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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 | 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. | |