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|  Peter Abelard | The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth. | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being. | |
| Lord Acton | Learn as much by writing as by reading. | |
| Abigail Adams | Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. | |
| Douglas Adams | Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. | |
| Franklin P. Adams | Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. | |
| Franklin P. Adams | I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. | |
| John Adams | It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives. | |
| John Adams | But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations…This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | A native American who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance...as a comet or an earthquake. | |
| John Adams | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them. | |
| John Adams | Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates… to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them. | |
| Samuel Adams | A general dissolution of the principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy.... While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but once they lose their virtue, they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.... If virtue and knowledge are diffused among the people, they will never be enslaved. This will be their great security. | |
| Samuel Adams | Shame on the men who can court exemption from present trouble
and expense at the price of their own posterity's liberty! | |
| Samuel Adams | No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can
any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and Virtue is
preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant,
and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own
weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders. | |
| Aeschylus | Time as he grows old teaches all things. | |
| Woody Allen | I call the mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master [and] receives new truth as an angel from Heaven. | |
| Lisa Alther | I’ve always felt that a person’s intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic. | |
| American Library Association | Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access of all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored. | |
| American Library Association | The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack… These actions apparently arise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. | |
| American Library Association | Why is Intellectual Freedom Important? Intellectual freedom is the basis of our democratic system. We expect our people to be self-governors. But to do so responsibly, our citizenry must be well informed. Libraries provide the ideas and information, in a variety of formats, to allow people to inform themselves. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do. | |
| Aristophanes | The wise learn many things from their enemies. | |
| Stephen Arons | Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy? | |
| Isaac Asimov | If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them. | |
| W. H. Auden | Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction. | |
| Marcus Aurelius | The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Knowledge is power. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Knowledge and human power are synonymous. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Liberty of speech invites and provokes liberty to be used again, and so bringeth much to a man’s knowledge. | |
| Roger Bacon | There are in fact four very significant stumblingblocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge. | |
| Ben H. Bagdikian | In the US, voters cast ballots for individual candidates who are not bound to any party program except rhetorically, and not always then. Some Republicans are more liberal than some Democrats, some libertarians are more radical than some socialists, and many local candidates run without any party identification. No American citizen can vote intelligently without knowledge of the ideas, political background, and commitments of each individual candidate. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Society is composed of men, and every man is a FREE agent. Since man is free, he can choose; since he can choose, he can err; since he can err, he can suffer. I go further: He must err and he must suffer; for his starting point is ignorance, and in his ignorance he sees before him an infinite number of unknown roads, all of which save one lead to error. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | The laws of this nature are those which forbid to wear arms, disarming those only who are not disposed to commit the crime which the laws mean to prevent. Can it be supposed, that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, and the most important of the code, will respect the less considerable and arbitrary injunctions, the violation of which is so easy, and of so little comparative importance? Does not the execution of this law deprive the subject of that personal liberty, so dear to mankind and to the wise legislator? and does it not subject the innocent to all the disagreeable circumstances that should only fall on the guilty? It certainly makes the situation of the assaulted worse, and of the assailants better, and rather encourages than prevents murder, as it requires less courage to attack unarmed than armed persons. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | A principal source of errors and injustice are false ideas of utility. For example: that legislator has false ideas of utility who considers particular more than general conveniencies, who had rather command the sentiments of mankind than excite them, who dares say to reason, 'Be thou a slave;' who would sacrifice a thousand real advantages to the fear of an imaginary or trifling inconvenience; who would deprive men of the use of fire for fear of their being burnt, and of water for fear of their being drowned; and who knows of no means of preventing evil but by destroying it. | |
| Cesare Beccaria | False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty... and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books. | |
| Ezra Taft Benson | If America is destroyed, it may be by Americans who salute the flag, sing the national anthem, march in patriotic parades, cheer Fourth of July speakers – normally good Americans, but Americans who fail to comprehend what is required to keep our country strong and free, Americans who have been lulled away into a false security. | |
| David K. Berninghausen | In order to get the truth, conflicting arguments and expression must be allowed. There can be no freedom without choice, no sound choice without knowledge. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | Heathen, n. A benighten creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. | |
