| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| 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 | Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end. | |
| Lord Acton | Freedom degenerates unless it has to struggle in its own
defence. | |
| Franklin P. Adams | Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds. | |
| John Adams | Liberty, according to my metaphysics, is an intellectual quality, an attribute that belongs not to fate nor chance. Neither possesses it, neither is capable of it. There is nothing moral or immoral in the idea of it. The definition of it is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power; it can elect between objects, indifferent in point of morality, neither morally good nor morally evil. | |
| John Adams | Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. | |
| John Adams | Major Greene this evening fell into some conversation with me about the Divinity and satisfaction of Jesus Christ. All the argument he advanced was, "that a mere creature or finite being could not make satisfaction to infinite justice for any crimes," and that "these things are very mysterious." Thus mystery is made a convenient cover for absurdity. | |
| John Adams | Spent an hour in the beginning of the evening at Major Gardiner's, where it was thought that the design of Christianity was not to make men good riddle-solvers, or good mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects, good husbands and good wives, good parents and good children, good masters and good servants. The following questions may be answered some time or other, namely, — Where do we find a precept in the Gospel requiring Ecclesiastical Synods? Convocations? Councils? Decrees? Creeds? Confessions? Oaths? Subscriptions? and whole cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion incumbered with in these days? | |
| 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. | |
| John Quincy Adams | The laws of man may bind him in chains or may put him to death, but they never can make him wise, virtuous, or happy. | |
| Samuel Adams | He therefore is the truest friend to the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue, and who, so far as his power and influence extend, will not suffer a man to be chosen into any office of power and trust who is not a wise and virtuous man...The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Samuel Adams | It is a very great mistake to imagine that the object of loyalty is the authority and interest of one individual man, however dignified by the applause or enriched by the success of popular actions. | |
| Samuel Adams | And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions. | |
| Aeschylus | I would far rather be ignorant than wise in the foreboding of evil. | |
| Aeschylus | Time as he grows old teaches all things. | |
| Aesop | It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow. | |
| Aesop | The shaft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagle's own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction. | |
| Aesop | The smaller the mind the greater the conceit. | |
| Aesop | The gods help them that help themselves. | |
| Aesop | Familiarity breeds contempt. | |
| Aesop | Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything. | |
| Aesop | Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties. | |
| Aesop | Do not count your chickens before they are hatched. | |
| Aesop | Self-conceit may lead to self-destruction. | |
| Aesop | While I see many hoof marks going in, I see none coming out. It is easier to get into the enemy's toils than out again. | |
| Aesop | Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own. | |
| Aesop | I will have nought to do with a man who can blow hot and cold with the same breath. | |
| Aesop | Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow. | |
| Aesop | Vices are their own punishment. | |
| Aesop | Appearances often are deceiving. | |
| Aesop | We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. | |
| Aesop | People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | Moderation in all things. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | Fortune helps the brave. | |
| Publius Terentius Afer | I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want. | |
| Herbert Sebastien Agar | The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. | |
| Mohammed Ali | The man who views the world at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life. | |
| 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. | |
| Jessica Anderson | I'm not apologising, I'm saying I'm sorry, which is quite different. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | Change your thoughts and you change your world. | |
| Marcus Aurelius Antoninus | The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer. | |
| 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. | |
| Saint Thomas Aquinas | The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing. | |
| Yassir Arafat | Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you. | |
| Aristophanes | The wise learn many things from their enemies. | |
| Aristotle | We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. | |
| Aristotle | Education is the best provision for old age. | |
| Aristotle | We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit | |
| Aristotle | The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. | |
| Aristotle | It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. | |
| Matthew Arnold | The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next. | |
| Richard Bach | There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go. | |
| Richard Bach | There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts. | |
| Francis Bacon | If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they see nothing but sea. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | One of the Seven [wise men of Greece] was wont to say: That laws were like cobwebs, where the small flies are caught and the great break through. | |
| 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. | |
| George Barrow | Youth will be served, every dog has his day and mine has been a fine one. | |
| Matsuo Basho | Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. | |
| 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. | |
| O. A. Battista | One of the hardest things to teach a child is that the truth is more important than the consequences. | |
| Harry C. Bauer | What's right with America is a willingness to discuss what's wrong with America. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books. | |
| Roy T. Bennett | Pursue what catches your heart, not what catches your eyes. | |
| Yogi Berra | It's never over 'till it's over. | |
| Yogi Berra | If you don't know where you're going, when you get there you'll be lost. | |
| Yogi Berra | Even Napoleon had his Watergate. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | The hardest tumble a man can make is to fall over his own bluff. | |
| William Blake | More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. | |
| William Blake | You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. | |
| William Blake | A truth that's told with bad intent, beats all the lies you can invent. | |
| William Blase | To be paranoid means to believe in delusions of danger and persecution. If the danger is real, and the evidence credible, then it cannot be delusional. To ignore the evidence, and hope that it CANNOT be true, is more an evidence of mental illness. | |
| James Boswell | Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. | |
| Anne Bradstreet | Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. | |
| Anne Bradstreet | Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish. | |
| Tom Braun | There is no wisdom without knowledge. | |
| Merry Browne | The elegance of honesty needs no adornment. | |
| Robert Browning | Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp. Or what’s a heaven for? | |
| 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. | |
| William Cullen Bryant | Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again. | |
