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|  Douglas Adams | Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. | |
| African Proverb | Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet. | |
| American Library Association | Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access of all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored. | |
| Nancy Astor | Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent. | |
| Saint Augustine | Near our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit that was not attractive in either flavor or form. One night, when I [at the age of sixteen] had played until dark on the sandlot with some other juvenile delinquents, we went to shake that tree and carry off its fruit. From it we carried off huge loads, not to feast on, but to throw to the pigs, although we did eat a few ourselves. We did it just because it was forbidden. | |
| Tallulah Bankhead | I'm a foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | The interest of the people lies in being able to join organizations, advocate causes, and make political “mistakes” without being subjected to governmental penalties. | |
| Alan Bloom | Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities. | |
| Leon Blum | A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought. | |
| James Boswell | Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. | |
| 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. | |
| Luther Burbank | It is well for people who think to change their minds occasionally in order to keep them clean. For those who do not think, it is best at least to rearrange their prejudices once in a while. | |
| Edwin Arthur Burtt | As compared with impulsive commitment to the first idea which dawns, that is, with intuitive action, reasoning is patient, exploratory of other possibilities, and deliberative. | |
| Albert Camus | An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. | |
| Confucius | By nature men are pretty much alike; it is learning and practice that set them apart. | |
| e. e. cummings | To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. | |
| Charles Darwin | False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long; but false views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path towards error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened. | |
| Graceanne A. Decandido | If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas – and I believe that is the truest definition of what we do – it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas. | |
| Max DePree | We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are. | |
| John Dewey | Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much,
are the three pillars of learning. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | I haven't failed, I've found 10,000 ways that don't work. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. | |
| Albert Einstein | The important thing is never to stop questioning. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. | |
| Bergan Evans | The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | Moderation in all things -- including moderation. | |
| 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. | |
| Galileo Galilei | In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. | |
| Galileo Galilei | I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. | |
| Josiah William Gitt | Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have known little progress, indeed. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | Lose this day loitering
'Twill be the same old story,
Tomorrow and the next,
Even more dilatory.
Whatever you would do,
Or dream of doing, begin it!
Boldness has power, genius, and magic in it.
Begin it now. | |
| Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. | |
| Wayne Gretzky | You miss 100% of the shots you never take. | |
| Bernhard Haisch | Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers. | |
| Eric Hoffer | There can be no freedom without freedom to fail. | |
| Billie Holiday | I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill, or exercise or yodeling or something, not music. | |
| Horace | Suffering is but another name for the teaching of experience, which is the parent of instruction and the schoolmaster of life. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | It is the great parent of science & of virtue: and that a nation will be great in both, always in proportion as it is free. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | 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. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. | |
| John Keats | Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. | |
| Jamaica Kincaid | Express everything you like. No word can hurt you. None. No idea can hurt you. Not being able to express an idea or word will hurt you more. Like a bullet. | |
| Harold D. Lasswell | Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware. | |
| Gotthold Ephraim Lessing | A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes. | |
| C. S. Lewis | Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God you learn. | |
| Georg Christoph Lichtenberg | One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything. | |
| Joshua Liebman | Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another's beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them. | |
| F. J. Lucas | Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000. | |
| Thomas Mann | It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. | |
| Justice Thurgood Marshall | If the First Amendment means anything,
it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house,
what books he may read or what films he may watch.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought
of giving government the power to control men's minds. | |
| H. L. Mencken | All I ask is equal freedom. When it is denied, as it always is, I take it anyhow. | |
| 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. | |
| Joel Miller | What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves. | |
| John Viscount Morley | When it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. | |
| Novalis | We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds. | |
| Cesare Pavese | To know the world one must construct it. | |