| Steve Biko | The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. | |
| Josh Billings | The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The layman’s constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn’t like is unconstitutional. | |
| Reuben Blades | I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance. | |
| Alan Bloom | Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities. | |
| Judge Curtis Bok | It will be asked whether one would care to have one's young daughter read these books. I suppose that by the time she is old enough to wish to read them she will have learned the biologic facts of life and the words that go with them. There is something seriously wrong at home if those facts have not been met and faced and sorted by then; it is not children so much as parents that should receive our concern about this. I should prefer that my own three daughters meet the facts of life and the literature of the world in my library than behind a neighbor's barn, for I can face the adversary there directly. If the young ladies are appalled by what they read, they can close the book at the bottom of page one; if they read further, they will learn what is in the world and in its people, and no parents who have been discerning with their children need fear the outcome. Nor can they hold it back, for life is a series of little battles and minor issues, and the burden of choice is on us all, every day, young and old | |
| Daniel Boorstin | We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. | |
| Tom Braun | There is no wisdom without knowledge. | |
| Tom Braun | If you think we are free today, you know nothing about tyranny and even less about freedom. | |
| Kingman Brewster | Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure. | |
| Jacob Bronowski | There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. | |
| Bellamy Brooks | Egotism is the anesthetic given by a kindly nature to relieve the pain of being a damned fool. | |
| William F. Buckley, Jr. | Now it is one thing to say (I say it) that people shouldn’t consume psychoactive drugs. It is entirely
something else to condone marijuana laws, the application of which resulted, in 1995, in the arrest of 588,963 Americans. Why are we so afraid to
inform ourselves on the question? | |
| Buddha | Through zeal, knowledge is gotten; through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost; let a man who knows the double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow. | |
| Edmund Burke | No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. | |
| Edmund Burke | Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. | |
| Edmund Burke | There are three estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' Gallery yonder there sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all. It is not a figure of speech or witty saying, it is a literal fact, very momentous to us in these times. | |
| Edmund Burke | The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. | |
| John Cage | I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. | |
| Edmond Cahn | The people’s right to obtain information does not, of course, depend on any assured ability to understand its significance or use it wisely. Facts belong to the people simply because they relate to interests that are theirs, government that is theirs, and votes that they may desire to cast, for they are entitled to an active role in shaping every fundamental decision of state. | |
| Albert Camus | An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. | |
| G. R. Capp | You cannot become a truly effective advocate unless you know all sides of your subject thoroughly, opposing arguments as well as your own. | |
| Orson Scott Card | It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data. | |
| Andrew Carnegie | I choose free libraries as the best agencies for improving the masses of the people, because they give nothing for nothing. They only help those who help themselves. They never pauperize. They reach the aspiring and open to these chief treasures of the world -- those stored up in books. A taste for reading drives out lower tastes. | |
| Nicolas-Sebasstien Chamfort | Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves. | |
| Chinese Proverb | The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names. | |
| Noam Chomsky | Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege. | |
| Francis Church | All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. | |
| John Ciardi | The public library is the most dangerous place in town. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Wise men are instructed by reason; men of less understanding, by experience; the most ignorant, by necessity; the beasts, by nature. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | Precisely in proportion to our own intellectual weakness will be our credulity as to those mysterious powers assumed by others. | |
| Confucius | Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. | |
| Joseph Conrad | Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning toward error. | |
| Norman Cousins | History is a vast early warning system. | |
| Noel Coward | I've over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn't have known. | |
| Patrick Cox | The holier-than-thou activists who blame the population for not spending more money on their personal crusades are worse than aggravating. They encourage the repudiation of personal responsibility by spreading the lie that support of a government program fulfills individual moral duty. | |
| Tench Coxe | As our president bears no resemblance to a king so we shall see the Senate has no similitude to nobles. First, not being hereditary, their collective knowledge, wisdom, and virtue are not precarious. For by these qualities alone are they to obtain their offices, and they will have none of the peculiar qualities and vices of those men who possess power merely because their father held it before them. | |
| Leonardo da Vinci | The desire to know is natural to good men. | |
| Edward Dahlberg | It takes a long time to understand nothing. | |
| William Damon | There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers. | |
| Frank Dane | Get all the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. The modern world is the child of doubt and inquiry, as the ancient world was the child of fear and faith. | |
| Charles Darwin | To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. | |
| Charles Darwin | Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations...In democratic countries knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other forms of knowledge; on its progress depends that of all the others. | |
| Graceanne A. Decandido | If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas. | |
| W. Edwards Deming | If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. | |
| W. Edwards Deming | It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. | |
| Demosthenes | There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm. | |