| 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. | |
| Buddha | Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others. | |
| Buddha | Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. | |
| Buddha | To be idle is a short road to death and to be diligent is a way of life; foolish people are idle, wise people are diligent. | |
| Buddha | Good men and bad men differ radically. Bad men never appreciate kindness shown them, but wise men appreciate and are grateful. Wise men try to express their appreciation and gratitude by some return of kindness, not only to their benefactor, but to everyone else. | |
| Buddha | The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed. | |
| Buddha | Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. | |
| Buddha | | |
| Buddha | Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned. | |
| Buddha | Believe nothing merely because you have been told it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be kind, conducive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide. | |
| Edmund Burke | He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. | |
| Edmund Burke | But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. | |
| Edmund Burke | All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing. | |
| Edmund Burke | In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed and the boldest staggered. | |
| Edmund Burke | Liberty, without wisdom, is license. | |
| Edmund Burke | There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity -- the law of nature, and of nations. | |
| Edmund Burke | There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men. | |
| Lord Byron | My time has been passed viciously and agreeably; at thirty-one so few years months days hours or minutes remain that "Carpe Diem" is not enough. I have been obliged to crop even the seconds -- for who can trust to tomorrow? | |
| Gaius Julius Caesar | Men willingly believe what they wish. | |
| Albert Camus | Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom. | |
| Albert Camus | It is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners. | |
| Orson Scott Card | The only way to learn is by changing your mind. | |
| Thomas Carlyle | Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure there is one less rascal in the world. | |
| Thomas Carlyle | Every human being has a right to hear what other wise human beings have spoken to him. It is one of the Rights of Men; a very cruel injustice if you deny it to a man. | |
| Jimmy Carter | The law is not the private property of lawyers, nor is justice the exclusive province of judges and juries. In the final analysis, true justice is not a matter of courts and law books, but of a commitment in each of us to liberty and mutual respect. | |
| Jimmy Carter | America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it is the other way around. Human rights invented America. | |
| Catherine of Siena | Every evil, harm and suffering in this life comes from the love of riches. | |
| Cato | Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech. | |
| Cato | Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing Freedom of Speech... Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech... | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time. | |
| Charles I | Never make a defence or apology before you be accused. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him. | |
| 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. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution. | |
| Chinese Proverb | Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it has been said it is the quality which guarantees all others. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | By doubting we all come at truth. | |
| Georges Clemenceau | America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to denigration without the usual interval of civilization. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. | |
| Hartley Coleridge | But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,
A universal licence to be good. | |
| Charles Caleb Colton | He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still. | |
| Confucius | If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself. | |
| Confucius | Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles. | |
| Confucius | The superior man understands what is right. The inferior man understands what is popular. | |
| Confucius | By nature men are pretty much alike; it is learning and practice that set them apart. | |
| Confucius | If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | Nature is inexorable. If men do not follow the truth they cannot live. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped. | |
| Bill Cosby | I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. | |
| Norman Cousins | History is a vast early warning system. | |
| Abraham Cowley | Life is an incurable disease. | |
| William Cowper | Absence of occupation is not rest,\\A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd. | |
| William Cowper | 'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower\\
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;\\
And we are weeds without it. | |
| William Cowper | He is the freeman whom the truth makes free. | |
| 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. | |
| Davy Crockett | I leave this rule for others when I'm dead, Be always sure you're right -- then go ahead. | |
| Leonardo Da Vinci | Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness. | |
| 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. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along. | |
| 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. | |
| Miguel de Cervantes | It is the part of wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket. | |
| Remy De Gourmont | The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it. | |
| Bertrand de Jouvenel | A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves. | |
| Jean de la Bruyere | A wise man neither suffers himself to be governed, nor attempts to govern others. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Everyone complains of his memory, none of his judgment. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | We have all sufficient strength to endure the misfortunes of others. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence. | |
| François Duc de La Rochefoucauld | Nothing is given so profusely as advice. | |
| Emile Louis Victor de Laveleye | There is in human affairs one order which is best. That order is not always the one which exists; but it is the order which should exist for the greatest good of humanity. God knows, it and will it: man's duty it is to discover and establish it. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field. | |
| Michel De Montaigne | I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so. | |
| Charles de Montesquieu | The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | In the end, the state of the Union comes down to the character of the people. ... I sought for the greatness and genius of America in her commodious harbors, her ample rivers, and it was not there. I sought for it in the fertile fields, and boundless prairies, and it was not there. I sought it in her rich mines, and vast world commerce, and it was not there. Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. | |
| Demosthenes | Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master. | |
| Max DePree | We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. | |
| Rene Descartes | If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. | |
| John Dewey | The only freedom that is of enduring importance is the freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment, exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worth while. The commonest mistake made about freedom is, I think, to identify it with freedom of movement, or, with the external or physical side of activity. | |
| Charles Dickens | Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence. There's no better rule. | |
