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The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
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| Henry Brooks Adams | Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. | |
| John Adams | The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton’s universe and Herschell’s universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world. | |
| American Library Association | We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. | |
| Henri Frederic Amiel | Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth. | |
| 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. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | As long as the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting to gain access to the legislature as well as fighting within it. | |
| Saul Bellow | Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated. | |
| Isaiah Berlin | But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them. | |
| Catherine Bertini | Let's have no illusions. We can't easily change the underlying beliefs and prejudices that do so much damage to women worldwide. We cannot quickly change attitudes, but we can change behaviour. At the World Food Programme we have recognized what a valuable tool food aid can be in changing behaviour. In so many poorer countries food is money, food is power. In some of our most successful food aid projects, we literally pay families who do not believe in educating their daughters to send those girls to school. A little free cooking oil can go a long way. We trade a 5 litre can of oil for 30 days of school attendance by a young girl. Yes, it's bribery. We don't apologize for that. We are changing behaviour, we are giving hope and opportunity to young girls and that is all that counts. Each small change in behaviour will one day pay off in a change in attitude. | |
| Mika Brezinski | And it could be that while unemployment and the economy worsens, [President Trump] could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control what people think. And that, that is our job. | |
| Harry Bridges | No man has ever been born a Negro hater, a Jew hater, or any other kind of hater. Nature refuses to be involved in such suicidal practices. | |
| Giordano Bruno | It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. | |
| Frank Gelett Burgess | Without bigots, eccentrics, cranks and heretics the world would not progress. | |
| Sir Richard Francis Burton | The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | Men willingly believe what they wish. | |
| Rev. Archibald Carey, Jr. | We, Negro Americans,
sing with all loyal Americans:\\
My country 'tis of thee,\\
Sweet land of liberty,\\
Of thee I sing.\\
Land where my fathers died,\\
Land of the Pilgrims' pride\\
From every mountainside\\
Let freedom ring!\\ \\
That's exactly what we mean --
from every mountain side, let freedom ring.
Not only from the Green Mountains and White Mountains
of Vermont and New Hampshire;
not only from the Catskills of New York;
but from the Ozarks in Arkansas,
from the Stone Mountain in Georgia,
from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia
-- let it ring not only for the minorities of the United States,
but for the disinherited of all the earth --
may the Republican Party, under God, from every mountainside,
LET FREEDOM RING! | |
| Jimmy Carter | If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent. | |
| Bill Clinton | African-Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do. | |
| Steven Crowder | This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you...
Hate speech is inextricably tied to political correctness, or Cultural Marxism, and that creates intellectual conformity -- or intellectual authoritarianism. And that’s where you start to see things like “safe spaces” or “trigger warnings” or speakers banned from campus, or people with unpopular opinions banned from social media. | |
| Steven Crowder | This is why political correctness, or Cultural Marxism,… lends itself so fashionably to easy labels. Transphobic, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, bigoted, Uncle Tom, white privilege, mainsplaining. All of these are slapped on people with "politically incorrect" opinions in an attempt to silence you... | |
| William O. Douglas | I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view. | |
| William O. Douglas | A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left. | |
| Albert Einstein | Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. | |
| Brian Eno | What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'. | |
| Frantz Fanon | Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted.
It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. | |
| David Dudley Field, II | Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices. This is corruption in reality, give it whatever other name you please. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy. ... These measures never fail to create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty
of discussing the propriety of public measures and political
opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means
the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another,
I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it,
whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and
shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others
for the privilege of not being abused myself. | |
| Frederick the Great | The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | Government is instituted for the common good; for the protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness of the people; and not for profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to institute government; and to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it. | |
| Alexander Hamilton | The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias and prejudice, and on the love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family. The opinion advanced in Notes on Virginia [by Thomas Jefferson] is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? | |
| William Henry Harrison | Understanding of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices. | |
| William Hazlitt | Prejudice is the child of ignorance. | |
| Heinrich Heine | Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. | |
| Robert Hughes | We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | The ugliness of bigotry stands in direct contradiction to the very meaning of America. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | My business is to bring my aspirations to conform to fact, not to try to harmonize fact with my aspirations. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and his fellow men. | |
| Joseph Henry Jackson | Did you ever hear anyone say, “That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me.” | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The concentrating [of powers] in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. | |
| Richard Lamm | Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettos and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning and ambition. ... I suggest that the best wand for society and for those who live in the ghettos and barrios would be the second wand. | |
| Doris Lessing | Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything. | |
| Lord George Lyttleton | To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused. | |
| James Madison | No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. | |