| Daniel Dennett | There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear. | |
| Max DePree | We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. | |
| Sir James Dewar | Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open. | |
| Diogenes | The foundation of every state is the education of its youth. | |
| William O. Douglas | Where suspicion fills the air and holds scholars in line for fear of their jobs, there can be no exercise of the free intellect. Supineness and dogmatism take the place of inquiry. A problem can no longer be pursued to its edges. Fear stalks the classroom. The teacher is no longer a stimulant to adventurous thinking; she becomes instead a pipe line for safe and sound information. A deadening dogma takes the place of free inquiry. Instruction tends to become sterile; pursuit of knowledge is discouraged; discussion often leaves off where it should begin. | |
| William O. Douglas | Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged. | |
| Frederick Douglass | To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave. | |
| John Dryden | Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. | |
| Albert Einstein | The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. | |
| Albert Einstein | The important thing is never to stop questioning. | |
| Albert Einstein | The restriction of knowledge to an elite group destroys the spirit of the society and leads to its intellectual impoverishment. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. | |
| Albert Einstein | The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. | |
| Albert Einstein | All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom. | |
| Albert Einstein | Imagination is more important than knowledge. | |
| George Eliot | Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. | |
| T. S. Eliot | Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? | |
| Michael Ellner | Everything is backwards;\\
everything is upside down.\\
Doctors destroy health,\\
lawyers destroy justice,\\
universities destroy knowledge,\\
governments destroy freedom,\\
the major media destroy information,\\
and religions destroy spirituality. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. | |
| Epictetus | Only the educated are free. | |
| Epictetus | We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. | |
| Desiderius Erasmus | In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. | |
| Felson | To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. | |
| Martin H. Fischer | Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. | |
| Martin H. Fischer | A good teacher must know the rules; a good pupil, the exceptions. | |
| Malcolm S. Forbes | Education's purpose
is to replace an empty mind
with an open one. | |
| Anatole France | If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. | |
| Jerome D. Frank | Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | A nation of well informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the region of ignorance that tyranny begins. | |
| Erich Fromm | If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated. | |
| Robert Frost | Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. | |
| Margaret Fuller | I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue. | |
| Dr. Thomas Fuller | Curiosity is the kernal of forbidden fruit. | |
| Galileo Galilei | All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. | |
| Galileo Galilei | 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. | |
| Gallagher | I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The seven blunders that human society commits and cause all the violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principles. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | If we are to reach real peace in this world,
and if we are to carry on a real war against war,
we shall have to begin with the children. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Truth never damages a cause that is just. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice. | |
| James A. Garfield | I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error. | |
| Stanley Garn | If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. | |
| John Taylor Gatto | Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another. | |
| Gazette of the United States | The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America. | |
| A. Bartlett Giamatti | Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well. | |
| Josiah William Gitt | Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| William Godwin | Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking; always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you'll know right away what you amount to. | |
| Barry Goldwater | The Trilateralist Commission is international...(and)...is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateralist Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power - political, monetary, intellectual, and ecclesiastical. | |
| Katharine Graham | We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows. | |
| A. Whitney Griswold | Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. | |
| Sydney J. Harris | Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is comparatively insignificant. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is largely because civilization enables us constantly to profit from knowledge which we individually do not possess and because each individual's use of his particular knowledge may serve to assist others unknown to him in achieving their ends that men as members of civilized society can pursue their individual ends so much more successfully than they could alone. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Ever since the beginning of modern science, the best minds have recognized that "the range of acknowledged ignorance will grow with the advance of science." Unfortunately, the popular effect of this scientific advance has been a belief, seemingly shared by many scientists, that the range of our ignorance is steadily diminishing and that we can therefore aim at more comprehensive and deliberate control of all human activities. It is for this reason that those intoxicated by the advance of knowledge so often become the enemies of freedom. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed, it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached. It is because we do not yet know which of the many competing new opinions will prove itself the best that we wait until it has gained sufficient support. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | All political theories assume, of course, that most individuals are very ignorant. Those who plead for liberty differ from the rest in that they include among the ignorant themselves as well as the wisest. | |
| Chris Hedges | We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. | |
| Claude-Adrien Helvetius | To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves. | |
| Heraclitus | Whosoever wishes to know about the world
must learn about it in its particular details.
