their actions are moral, and that it is absolutely impossible to serve God otherwise." ~ Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
"We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best."
~ Philip James Bailey (1816-1902)
"There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any asssertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.... Our political life is also predicated on openness. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress." ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)
"Labels not only free us from the obligation to think creatively; they numb our sensibilities, our power to feel. During the Vietnam War, the phrase body count entered our vocabulary. It is an ambiguous phrase, inorganic, even faintly sporty. It distanced us from the painful reality of corpses, of dead, mutilated people." ~ Paula Fox, 'News From the World' (2011)
23. "Liberty must be allowed to work out its natural results; and these will, ere long, astonish the world." ~ James Buchanan (1791-1868)
"To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute." ~ James Buchanan (1791-1868)
"Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives." ~ James Anthony Froude, 'The Nemesis of Faith' (1849)
"Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost." ~ Chauncey Depew, (1834-1928)
"Whatever task God is calling us to, if it is yours it is mine, and if it is mine it is yours. We must do it together — or be cast aside together." ~ Howard Hewlett Clark (1903-1986)
"Careful and correct use of language is a powerful aid to straight thinking, for putting into words precisely what we mean necessitates getting our own minds quite clear on what we mean." ~ W. I. B. Beveridge, 'The Art of Scientific Investigation' (1950)
"Hypothesis is a tool which can cause trouble if not used properly. We must be ready to abandon out hypothesis as soon as it is shown to be inconsistent with the facts." ~ W. I. B. Beveridge, 'The Art of Scientific Investigation' (1950)
24. "I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people, and take away their freedom of choice and religion." ~ William of Orange, 'Havo Exam' (1564)
"I am no Calvinist, but it seems to me neither right nor worthy of a Christian to seek, for the sake of differences between the doctrine of Calvin and the Confession of Augsburg, to have this land swarming with troops and inundated with blood." ~ William of Orange (1533-1584)
"There is one certain means by which I can be sure never to see my country's ruin. I will die in the last ditch." ~ William of Orange (1533-1584)
"Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so." ~ Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)
"If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and how if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future." ~ Robert Penn Warren, 'All the King's Men' (1946)
"Blood is the first cost. History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs — the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam." ~ Robert Penn Warren, 'The Legacy of the Civil War' (1961)
25. "The mystery of life is certainly the most persistent problem ever placed before the thought of man. There is no doubt that from the time humanity began to think it has occupied itself with the problem of its origin and its future which undoubtedly is the problem of life. The inability of science to solve it is absolute. This would be truly frightening were it not for faith." ~ Guglielmo Marconi, speech to the International Congress of Electro-Radio Biology, Venice (10 Sep 1934)
"We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion — a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply." ~ Edward R. Murrow, 'This I Believe' (1951)
"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular." ~ Edward R. Murrow, 'See It Now' (9 March 1954)
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting." ~ William J. Brennan (1906-1997)
"The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism." ~ William J. Brennan (1906-1997)
"The constitutional vision of human dignity rejects the possibility of political orthodoxy imposed from above; it respects the right of each individual to form and to express political judgments, however far they may deviate from the mainstream and however unsettling they might be to the powerful or the elite." ~ William J. Brennan, "Constitutional Interpretation" address at Georgetown University (12 Oct 1985)
26. "A noble man estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires." ~ Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
"Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names." ~ Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
"Experience has two things to teach; the first is that we must correct a great deal; the second, that we must not correct too much." ~ Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)
"To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
"The truth can be spoken only by someone who is already at home in it; not by someone who still lives in untruthfulness, and does no more than reach out towards it from within untruthfulness." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
"When a people lose the courage to resist encroachment on their rights, then they can't be saved by an outside force. Our belief is that people always have the kind of government they want and that individuals must bear the risks of freedom, even to the extent of giving their lives." ~ A. E. van Vogt (1912-2000), in "The Weapon Shops of Isher" (1951)
"Once you accept the existence of God — however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him — then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage." ~ Morris West (1916-1999), 'The Clowns of God' (1981)
27. "Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
"It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish." ~ Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1792)
"Education has for its object the formation of character. To curb restive propensities, to awaken dormant sentiments, to strengthen the perceptions, and cultivate the tastes, to encourage this feeling and repress that, so as finally to develop the child into a man of well proportioned and harmonious nature — this is alike the aim of parent and teacher." ~ Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), 'Social Statics' (1851)
"If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect a man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?" ~ Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), 'The New Toryism' (1884)
