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| Peter Abelard | The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth. | |
| Lord Acton | Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being. | |
| Lord Acton | Learn as much by writing as by reading. | |
| Abigail Adams | Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence. | |
| Douglas Adams | Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. | |
| Franklin P. Adams | I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way. | |
| Henry Brooks Adams | Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts. | |
| Aeschylus | Time as he grows old teaches all things. | |
| Aesop | Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own. | |
| 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. | |
| African Proverb | Don't look where you fall, but where you slipped. | |
| 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. | |
| Henri Frederic Amiel | Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and therefore independence of all social, political or religious prejudice... It loves one thing only... truth. | |
| Aristophanes | The wise learn many things from their enemies. | |
| Aristotle | Education is the best provision for old age. | |
| Stephen Arons | Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy? | |
| St. Augustine | Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men. | |
| 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. | |
| Francis Bacon | So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather. | |
| Francis Bacon | Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence, and things mean and splendid exist alike. | |
| Sir Francis Bacon | Knowledge is power. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Matsuo Basho | Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books. | |
| Rev. Henry Ward Beecher | Make men large and strong and tyranny will bankrupt itself in making shackles for them. | |
| Lyman Beecher | No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy. | |
| Sir William Berkeley | I thank God, we have not free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have these hundred years. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy and sects into the world; and printing has divulged them and libels against the government. God keep us from both! | |
| 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. | |
| Neal Boortz | Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful. | |
| Neal Boortz | How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government? | |
| Jorge Luis Borges | I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. | |
| James Boswell | Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. | |
| Kingman Brewster | Universities should be safe havens where ruthless examination of realities will not be distorted by the aim to please or inhibited by the risk of displeasure. | |
| Jacob Bronowski | There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy. All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. | |
| 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. | |
| Warren Buffett | Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. | |
| Warren Buffett | ...it's a good idea to review past mistakes before committing new ones. | |
| 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. | |
| Edmund Burke | People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. | |
| Vannevar Bush | Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. | |
| Albert Camus | An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. | |
| Albert Camus | Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. | |
| Georg Cantor | A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held. | |
| Orson Scott Card | It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles; and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data. | |
| Orson Scott Card | The only way to learn is by changing your mind. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. | |
| 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 | It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem. | |
| Chinese Proverb | Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day.
Teach him how to fish and he'll eat forever. | |
| Winston Churchill | The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. | |
| Winston Churchill | This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | To be ignorant of what happened before you were born... is to live the life of a child for ever. | |
| Ralph Cicerone | Gravity is still just a theory, too. Would you like to test it by placing your neck beneath a guillotine? | |
| Harlan Cleveland | For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible--and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. | |
| Anthony Collins | By freethinking I mean the use of the understanding in endeavoring to find out the meaning of any proposition whatsoever, in considering the nature of the evidence for or against, and in judging of it according to the seeming force or weakness of the evidence. | |
| 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. | |