Knowledge is not intelligence.
In searching for the truth be ready for the unexpected.
Change alone is unchanging.
The same road goes both up and down.
The beginning of a circle is also its end.
Not I, but the world says it: all is one.
And yet everything comes in season. | |
| Eric Hoffer | To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth. Though it is held before our eyes, pushed under our noses, rammed down our throats -- we know it not. | |
| Eric Hoffer | The fact is that up to now a free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning- from minding other people's business- and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual's sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman's sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | I share the belief of many of my contemporaries that the spiritual crisis pervading all spheres of Western industrial society can be remedied only by a change in our world view. We shall have to shift from the materialistic, dualistic belief that people and their environment are separate, toward a new conciousness of an all-encompassing reality, which embraces the experiencing ego, a reality in which people feel their oneness with animate nature and all of creation. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | I believe that if people would learn to use LSD's vision-inducing capability more wisely, under suitable conditions, in medical practice and in conjunction with meditation, then in the future this problem child could become a wonderchild. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | Deliberate provocation of mystical experience, particularly by LSD and related hallucinogens, in contrast to spontaneous visionary experiences, entails dangers that must not be underestimated. Practitioners must take into account the peculiar effects of these substances, namely their ability to influence our consciousness, the innermost essence of our being. The history of LSD to date amply demonstrates the catastrophic consequences that can ensue when its profound effect is misjudged and the substance is mistaken for a pleasure drug. Special internal and external advance preperations are required; with them, an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. | |
| Dr. Albert Hoffman | The characteristic property of hallucinogens, to suspend the boundaries between the experiencing self and the outer world in an ecstatic, emotional experience, makes it posible with their help, and after suitable internal and external perparation... to evoke a mystical experience according to plan, so to speak... I see the true importance of LSD in the possibility of providing material aid to meditation aimed at the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality. Such a use accords entirely with the essence and working character of LSD as a sacred drug. | |
| Richard Hofstadter | A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else. | |
| Sidney Hook | To silence criticism is to silence freedom. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | There is no slavery but ignorance.
Liberty is the child of intelligence. | |
| Eugene Ionesco | It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. | |
| Julian Jaynes | History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I have often thought that nothing would do more extensive good at small expense than the establishment of a small circulating library in every county, to consist of a few well-chosen books, to be lent to the people of the country under regulations as would secure their safe return in due time. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I cannot live without books. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Reason and free inquiry are the only effective agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error and error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free inquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced. Had not free inquiry been indulged at the era of the Reformation, the corruption of Christianity could not have been purged away. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend, and require elementary qualification only, and sufficient age. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man’s conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intelligence. | |
| David Starr Jordan | Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. | |
| Franz Kafka | I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. | |
| Immanuel Kant | Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. | |
| Sir Arthur Keith | As long as man remains an inquiring animal, there can never be a complete unanimity in our fundamental beliefs. The more diverse our paths, the greater is likely to be the divergence of beliefs. | |
| Helen Keller | College isn't the place to go for ideas. | |
| Thomas Kempis | But because many endeavor to get knowledge rather than to live well, they are often deceived and reap little or no benefit from their labor. | |
| George F. Kennan | The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas -- complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. | |
| John Maynard Keynes | The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. | |
| Omar Khayyam | Indeed the Idols I have loved so long,\\
have done my credit in this World much wrong;\\
have drowned my Glory in a shallow Cup,\\
and sold my Reputation for a Song. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element -- learning. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education. | |
| Frank H. Knight | Knowledge is more a matter of learning
than of the exercise of absolute judgment.