| Dionysius, the Elder | Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much,
are the three pillars of learning. | |
| John Dos Passos | Individuality is freedom lived. | |
| Rabbi Wayne Dosick | The reality is, if we tell the truth, we only have to tell the truth once. If you lie, you have to keep lying forever. | |
| Fyodor Dostoyevsky | A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself and for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love, and in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest form of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying to others and to yourself. | |
| William O. Douglas | The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. | |
| John Dryden | The most may err as grossly as the few. | |
| John Dryden | Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind. | |
| Alexandre Dumas | Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest. | |
| Friedrich Durrenmatt | The freedom of each individual can only be the freedom of all. | |
| Sir Edward Dyer | O liberty,
Parent of happiness, celestial born
When the first man became a living soul;
His sacred genius thou. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. | |
| Albert Einstein | A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, "Universe," a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting
us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to
us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of
nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the
striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a
foundation for inner security. | |
| Albert Einstein | As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. | |
| Albert Einstein | Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. | |
| Albert Einstein | How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of goodwill! In such a place even I would be an ardent patriot. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | So long as we govern our nation by the letter and spirit of the Bill of Rights, we can be sure that our nation will grow in strength and wisdom and freedom. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. | |
| George Eliot | Blessed is the person who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving 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? | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be had? | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Character is higher than intellect... A great soul will be strong to live as well as think. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | People only see what they are prepared to see. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going. | |
| Quintus Ennius | That is true liberty, which bears a pure and firm breast. | |
| 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. | |
| Epictetus | He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid. | |
| Desiderius Erasmus | In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. | |
| Desiderius Erasmus | War is sweet to those who haven't tasted it. | |
| Bergan Evans | The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. | |
| Martin H. Fischer | Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. | |
| Henry Ford | To do for the world more than the world does for you -- that is success. | |
| Jerome D. Frank | Increasingly constructive doubt is the sign of advancing civilization. | |
| Viktor Frankl | We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Moderation in all things -- including moderation. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | There was never a good war, or a bad peace. | |
| 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. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late. | |
| French Aphorism | Constitutions are made of paper; Bayonets are made of steel. | |
| Sigmund Freud | Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. | |
| 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. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | From my experience of hundreds of children, I know that they have perhaps a finer sense of honour than you or I have. The greatest lessons in life, if we would but stoop and humble ourselves, we would learn not from grown-up learned men, but from the so-called ignorant children. | |
| William Lloyd Garrison | No man shall rule over me with my consent. I will rule over no man. | |
| Robbie Gass | Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it. | |
| King George III | Knavery seems to be so much the striking feature of its [America's] inhabitants that it may not in the end be an evil that they will become aliens to the kingdom. | |
| Henry George | It is not the business of government to make men virtuous or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences of his own folly. Government should be repressive no further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very ends they are intended to serve. | |
| 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. | |
| Edward Gibbon | The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators. | |
| Edward Gibbon | Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive. | |
| Henry Giles | Not until right is founded upon reverence will it be secure; not until duty is based upon love will it be complete; not until liberty is based on eternal principles will it be full, equal, lofty, and universal. | |
| Charlotte Perkins Gilman | The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it. | |
| Nikki Giovanni | In the name of peace They waged the wars Ain't they got no shame | |
| 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 | Yes! to this thought I hold with firm persistence;\\
The last result of wisdom stamps it true;\\
He only earns his freedom and existence\\
Who daily conquers them anew. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The unnatural, that too is natural. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. | |
| Billy Graham | I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right. | |
| Wavy Gravy | The whole earth is in jail and we're plotting this incredible jailbreak. | |
| Horace Greeley | I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot. | |
| Richard Grenier | As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. | |
| 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. | |
| Bernhard Haisch | Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers. | |
| Lucille S. Harper | The nice thing about egotists is that they don't talk about other people. | |
| Benjamin Harrison | We Americans have no commission from God to police the world | |
| Elizabeth Harrison | Those who are lifting the world upward and onward are those who encourage more than criticize. | |
| Caryl Parker Haskins | A society committed to the search for truth must give protection to, and set a high value upon, the independent and original mind, however angular, however rasping, however, socially unpleasant it may be; for it is upon such minds in large measure, that the effective search for truth depends. | |
| William Havard | The greatest Glory of a free-born People, Is to transmit that Freedom to their Children. | |
| 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 | 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 | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| 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. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. | |
| Heinrich Heine | Whenever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once. | |
| Ernest Hemingway | Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function. | |
| 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. | |
| Heraclitus | The people must fight for their laws as for their walls. | |
| Heraclitus | Man's character is his fate. | |
| Auberon Herbert | It is not laissez-faire that has failed. That would be an ill day for men. What has failed is the courage to see what is true and speak it to the people, to point to the true remedies. | |
| Herman Hesse | Wisdom is not communicable.