| Nelson Mandela | I always knew that deep down in every human heart, there is mercy and generosity. No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than the opposite. | |
| Carey McWilliams | Whatever the individual motives of the censors may be, censorship is a form of social control. It is a means of holding a society together, of arresting the flux which censors fear. And since the fear cannot be appeased, the demands for censorship mount in volume and intensity. And one form of censorship can easily lead to other forms. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. | |
| Henry Miller | Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. | |
| Thomas Paine | An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself. | |
| Thomas Paine | Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. | |
| Katherine Patterson | All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf -- that book I abhor -- then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us. | |
| Kort E. Patterson | According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them. | |
| Sir Karl Popper | There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions… It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory. | |
| Ayn Rand | Collectivism is a doctrine that holds that the individual has no rights, and the ultimate standard of value is the group to which 'he belongs.' Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors. Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas -- or of inherited knowledge -- which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men. Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. | |
| Jon Rappoport | Socialism is: \\
The taking of money (taxes) from some people who work for it and giving it to others who don't work for it. On a grand scale. \\
The vast expansion of freebies doled out by central government. In order to create and sustain dependence. \\
The government protection of favored persons and corporations, permitting them and aiding them to expand their fortunes without limit, regardless of what crimes they commit in the process. (Monsanto would be a fine example.) \\
The squeezing out of those who would compete with the favored persons and corporations. \\
The dictatorship by and for the very wealthy, pretending to be the servant of the masses. \\
The lie that the dictatorship is being run by the masses. \\
The gradual lowering of the standard of living for the overwhelming number of people. \\
The propaganda claiming socialism is the path to a better world for all. \\ \\
In other words, socialism is a protection racket and a long con and a heartless system of elite control, posing as the greatest good.
It is just another form of top-down tyranny---as old as the hills. | |
| 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. | |
| Jean-Francois Revel | A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence. | |
| Lew Rockwell | Even though they are a relatively recent policy development, civil rights laws are considered necessary to insure rights for blacks. But they are, in fact, among the most draconian forms of intervention into the free market. They attack the essence of private property, the ability to exercise control over it. Such laws have resulted in lessened economic freedom, lowered prosperity, heightened social tension, and more trouble for the groups the laws are supposed to help. ... A Korean grocer may want to employ only Korean clerks, a magazine for black professionals only black editors and writers, and a German restaurant only German cooks and waiters. An employer may think that Iraqi-Americans have been unfairly treated and want to favor them. A women’s health club may want only women customer’s and a men’s bar may want only men. There is nothing wrong with any of these behaviors, although civil rights laws seek to end them. In addition to violating the free labor contract, civil rights laws guarantee everyone the right of “access” to “public accommodations” like restaurants, movie theaters, and shops. In fact, what the civil rights laws call public is really private. These businesses are established by private entrepreneurs with private money. The owners should no more be required to serve everyone who comes into their place than they are required to invite everyone to their home for dinner. A large downtown restaurant is as private as a small house in the country. The real difference between private and public is one of ownership, not function or location. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living. | |
| Richard Salant | If newsmen do not tell the truth as they see it because it might make waves,
or if their bosses decide something should or should not be broadcast
because of Washington or Main Street consequences,
we have dishonored ourselves and we have lost the First Amendment by default. | |
| Greg Sargent | ... political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions. | |
| Eric Schaub | Among the mighty are those who recognize beauty as power, and power as beautiful. | |
| Eric Schaub | It takes two wings to fly. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth. | |
| William Shakespeare | Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous. | |
| Richard Shortway | The cold, hard facts of magazine publishing mean that those who advertise get editorial coverage. | |
| Herbert Spencer | There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is a proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is condemnation before investigation. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it’s high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. That [affirmative action] programs may have been motivated, in part, by good intentions cannot provide refuge from the principle that under our Constitution, the government may not make distinctions on the basis of race. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | [T]he courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.... The mere fact that a school is black does not mean that it is the product of an unconstitutional violation. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... till we come to the hard bottom of rocks in place, which we can call reality. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. | |
| 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. | |
| Carlton Turner | Marijuana leads to homosexuality ... and therefore to AIDS. | |
| Mark Twain | Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. | |
| Mark Twain | Travel is lethal to prejudice. | |
| Mark Twain | It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many people can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. | |
| Voltaire | Prejudices are what fools use for reason. | |
| George Washington | A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one nation the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation. | |
| Adam Weishaupt | We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools; and by open, hearty behavior, show condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel. | |
| John Wilson | The benefits of the reading, writing and math does [sic] not outweigh the need for [black and white] children to learn to work and play together. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. And the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes. | |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein | Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself. | |
| 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. | |
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