Learning requires time, and in time the situation dealt with,
as well as the learner, undergoes change. | |
| Erwin Knoll | Everything you read in the press is absolutely true.
Except the rare event of which you have personal knowledge. | |
| Stanislaw Jerszy Lec | The only fool bigger than the person who knows it all is the person who argues with him. | |
| Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | [M]y work, which I've done for a long time,
was not pursued in order to gain the praise I now enjoy,
but chiefly from a craving after knowledge,
which I notice resides in me more than in most other men.
And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable,
I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper,
so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists' puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value. Let the doctor tell me I shall die unless I do so-and-so; but whether life is worth having on those terms is no more a question for him than for any other man. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. | |
| Georg Christoph Lichtenberg | One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | The philosophy of the classroom today will be the philosophy of government tomorrow. | |
| Walter Lippmann | When all think alike, no one is thinking very much. | |
| Walter Lippmann | We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say. | |
| John Locke | Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered. | |
| John Locke | The only fence against the world
is a thorough knowledge of it. | |
| H. P. Lovecraft | The most merciful thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. | |
| H. P. Lovecraft | The most merciless thing in the world ... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. | |
| James Russell Lowell | But it was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled. | |
| F. J. Lucas | Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow so that everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found. | |
| James Madison | A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a
people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves
with the power which knowledge gives. | |
| James Madison | The advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty. | |
| Thomas Mann | It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. | |
| Andre Maurois | In literature as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others. | |
| William Gibbs McAdoo | It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument. | |
| Margaret Mead | My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. | |
| Menander | It is not white hair that engenders wisdom. | |
| Mencius | To act without clear understanding, to form habits without investigation, to follow a path all one's life without knowing where it really leads -- such is the behavior of the multitude. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit; it is also opposed to all other attempts at rational thinking. Not by accident does Genesis 3 make the father of knowledge a serpent -- slimy, sneaking and abominable. Since the earliest days the church as an organization has thrown itself violently against every effort to liberate the body and mind of man. It has been, at all times and everywhere, the habitual and incorrigible defender of bad governments, bad laws, bad social theories, bad institutions. It was, for centuries, an apologist for slavery, as it was the apologist for the divine right of kings. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts. | |
| H. L. Mencken | That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The art of politics, under democracy, is simply the art of ringing it. Two branches reveal themselves. There is the art of the demagogue, and there is the art of what may be called, by a shot-gun marriage of Latin and Greek, the demaslave. They are complementary, and both of them are degrading to their practitioners. The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and then pretends that he believes it himself. | |
| H. L. Mencken | There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon, however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable. Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator on his own account. The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is even highly probable. | |
| Olin Miller | To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it. | |
| Charles Mingus | Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity. | |
| Richard Mitchell | Rousseau had it backwards. We are NOT born free. We are born in the chains of the random and the reflexive, and are ignorant and unreasonable by simple nature. We must learn to be free, to organize the random and detect the reflexive, to acquire the knowledge of particulars and the powers of reason. The examined life is impossible if we cannot examine, order, classify, define, distinguish, always in minute particulars. | |
| Mohammed | The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr. | |
| James Monroe | Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties. | |
| Toni Morrison | Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually alone in accomplishing this. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | I am entirely persuaded that the American public is more reasonable, restrained and mature than most of the broadcast industry's planners believe. Their fear of controversy is not warranted by the evidence. | |
| Edward R. Murrow | We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment, unpopular. | |
| National Education Association Resolution | The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. | |
| Issac Newton | I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. | |
| Albert Jay Nock | The superficial distinctions of Fascism, Bolshevism, Hitlerism, are the concern of journalists and publicists; the serious student sees in them only one root-idea of a complete conversion of social power into State power. | |
| Northwest Ordinance, Article III, 1787 | Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. | |
| J. Robert Oppenheimer | 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. | |
| Thomas Paine | Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. | |
| Thomas Paine | The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood. | |
| Cesare Pavese | To know the world one must construct it. | |
| Pope Pius XII | One Galileo in two thousand years is enough. | |
| Plato | Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind. | |
| Plato | Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | No man is wise enough by himself. | |
| Plutarch | The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. | |