The wisdom which a wise man tries to communicate
always sounds foolish. | |
| Hillel | What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; that is the whole Law: all the rest is interpretation. | |
| Hindu Saying | Pitiful is the one who, fearing failure, makes no beginning. | |
| Eric Hoffer | One realizes that one of the chief differences between an adult and a juvenile is that the adult knows when he is an ass while the juvenile never does. | |
| Eric Hoffer | You can never get enough of what you don't really need. | |
| Eric Hoffer | The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning; it should produce not learned but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society, where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. | |
| Eric Hoffer | There can be no freedom without freedom to fail. | |
| Thomas Holcroft | To prevent inquiry is among the worst of evils. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God. | |
| Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. | Once the mind has been stretched by a new idea, it will never again return to its original size. | |
| Horace | Who then is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains,
firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been
rounded off and polished. | |
| Horace | Who then is free? The wise man who can command himself. | |
| Horace | Force without wisdom falls of its own weight. | |
| Horace | Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life. | |
| Elbert Hubbard | Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day;
wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit. | |
| David Hume | It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. | |
| Aldous Huxley | An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. | |
| Aldous Huxley | Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature leads, or you will learn nothing. | |
| Hypatia of Alexandria | Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That's one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can ever help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population -- the intelligent ones or the fools? I think we can agree it's the fools, no matter where you go in this world, it's the fools that form the overwhelming majority. | |
| Henrik Ibsen | The spirit of truth and the spirit of freedom -- they are the pillars of society. | |
| Tokugawa Ieyasu | To come to know your enemy, first you must become his friend, and once you become his friend, all his defences come down. Then you can choose the most fitting method for his demise. | |
| Indian Saying | When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life in such a manner that when you die the world cries and you rejoice. | |
| William Ralph Inge | It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own. | |
| William Ralph Inge | A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it. | |
| William Ralph Inge | Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | — My creed —\\
Happiness is the only good.\\
The place to be happy is here.\\
The time to be happy is now.\\
The way to be happy is to make others so. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart -- builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | The real searcher after truth will not receive the old because it is old, or reject the new because it is new. He will not believe men because they are dead, or contradict them because they are alive. With him an utterance is worth the truth, the reason it contains, without the slightest regard to the author. He may have been a king or serf -- a philosopher or servant, -- but the utterance neither gains nor loses in truth or reason. Its value is absolutely independent of the fame or station of the man who gave it to the world. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul. In each country, in defence of each religion, the same arguments would be urged. | |
| Robert G. Ingersoll | There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments - there are only consequences. | |
| 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. | |
| 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.” | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact. | |
| William James | The greatest discovery of any generation is that a living soul can alter his life by altering his attitude. | |
| 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 | We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest -- which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves. | |
| 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 | When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, an hundred. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Cultivators of the earth
are the most
valuable citizens. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | May [the Declaration of Independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is a great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual, he tells lies without attending to it, and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all it's good dispositions. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | ...truth is great and will prevail if left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to our god alone. I enquire after no man's and trouble none with mine; nor is it given to us in this life to know whether yours or mine, our friend's or our foe's, are exactly the right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicity. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet devised by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution. | |
| 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 | ...Enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man, acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter -- with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more.. .a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is part of the American character to consider nothing as desperate. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words. And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Put up again thy sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | In order that all men might be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Courage is the first of all the virtues because if you haven't courage, you may not have the opportunity to use any of the others. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it. | |
| 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. | |
| Chief Joseph | It does not require many words to speak the truth. | |
| Juvenal | Count it the greatest sin to prefer life to honor, and for the sake of living to lose what makes life worth having. | |
| Juvenal | Quis costodiet ipsos custodies? (Who will watch the watchers?) | |
| 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. | |
| Elie Kedourie | Any philosophy worth considering must attempt to account for the existence of evil in the world. | |
| Helen Keller | I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble. | |
| Helen Keller | There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. | |
| Walt Kelly | We have met the enemy and he is us. | |
| John F. Kennedy | ...probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone. | |
| Ken Kesey | Take what you can use and let the rest go by. | |
| Charles F. Kettering | My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there. | |
| Charles F. Kettering | Engineering is thus a combination of brains and material -- the more brains the less material. | |
| Hazrat Inayat Khan | Words that enlighten are more precious than jewels. | |
| Omar Khayyam | The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on. Nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it. | |
| 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. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion -- and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion ... while Truth again reverts to a new minority. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | People hardly ever make use of the freedom they have, for example, freedom of thought; instead they demand freedom of speech as a compensation. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived-forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. | |
| Kingfish | All I kin say is when you finds yo'self wanderin' in a peach orchard, ya don't go lookin' for rutabagas. | |
| Russell Kirk | The aim of any good constitution is to achieve in a society a high degree of political harmony, so that order and justice and freedom may be maintained. | |
| Russell Kirk | There are no lost causes because there are no gained causes. | |
| Rabbi Harold Kushner | I would rather think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to come together and make sense. | |
| Louis Lamour | Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom. | |
| Rose Wilder Lane | Happiness is something that comes into our lives through doors we don't even remember leaving open. | |
| Lao-Tzu | Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power. | |
| Lao-Tzu | A government can be compared to our lungs. Our lungs are best when we don't realize they are helping us breathe. It is when we are constantly aware of our lungs that we know they have come down with an illness. | |
| Lao-Tzu | The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself. | |
| Lao-Tzu | To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease. | |
| Harold J. Laski | The only real security for social well-being is the free exercise of men’s minds. | |
| Latin Proverb | Suum cuique
[To each his own, to each according to his merits.] | |
| Latin Proverb | If the wind will not serve, take to the oars. | |
| Andrew B. Law | There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom. | |
| 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. | |
| Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes. | |
| C. S. Lewis | To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death --- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow. | |
| 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. | |
| C. S. Lewis | [Prosperity] knits a man to the world. He thinks he's 'finding his place in it,' while really it is finding its place in him. | |
| C. S. Lewis | A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. | |
| C. S. Lewis | It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects -- military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden -- that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God you learn. | |
| Joseph Lewis | The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. | |
| 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 | Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.