"It has been my misfortune to be engaged in more battles than any other general on either side of the Atlantic; but there was never a time during my command when I would not have chosen some settlement by reason rather than the sword." ~ Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)
"Let us labor to add all needful guarantees for the more perfect security of free thought, free speech, and free press, pure morals, unfettered religious sentiments, and of equal rights and privileges to all men, irrespective of nationality, color, or religion." ~ Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), Speech to the Society of the Army of Tennessee (1875)
"I leave comparisons to history, claiming only that I have acted in every instance from a conscientious desire to do what was right, constitutional, within the law, and for the very best interests of the whole people. Failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent." ~ Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885), State of the Union Address (5 Dec 1876)
28. "It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they are incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin." ~ James Monroe (1758-1831)
"The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love." ~ Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
"War is at first, the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that the other fellow isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off." ~ Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
"Nothing is more narrow-minded than chauvinism or race hatred. To me all men are equal: there are jackasses everywhere, and I have the same contempt for them all. No petty prejudices!" ~ Karl Kraus (1874-1936)
"I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more." ~ Oskar Schindler (1908-1974)
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what." ~ Harper Lee (1926-2016), 'To Kill a Mockingbird' (1960)
"The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that." ~ Harper Lee (1926-2016)
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29. "Liberty is a word which, according as it is used, comprehends the most good and the most evil of any in the world. Justly understood it is sacred next to those which we appropriate in divine adoration; but in the mouths of some it means anything, which enervate a necessary government; excite a jealousy of the rulers who are our own choice, and keep society in confusion for want of a power sufficiently concentered to promote its good." ~ Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), 19 Nov 1787
"The powers of congress must be defined, but their means must be adequate to the purposes of their constitution. It is possible there may be abuses and misapplications; still, it is better to hazard something than to hazard at all." ~ Oliver Ellsworth (1745-1807), letter to Governor Trumbull (10 Jul 1783)
"Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster." ~ William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
"We hold that the greatest right in the world is the right to be wrong, that in the exercise thereof people have an inviolable right to express their unbridled thoughts on all topics and personalities, being liable only for the use of that right." ~ William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
"Today we are engaged in a contest for human freedom. During the last war we crushed one type of totalitarian tyranny in a military sense, but the ideological fight has not been won, for we cannot eliminate ideas by physical means and yet maintain freedom of thought. Only better and more inspiring ideas can be used to fight tyrannical ideas." ~ Harold Urey (1893-1981), 'California Monthly' (Dec 1947)
"Jazz is a good barometer of freedom. In its beginnings, the United States spawned certain ideals of freedom and independence through which, eventually, jazz was evolved, and the music is so free, that many people say it is the only unhampered, unhindered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country." ~ Duke Ellington (1899-1974), 'Music is My Mistress' (1973)
30. "It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment. When I have clarified and exhausted a subject, then I turn away from it, in order to go into darkness again; the never-satisfied man is so strange if he has completed a structure, then it is not in order to dwell in it peacefully, but in order to begin another. I imagine the world conqueror must feel thus, who, after one kingdom is scarcely conquered, stretches out his arms for others." ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), letter to Farkas Wolfgang Bolyai (2 September 1808)
"There is in this world a joy of the intellect, which finds satisfaction in science, and a joy of the heart, which manifests itself above all in the aid men give one another against the troubles and trials of life. But for the Supreme Being to have created existences, and stationed them in various spheres in order to taste these joys for some 80 or 90 years — that were surely a miserable plan.... Whether the soul were to live for 80 years or for 80 million years, if it were doomed in the end to perish, such an existence would only be a respite. In the end it would drop out of being. We are thus impelled to the conclusion to which so many things point, although they do not amount to a coercive scientific proof, that besides this material world there exists another purely spiritual order of things, with activities as various, as the present, and that this world of spirit we shall one day inherit." ~ Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
"The way out of our narrowness may not be so easy as the way in. The weasel that creeps into the corn-bin has to starve himself before he can leave by the same passage." ~ Cyrus Augustus Bartol (1813-1900)
"Giving up freedom for security has begun to look naive. Even to me. Many of you were ahead of me on this — Three out of four hijacked airplanes destroyed the World Trade Center and a piece of the Pentagon in 2001. How is it possible that those planes were taken using only five perps armed with knives? It was possible because all those hundreds of passengers had been carefully stripped of every possible weapon. We may want to reconsider this approach. It doesn't work in high schools either." ~ Larry Niven (b. 1938), 'how the Universe works' (2002)
"The greatest lesson we can learn from the past ... is that freedom is at the core of every successful nation in the world." ~ Frederick Chiluba (1943-2011)
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