| Marcel Proust | We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can make for us or spare us. | |
| Proverb | Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. | |
| Proverb | Observation, and not old age, brings wisdom. | |
| Proverb | The wise learn from the experience of others, most from their own experience, and fools not at all. | |
| Proverb | The wise do freely, early and in good time, what fools do later out of necessity. | |
| Navajo Proverb | You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. | |
| Ayn Rand | It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. | |
| Ayn Rand | There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction. | |
| Jonathan Rauch | A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will. | |
| Ronald Reagan | How do you tell a Communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin. | |
| Ronald Reagan | We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. | |
| Charley Reese | Unless they can pass the same test that immigrants must pass to become citizens, people shouldn't be allowed to vote. The idea that there is some public benefit in ignoramuses and morons pulling levers next to names on a ballot is one of the evil myths of post-modern America. The purpose of voting, in our country, is to select men and women with the competence and integrity to operate the mechanics of government fixed by our Constitution. For this process to have any public benefit requires that the choices be made on an intelligent, knowledgeable and reasoned basis. | |
| Sheldon Richman | Among other grand achievements, F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge—information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state. | |
| Georges Ripert | We continue to claim that nobody is supposed to ignore the law. But we must give some credit to those who know it. | |
| John D. Rockefeller, Sr. | In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.
We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen -- of whom we have an ample supply.
The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. | |
| Will Rogers | One of these days they are going to remove so much of the 'hooey' and the thousands of things the schools have become clogged up with, and we will find that we can educate our broods for about one-tenth of the price and learn 'em something that they might accidentally use after they escape. | |
| Milton Rokeach | The relative openness or closedness of a mind cuts across specific content; that is, it is not restricted to any one particular ideology, or religion, or philosophy, or scientific viewpoint. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | We all know that books will burn -- yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | Knowledge -- that is, education in its true sense -- is our best protection against unreasoning prejudice and panic-making fear, whether engendered by special interest, illiberal minorities, or panic-stricken leaders. | |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | The most absolute authority is that which penetrates into a man’s innermost being and concerns itself no less with his will than with his actions. | |
| John Ruskin | One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily... My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said 'Let him touch it.' So I touched it -- and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty. | |
| John Ruskin | Without seeking, truth cannot be known at all. It can neither be declared from pulpits, nor set down in articles, nor in any wise prepared and sold in packages ready for use. Truth must be ground for every man by itself out of it such, with such help as he can get, indeed, but not without stern labor of his own. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt. | |
| Bertrand Russell | The earth becomes more crowded, and our dependence upon our neighbours becomes more intimate. In these circumstances life cannot remain tolerable unless we learn to let each other alone in all matters that are not of immediate and obvious concern to the community. We must learn to respect each other's privacy, and not to impose our moral standards upon each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realize that other ages and other countries, and even other groups in his own country, have moral standards different from his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for others to resist him. Let us hope that a broader education and a wider knowledge of mankind may gradually weaken the ardour of our too virtuous masters. | |
| Willy Russell | I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. | |
| Carl Sagan | There is a lurking fear that some things are not meant “to be known,” that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. | |
| Andrei Sakharov | Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas. | |
| George Santayana | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | |
| George Santayana | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | |
| Robert C. Savage | Most people are willing to pay more to be amused than to be educated. | |
| Eric Schaub | Speak honestly, and the truth will make itself known. | |
| Eric Schaub | The more I truly learn, I realize the less I truly know. | |
| Eric Schaub | Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us? | |
| Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. | Liberalism regards all absolutes with profound skepticism, including both moral imperatives and final solutions... Insistence upon any particular solution is the mark of an ideologue... | |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | All truth passes through 3 stages.\\
First, it is ridiculed.\\
Second, it is violently opposed.\\
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Of course, however, the living voice and the intimacy of a common life will help you more than the written word. You must go to the scene of action, first, because men put more faith in their eyes than in their ears, and second, because the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Withdraw into yourself, as far as you can. Associate with those who will make a better man of you. Welcome those whom you yourself can improve. The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | The best ideas are common property. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | That most knowing of persons – gossip. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing. | |
| Butler D. Shaffer | Our lack of constant awareness has also permitted us to accept definitions of freedom that are not necessarily consistent with the actuality of being free. Because we have learned to confuse the word with the reality the word seeks to describe, our vocabulary has become riddled with distorted and contradictory meanings smuggled into the language. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. | |