This expresses my idea of democracy. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool all of the people all the time. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | It is the eternal struggle between these two principles - right and wrong - throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time... | |
| Abraham Lincoln | We have forgotten the gracious hand which has preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving Grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. | |
| John Locke | New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. | |
| John Locke | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other. | |
| 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 | [E]very Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property. | |
| John Locke | Self-defence is a part of the law of nature; nor can it be denied the community, even against the king himself... | |
| John Locke | The only fence against the world
is a thorough knowledge of it. | |
| Vince Lombardi | Fatigue makes cowards of us all. | |
| Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done. | |
| James Russell Lowell | And I honor the man \\ who is willing to sink \\ Half his present repute \\ for the freedom to think \\ And, when he has thought, \\ be his cause strong or weak \\ Will risk t’ other half \\ for the freedom to speak. | |
| James Russell Lowell | A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic. | |
| Clare Boothe Luce | There are no hopeless situations; There are only men who have grown hopeless about them. | |
| Martin Luther | Peace if possible, but truth at any rate. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbours together is still smaller. | |
| Thomas Babington Macaulay | And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best? | |
| Antonio Machado | There is no way; we make the road by walking it. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are. | |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | The wise man does at once what the fool does finally. | |
| Charles Mackay | Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. | |
| James Madison | Whilst we assert a freedom to embrace, to profess, and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to choose minds who have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. | |
| James Madison | But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. | |
| James Madison | There is no maxim in my opinion which is more liable to be misapplied, and which therefore needs elucidation than the current one that the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong…. In fact it is only reestablishing under another name and a more specious form, force as the measure of right…. | |
| James Madison | The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust. | |
| James Madison | In framing a government, which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed, and in the next place, oblige it to control itself. | |
| James Madison | The people of the U.S. owe their Independence & their liberty, to the wisdom of descrying in the minute tax of 3 pence on tea, the magnitude of the evil comprised in the precedent. Let them exert the same wisdom, in watching against every evil lurking under plausible disguises, and growing up from small beginnings. | |
| Maimonides | Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it. | |
| David Mamet | People may or may not say what they mean...but they always say something designed to get what they want. | |
| Thomas Mann | Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. | |
| Christopher Marlowe | Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight? | |
| George Mason | No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue, and by frequent recurrence to fundamental principles. | |
| George Mason | Considering the natural lust for power so inherent in man, I fear the thirst of power will prevail to oppress the people. | |
| James McGuigan | Rules are written for those who lack the ability to truly reason. But for those who can, rules become nothing more than guidelines, and live their lives governed not by rules but by reason. | |
| Al McGuire | I think the world is run by 'C' students. | |
| Margaret Mead | My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school. | |
| Alexander Meiklejohn | Freedom is always wise. | |
| Alexander Meiklejohn | Whatever the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to the safety resulting from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise. | |
| Rupertus Meldenius | In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas \\
Unity in things Necessary, Liberty in things Unnecessary, and Charity in all. | |
| 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. | |
| Mencius | The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. | |
| H. L. Mencken | No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. | |
| Thomas Merton | I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself.
If modern people were a little less sane, a little more doubtful,
a little more aware of their absurdities and contradictions,
perhaps there might be the possibility of their survival. | |
| Javier Milei | I did not come here to guide lambs. I came here to awaken lions. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The only freedom deserving the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest. | |
| 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. | |
| Zell Miller | You won't find average Americans on the left or on the right. You'll find them at Kmart. | |
| John Milton | None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants. | |
| John Milton | When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. | |
| The Mishnah | Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure. | |
| 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. | |
| James Monroe | Let us by wise and constitutional measures promote intelligence among the people as the best means of preserving our liberties. | |
| James Monroe | How prone all human institutions have been to decay; how subject the best-formed and most wisely organized governments have been to lose their check and totally dissolve; how difficult it has been for mankind, in all ages and countries, to preserve their dearest rights and best privileges, impelled as it were by an irresistible fate of despotism. | |
| Charles Langbridge Morgan | One cannot shut ones eyes to things not seen with eyes. | |
| J. P. Morgan | A man always has two reasons for what he does -- a good one, and the real one. | |
| John Viscount Morley | The means prepare the end, and the end is what the means have made of it. | |
| 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. | |
| Lance Morrow | Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past,
by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business.
Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control...
to be locked into a sequence of act and response,
of outrage and revenge, tit for tat, escalating always.
The present is endlessly overwhelmed and devoured by the past.
Forgiveness frees the forgiver.
It extracts the forgiver from someone else's nightmare. | |
| Ogden Nash | Children aren't happy without something to ignore, and that's what parents were created for. | |
| Native American Story | A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt about a tragedy. He said, “I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart. One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.” The grandson asked him, “Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?” The grandfather answered, “The one I feed.” | |
| Sir Isaac Newton | If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants. | |
| Issac Newton | I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. | |
| Scott O'Grady | Your depth of commitment, your quality of service, the product of your devotion -- these are the things that count in life. | |
| George Orwell | Men sleep peacefully in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. | |
| Thomas Paine | I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies another this right makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it. | |
| 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. | |
| Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit | The more we sweat in peace the less we bleed in war. | |
| General George S. Patton, Jr. | I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. | |
| Cesare Pavese | To know the world one must construct it. | |
| J. H. Payne | Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. | |
| William Penn | A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it. | |
| Pericles | Instead of looking on discussion as a stumbling block in the way of action, we think it an indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all. | |
| Tom Peters | If a window of opportunity appears, don't pull down the shade. | |
| Plato | Do not expect justice where might is right. | |
| Plato | Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. | |
| Plato | The worst of all deceptions is self-deception. | |
| Plato | Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | Not by age but by capacity is wisdom acquired. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | Patience is the best remedy for every trouble. | |
| Titus Maccius Plautus | No man is wise enough by himself. | |
| Plutarch | What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. | |
| Plutarch | The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled. | |
| Alexander Pope | Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread. | |
| Alexander Pope | A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday. | |
| Red Pritchard | You are not what you think you are; What you think – you are. | |
| 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 | Observation, and not old age, brings wisdom. | |
| Chinese Proverb | Outside noisy, inside empty. | |
| Navajo Proverb | You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep. | |
| Anthony Quayle | To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation. | |
| Marcus Fabius Quintilianus | Those who wish to appear wise among fools, among the wise seem foolish. | |
| Ayn Rand | Let me explain this. There are, fundamentally, only two causes of the progress of the nineteenth century -- the same two causes which you will find at the root of any happy, benevolent, progressive era in human history. One cause is psychological, the other existential -- or: one pertains to man's consciousness, the other to the physical conditions of his existence. The first is reason, the second is freedom. And when I say "freedom," I do not mean poetic sloppiness, such as "freedom from want" or "freedom from fear" or "freedom from the necessity of earning a living." I mean "freedom from compulsion -- freedom from rule by physical force." Which means: political freedom. | |
| John P. Reid | Restraint of government is the true liberty and freedom of the people. | |
| Will Rogers | Your mothers get mighty shocked at you girls nowadays, but in her day, her mother was just on the verge of sending her to reform school. | |
| Will Rogers | We are always yapping about the 'Good Old Days' and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it. There is a whole lot of all our past lives that wasn't so hot. | |
| Will Rogers | An economist is a man that can tell you...what can happen under any given condition, and his guess is liable to be as good as anybody else's too. | |
| Will Rogers | I bet after seeing us, George Washington would sue us for calling him 'father'. | |
| Will Rogers | The United States investigates everything -- usually after it's dead. | |
| Will Rogers | I bet you, if I had met Trotsky, and had had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I have never yet met a man I didn't like. | |
| Will Rogers | America has a very unique record. We never lost a war or won a conference... | |
| Will Rogers | Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. | |
| Will Rogers | Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven't had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln. | |
| Will Rogers | If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, 'America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership'. | |
| Will Rogers | I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined or hard to check as a socially ambitious mother. | |
| Will Rogers | Don't let yesterday use up too much of today. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The creed of our democracy is that liberty is acquired and kept by men and women who are strong and self-reliant, and possessed of such wisdom as God gives mankind -- men and women who are just, and understanding, and generous to others -- men and women who are capable of disciplining themselves. For they are the rulers and they must rule themselves. | |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | The saving grace of America lies in the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are possessed of two great qualities -- a sense of humor and a sense of proportion. | |
| 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. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | All privileges based on wealth, and all emnity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error. | |
| 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 | It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living. | |
| 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. | |
| Patricia Sampson | Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward. | |
| Lord Herbert Louis Samuel | Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built. | |
| Carl Sandburg | Nothing happens unless first a dream. | |
| George Santayana | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | |
| George Santayana | Only the dead have seen the end of war. | |
| George Santayana | The wisest mind has something yet to learn. | |
| William Saroyan | Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. | |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. | |
| Jean-Baptiste Say | Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right? | |
| French Saying | Laissez-nous faire, laissez-nous passer. Le monde va de lui meme.
(Let us do, leave us alone. The world runs by itself.) | |
| Eric Schaub | Life is but a blink,
and it matters. | |
| Eric Schaub | Speak honestly, and the truth will make itself known. | |
| Eric Schaub | If you want to know the big 'T' Truth,
tell the little 't' truth without fail.
Then listen closely to what you say. | |
| Eric Schaub | A seeker of truth is no stranger to controversy. | |
| Eric Schaub | Some mistakes cannot be redeemed but by forgiveness. | |
| Eric Schaub | When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires. | |
| Eric Schaub | The more I truly learn, I realize the less I truly know. | |
| Eric Schaub | Among the mighty are those who recognize beauty as power, and power as beautiful. | |
| Eric Schaub | It takes two wings to fly. | |
| Eric Schaub | Every party skews the facts to their advantage, and inevitably, the minority party must resort to telling the truth. | |
| Eric Schaub | There is no Freedom without Courage. | |
| Eric Schaub | Life is a gift. Freedom is a responsibility. | |
| Eric Schaub | Some truths need to be learned from the inside. | |
| Eric Schaub | The truth doesn't sell. It is high in supply, but low in demand. | |
| Irwin Schiff | If you want irresponsible politicians to spend less, you must give them less to spend. | |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom. | |
| Carl Schurz | From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor's rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own. | |
| General H. Norman Schwarzkopf | The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it. | |
| Sir Walter Scott | O, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What is freedom? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any restraint, to any chance. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | As long as you live, keep learning how to live. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Nothing lasts forever, few things even last for long: all are susceptible of decay in one way or another; moreover all that begins also ends. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What need is there to weep over parts of life?