| Algernon Sidney | [T]here is a difference between lions and asses; and he is a fool who knows not that swords were given to men, that none might be slaves, but such as know not how to use them. | |
| Lillian Smith | Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college. | |
| Joseph Sobran | In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college. | |
| Gerry Spence | The Internet…has become the voice of the people in the first genuine experiment in democracy yet conducted in America. It stands ready to serve every facet, every faction. | |
| Charles T. Sprading | The first great struggle for liberty was in the realm of thought. The libertarians reasoned that freedom of thought would be good for mankind; it would promote knowledge, and increased knowledge would advance civilization. But the authoritarians protested that freedom of thought would be dangerous, that people would think wrong, that a few were divinely appointed to think for the people. | |
| Philip Dormer Stanhope | The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet. | |
| John Steinbeck | Man is the only kind of varmint that sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it. | |
| Saul Steinberg | The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes. | |
| Leslie Stephen | If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries. | |
| Adlai E. Stevenson II | If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow it wherever the search may lead us. | |
| Joseph Story | A good government implies two things; first, fidelity to the objects of the government; secondly, a knowledge of the means, by which those objects can be best attained. | |
| Justice Joseph Story | Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and
intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished
from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and
the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people,
in order to betray them. | |
| Alfred Lord Tennyson | Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | To be awake is to be alive. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. | |
| Dr. John J. Tigert | I do not believe there are more than a very limited number of persons, perhaps a hundred who really know what is in the Constitution of the United States. | |
| Alvin Toffler | The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | I know that most men -- not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems -- can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty -- conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives. | |
| Mark Twain | A classic is a book which people praise and don't read. | |
| Mark Twain | Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. | |
| Mark Twain | When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. | |
| Mark Twain | I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. | |
| Mark Twain | God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board. | |
| Sun Tzu | If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. | |
| Mark Van Doren | An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure. | |
| Hendrik van Loon | Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession -- their ignorance. | |
| Voltaire | The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything. | |
| Voltaire | The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. | |
| Clemens von Metternich | Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. | |
| Ludwig von Mises | There are for man only two principles available for a mental grasp of reality, namely, those of teleology and causality. What cannot be brought under either of these categories is absolutely hidden to the human mind. An event not open to an interpretation by one of these two principles is for man inconceivable and mysterious. Change can be conceived as the outcome either of the operation of mechanistic causality or of purposeful behavior; for the human mind there is no third way available. | |
| Marilyn vos Savant | To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe. | |
| George Wald | A physicist is an atoms way of knowing about atoms. | |
| Henry Wallace | In some ways, certain books are more powerful by far than any battle. | |
| George Washington | If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst. | |
| George Washington | ...and Whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint committee requested me to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God, especially a form of government for their safety and happiness. Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November, next to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being Who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, or will be ...that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to there becoming a nation... And also that we then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other transgressions... to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a governmment of wise, just and Constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed...(and) to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among us...given under my hand at the City of New York, the 3rd day of October in the Year of Our Lord 1789. | |
| Daniel Webster | Knowledge is the only fountain both of love and the principles of human liberty. | |
| Justice Byron R. White | While the collateral consequences
of drugs such as cocaine
are indisputably severe,
they are not unlike those
which flow from the misuse
of other, legal, substances. | |
| Albert Edward Wiggin | Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence. | |
| Frank Lloyd Wright | A sure sign of a genius is that all of the dunces are in a confederacy against him. | |
| Frank Zappa | Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence. | |
| Frank Zappa | Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system.
Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts.
Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.
Forget I mentioned it... Rise for the flag salute. | |
| Frank Zappa | Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read. | |
| Frank Zappa | Remember, Information is not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best. | |
| Frank Zappa | Most people wouldn't know music if it came up and bit them on the ass. | |
| Edward Zehr | I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either. | |
| Eve Zibart | Prejudice rarely survives experience. | |
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