The whole of it calls for tears. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What," say you, "are you giving me advice? Indeed, have you already advised yourself, already corrected your own faults? Is this the reason why you have leisure to reform other men?" No, I am not so shameless as to undertake to cure my fellow-men when I am ill myself. I am, however, discussing with you troubles which concern us both, and sharing the remedy with you, just as if we were lying ill in the same hospital. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | That is why we give to children a proverb, or that which the Greeks call Chreia, to be learned by heart; that sort of thing can be comprehended by the young mind, which cannot as yet hold more. For a man, however, whose progress is definite, to chase after choice extracts and to prop his weakness by the best known and the briefest sayings and to depend upon his memory, is disgraceful; it is time for him to lean on himself. He should make such maxims and not memorize them. For it is disgraceful even for an old man, or one who has sighted old age, to have a note-book knowledge. "This is what Zeno said." But what have you yourself said? "This is the opinion of Cleanthes." But what is your own opinion? How long shall you march under another man's orders? Take command, and utter some word which posterity will remember. Put forth something from your own stock. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | If you are wise, mingle these two elements: do not hope without despair, or despair without hope. | |
| 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 | The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What is wisdom? Always desiring the same things, and always refusing the same things. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | Before I became old I tried to live well; now that I am old, I shall try to die well; but dying well means dying gladly. | |
| Lucius Annaeus Seneca | What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? | |
| William Shakespeare | The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. | |
| William Shakespeare | To willful men, the injuries that they themselves procure must be their schoolmasters. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | [A]nd obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men and of the human frame, A mechanized automaton. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. | |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | Power, like a desolating pestilence,\\
Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience,\\
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,\\
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame,\\
A mechanized automaton. | |
| George Shultz | The minute you start talking about what you're going to do if you lose, you have lost. | |
| Socrates | Think not those faithful who praise all thy words and actions,
but those who kindly reprove thy faults. | |
| Socrates | The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways: I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows. | |
| Solon | We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been. | |
| Sophocles | Wisdom outweighs any wealth. | |
| 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. | |
| Stadius | Anger manages everything badly. | |
| Dan Stanford | Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. | |
| Shelby Steele | Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves. | |
| Casey Stengel | They said it couldn't be done but sometimes it doesn't work out that way. | |
| Robert Louis Stevenson | To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. | |
| Joseph Story | Men, to act with vigour and effect, must have time to mature measures, and judgment and experience, as to the best method of applying them. They must not be hurried on to their conclusions by the passions, or the fears of the multitude. They must deliberate, as well as resolve. | |
| William Graham Sumner | | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation,
I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| William Graham Sumner | If I want to be free from any other man’s dictation, I must understand that I can have no other man under my control. | |
| Thomas Szasz | The battle for the world is the battle for definitions. | |
| Amy Tan | In America nobody says you have to keep the circumstances you were born with. | |
| Tecumseh | Live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart.\\
Trouble no one about his religion.\\
Respect others in their views and demand that they respect yours.\\
Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life.\\
Seek to make your life long and of service to your people.\\
Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide.\\
Always give a word or sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, or even a stranger, if in a lonely place.\\
Show respect to all people, but grovel to none.\\
When you rise in the morning, give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength. \\
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.\\
Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.\\
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way.\\
Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home. | |
| Alfred Lord Tennyson | Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. | |
| Mother Teresa | If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. | |
| Mother Teresa | Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being's entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or sovereign. ... You must weep that your own government, at present, seems blind to this truth. | |
| William Makepeace Thackeray | To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained -- who can say this is not greatness? | |
| The Koran | He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh. | |
| The Literary Digest | The ordinary
"horseless carriage"
is at present a luxury for the
wealthy; and although its price
will probably fall in the future,
it will never, of course, come
into as common use as the bicycle. | |
| The Mahabharata | This is the sum of all true righteousness: deal with others as thou wouldst thyself be dealt by. Do nothing to thy neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee hereafter. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | To be awake is to be alive. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | That government is best which governs least. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Things do not change, we change. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | That man is richest whose pleasures are cheapest. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | The strongest of all warriors are these two -- Time and Patience. | |
| 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. | |
| Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoi | Hypocrisy is anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised. | |
| Arnold J. Toynbee | Civilization is a movement, not a condition; it is a voyage, not a harbor. | |
| Verka Paunovska Trajcesica | A memory is the life past, no one can take from you, forever it lasts. | |
| Harry S. Truman | I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it. | |
| Harry S. Truman | When even one American -- who has done nothing wrong -- is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. | |
| St. George Tucker | This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. ... The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. | |
| Amos Tversky | Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for. | |
| Mark Twain | When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. | |
| Mark Twain | It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either. | |
| Mark Twain | Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. | |
| Mark Twain | Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant. | |
| Stewart L. Udall | We have, I fear, confused power with greatness. | |
| Unknown | On the surface of the world right now there is
War and violence and things seem dark.
But calmly and quietly, at the same time,
Something else is happening underground.
An inner revolution is taking place
And certain individuals are being called to a higher light.
It is a silent revolution.
From the inside out. From the ground up.
This is a Global operation.
A Spiritual Conspiracy.
There are sleeper cells in every nation on the planet.
You won't see us on the TV.
You won't read about us in the newspaper.
You won't hear about us on the radio.
We don't seek any glory.
We don't wear any uniform.
We come in all shapes and sizes, colors and styles.
Most of us work anonymously.
We are quietly working behind the scenes
In every country and culture of the world
Cities big and small, mountains and valleys,
In farms and villages, tribes and remote islands.
You could pass by one of us on the street
And not even notice.
We go undercover.
We remain behind the scenes.
It is of no concern to us who takes the final credit
But simply that the work gets done.
Occasionally we spot each other in the street.
We give a quiet nod and continue on our way.
During the day many of us pretend we have normal jobs
But behind the false storefront at night
Is where the real work takes place.
Some call us the Conscious Army.
We are slowly creating a new world
With the power of our minds and hearts.
We follow, with passion and joy
Our orders come from the Central Spiritual Intelligence.
We are dropping soft, secret love bombs when no one is looking
Poems ~ Hugs ~ Music ~ Photography ~ Movies ~ Kind words ~
Smiles ~ Meditation and prayer ~ Dance ~ Social activism ~ Websites
Blogs ~ Random acts of kindness...
We each express ourselves in our own unique ways
With our own unique gifts and talents.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
That is the motto that fills our hearts.
We know it is the only way real transformation takes place.
We know that quietly and humbly we have the
Power of all the oceans combined.
Our work is slow and meticulous
Like the formation of mountains.
It is not even visible at first glance.
And yet with it entire tectonic plates
Shall be moved in the centuries to come.
Love is the new religion of the 21st century.
You don't have to be a highly educated person
Or have any exceptional knowledge to understand it.
It comes from the intelligence of the heart
Embedded in the timeless evolutionary pulse of all human beings.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Nobody else can do it for you.
We are now recruiting.
Perhaps you will join us
Or already have.
All are welcome.
The door is open. | |
| Unknown | Time and attention are our scarcest commodities - use them wisely. | |
| John Updike | The essential support and encouragement comes from within, arising out of the mad notion that your society needs to know what only you can tell it. | |
| Paul Valéry | Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations. | |
| Abigail Van Buren | Wisdom doesn't automatically come with old age. Nothing does - except wrinkles. It's true, some wines improve with age. But only if the grapes were good in the first place. | |
| Voltaire | It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. | |
| 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. | |
| Marilyn vos Savant | What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from'. | |
| 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. | |
| Izaak Walton | I remember that a wise friend of mine did usually say, 'That which is everybody's business is nobody's business'. | |
| Booker T. Washington | I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. | |
| George Washington | If we are wise, let us prepare for the worst. | |
| George Washington | There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government, and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This, within certain limits, is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favour, upon the spirit of party: but, in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be, by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume. | |
| 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. | |
| George Washington | As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is to use it as sparingly as possible, avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it, avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear. The execution of these maxims belongs to your representatives, but it is necessary that public opinion should co-operate. | |
| George Washington | The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period. | |
| 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. | |
| George Washington | The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissensions, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.
The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.
Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.
It serves always to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to government itself through the channels of party passions. Thus the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another. | |
| George Washington | There can be no greater error than to expect, or calculate upon real favours from Nation to Nation. 'Tis an illusion which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. | |
| Martha Washington | The greatest part of our happiness depends on our dispositions, not our circumstances. | |
| J. C. Watts, Jr. | My father taught that the only helping hand you're ever going to be able to rely on is the one at the end of your sleeve. | |
| Daniel Webster | God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. | |
| Daniel Webster | I apprehend no danger to our country from a foreign foe ... Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter. -- From the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence, I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants, and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men, and become the instruments of their own undoing. Make them intelligent, and they will be vigilant; give them the means of detecting the wrong, and they will apply the remedy. | |
| Simone Weil | There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime – namely, repressive justice. | |
| Simone Weil | Liberty consists in the ability to choose. | |
| Simone Weil | Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. | |
| Robert Welch | I want for our country enough laws to restrain me from injuring others, so that these laws will also restrain others from injuring me. I want enough government, with enough constitutional safeguards, so that this necessary minimum of laws will be applied equitably to everybody, and will be binding on the rulers as well as those ruled. Beyond that I want neither laws nor government to be imposed on our people as a means or with the excuse of protecting us from catching cold, or of seeing that we raise the right kind of crops, or of forcing us to live in the right kind of houses or neighborhoods, or of compelling us to save money or to spend it, or of telling us when or whether we can pray. I do not want government or laws designed for any other form of welfarism or paternalism, based on the premise that government knows best and can run our lives better than we can run them ourselves. And my concept of freedom, and of its overwhelming importance, is implicit in these aspirations and ideals. | |
| H. G. Wells | The great trouble with you Americans is that you are still under the influence of that second-rate -- shall I say third-rate? -- mind, Karl Marx. | |
| William Allen White | You can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people -- and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive. | |
| William Allen White | Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others. | |
| Walt Whitman | The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint.
The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws. | |
| John Greenleaf Whittier | For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been! | |
| Elie Wiesel | The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. | |
| Oscar Wilde | The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. | |
| Oscar Wilde | A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation. | |
| Wendell L. Willkie | Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin. | |
| Woodrow Wilson | America is not a mere body of traders; it is a body of free men. Our greatness is built upon our freedom -- is moral, not material. We have a great ardor for gain; but we have a deep passion for the rights of man. | |
| 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. | |
| John Wooden | Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights. | |
| Virginia Woolf | Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. | |
| Herman Wouk | Remember this, if you can. There is nothing more precious than time. You probably feel you have a measureless supply of it, but you have not. Wasted hours destroy your life just as surely at the beginning as at the end, only in the end it becomes more obvious. | |
| Wright v. United States | To disregard such a deliberate choice of words and their natural meaning, would be a departure from the first principle of constitutional interpretation. "In expounding the Constitution of the United States," said Chief Justice Taney in Holmes v. Jennison, 14 U.S. 540, 570-1, "every word must have its due force and appropriate meaning; for it is evident from the whole instrument, that, no word was unnecessarily used, or needlessly added. The many discussions which have taken place upon the construction of the Constitution, have proved the correctness of this proposition; and shown the high talent, the caution and the foresight of the illustrious men who framed it. Every word appears to have been weighed with the utmost deliberation and its force and effect to have been fully understood. | |
| Shueur Zalman | Words are the pen of the heart, but music is the pen of the soul. | |
| Israel Zangwill | America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming. | |
| 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. | |
| Peter Zarlenga | I am thought.
I can see what the eyes cannot see.
I can hear what the ears cannot hear.
I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
Yet I create Beauty for the eyes,
Music for the ears,
Love for the heart.
They, ignorant of their ignorance, call me cold.
Barren of Sight.
Barren of Sound.
Barren of Feeling.
But it is I who am from which all comes.
Given to the ungrateful.
Unseen.
Unheard.
Unfelt. | |
| John Peter Zenger | No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves. | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |