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Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace.
Milan Kundera
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue.
Unknown
Whoever said you can't buy happiness forgot about puppies.
Gene Hill
In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.
Imbesi's Law of Conservation of Filth
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
John Cleese, comic actor (1939- )
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
Thornton Wilder, writer (1897-1975)
The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)
As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939)
It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)
If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)
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, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
Trees are not known by their leaves, nor even by their blossoms, but by their fruits.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204)
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
Marshall McLuhan, cultural historian and communications theorist (1911-1980)
The tears of strangers are only water.
Russian proverb
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
Lord Salisbury, British prime minister(1830-1903)
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
Henry Winkler, actor (1945-)
He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.
Confucius (c. 551-479? BC)
Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
Miguel de Cervantes, writer (1547-1616)
A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood.
Chinese Proverb
When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
Rita Rudner, comedienne (1955- )
Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!
Charles de Montesquieu, philosopher and writer (1689-1755)
Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
Chuang-Tzu, philosopher (4th c. BCE)
I am not one of those who believe that a great army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great profession those who form parts of it want to exercise their profession.
Woodrow Wilson, 28th US president, Nobel laureate (1856-1924)
People change and forget to tell each other.
Lillian Hellman, playwright (1905-1984)
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
James Madison, 4th US president (1751-1836)
Flattery won't hurt you if you don't swallow it.
Kin Hubbard, humorist (1868-1930)
The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
Elizabeth Bowen, novelist (1899-1973)
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez, musician (1941- )
Some fellows pay a compliment like they expected a receipt.
Kin Hubbard, humorist (1868-1930)
No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)
The road to wisdom? Well it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again, but less and less and less.
Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)
What you get out depends on what you put in; and as the grandest mill in the world will not extract wheat-flour from peascods, so pages of formulae will not get a definite result out of loose data.
Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and writer (1825-1895)
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Johannes Kepler, astronomer (1571-1630)
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all hey have now, and all they expect to have.
Edward Everett Hale, clergyman and author (1822-1909)
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)
Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.
Edwin Way Teale, naturalist and author (1899-1980)
A scholar knows no boredom.
Jean Paul Richter, writer (1763-1825)
Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist (1930- )
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.
John Keats, poet (1795-1821)
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld, writer (1613-1680)
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: Humility is endless.
T.S Eliot, poet (1888-1965)
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)
Life is mostly froth and bubble, / Two things stand like stone, / Kindness in another's trouble, / Courage in your own.
Adam Lindsay Gordon, poet (1833-1870)
A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives the rose.
Chinese proverb
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.
Elsa Schiaparelli, fashion designer (1890-1973)
There's no sauce in the world like hunger.
Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds.
William Ellery Channing, clergyman and writer (1780-1842)
By trying to make things easier for their children parents can make things much harder for them.
Mardy Grothe, psychologist and author (1942- )
A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
W.C. Fields, comedian (1880-1946)
In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
Socrates, philosopher (469?-399 BCE)
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher and writer (c. 3 BCE - AD 65)
Swords and guns have no eyes.
Chinese proverb
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and philosopher (1772-1834)
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
David Dunham
A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned one will take only twice as long.
Brasington's Ninth Law
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
Chinese Proverb
Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes, it obstructs your vision.
Hsi-Tang
One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
John W. Foster, clergyman (1770-1843)
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James, psychologist (1842-1910)
When people tell you how young you look, they are also telling you how old you are.
Cary Grant, actor (1904-1986)
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680)
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)
One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Vincent van Gogh, painter (1853-1890)
The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
With enough 'ifs' we could put Paris in a bottle.
French saying
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
Moliere, actor and playwright (1622-1673)
If the rich could hire someone else to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
Jewish Proverb
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Thomas Wolfe, novelist (1900-1938)
No one has ever become poor by giving.
Anne Frank, Holocaust diarist (1929-1945)
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire, educator (1921-1997)
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov, actor, writer and director (1921- )
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
Spanish proverb
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (1949- )
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Ludwig Van Beethoven, composer (1770-1827)
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, literary critic (1804-1869)
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
Without darkness there are no dreams.
Karla Kuban, novelist
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
Beware the fury of the patient man.
John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value to its scarcity.
Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680)
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Arnold Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)
The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reach us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiation of their personalities.
Kahlil Gibran, poet and artist (1883-1931)
The only gift is giving to the poor; / All else is exchange.
Thiruvalluvar, poet (c. 30 BCE)
To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680)
You can sometimes count every orange on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange.
A.K. Ramanujan, poet (1929-1993)
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)
Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration.
Igor Stravinsky, composer (1882-1971)
A calamity that affects everyone is only half a calamity.
Italian proverb
Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?
Thomas J. Watson, industrialist (1874-1956)
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson, critic (1895-1972)
An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color-blind.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )
Everything you've learned in school as `obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)
The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
Reading is seeing by proxy.
Herbert Spencer, philosopher (1820-1903)
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of discussion.
Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
If the secret sorrows of everyone could be read on their forehead, how many who now cause envy would suddenly become the objects of pity.
Italian proverb
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou, poet (1928- )
In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974)
A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.
Paul Gardner, painter
The great high of winning Wimbledon lasts for about a week. You go down in the record book, but you don't have anything tangible to hold on to. But having a baby -- there isn't any comparison.
Chris Evert Lloyd, tennis player (1954- )
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)
If you don't execute your ideas, they die.
Roger von Oech, author and consultant
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste they hurry past it.
Soren Kierkegaard, philosopher (1813-1855)
Intellectuals solve problems: geniuses prevent them.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a persons standing in the political community. Government can run afoul of that prohibition in two principal ways. . . . . The second and more direct infringement is government endorsement or disapproval of religion. Endorsement sends a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.
Justice O'Connor for Lynch v. Donnelly, 465 U.S. 668 (March 5, 1984) at 687-88
Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, psychiatrist and author (1926- )
I'm proud to pay taxes in the United States; the only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.
Arthur Godfrey
He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes.
Chinese Proverb
I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)
How much easier it is to be generous than just! Men are sometimes bountiful who are not honest.
Junius, pseudonym of the unknown author of a series of letters published in a London newspaper during (1769-1772)
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908- )
Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
Will Durant, historian (1885-1981)
We can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men's wisdom.
Michel Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
To love is to receive a glimpse of heaven.
Karen Sunde, playwright
When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.
Confucius (551-479 BC)
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin, author
He is the best physician who is the most ingenious inspirer of hope.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic, and philosopher (1772-1834)
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
Margaret Mitchell, novelist (1900-1949)
There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.
Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.
Anne Bradstreet, poet (1612-1672)
The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.
Arnold Bennett, novelist (1867-1931)
The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
Dante Alighieri, poet (1265-1321)
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.
Maya Angelou, poet (1928- )
All the time a person is a child he is both a child and learning to be a parent. After he becomes a parent he becomes predominantly a parent reliving childhood.
Benjamin Spock, pediatrician and author (1903-1998)
To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Charity sees the need not the cause.
German proverb
The only man who is really free is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.
Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher.
Japanese proverb
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in!
Gustave Flaubert, novelist (1821-1880)
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Sarah Margaret Fuller, author (1810-1850)
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
Navajo Proverb
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln, U.S. president (1809-1865)
Men of genius are often dull and inert in society, as a blazing meteor when it descends to earth, is only a stone.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1819-1892)
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)
Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.
Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Have patience! In time, even grass becomes milk.
Charan Singh, mystic (1916-1990)
Everyone is a genius at least once a year.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)
One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.
Rita Mae Brown, author (1944- )
Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present.
English Proverb
When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
Henri Frederic Amiel, philosopher and writer (1821-1881)
Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
The road uphill and the road downhill are one and the same.
Heraclitus, philosopher (Ca. 540-470 BCE)
The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.
Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)
Kings stand more in need of the company of the intelligent than the intelligent do of the society of kings.
Saadi, poet (1184-1291) [Gulistan]
I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)
Oftentimes excusing of a fault / Doth make the fault the worse by th' excuse.
William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)
I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.
Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood.
Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)
Talking is like playing the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., poet, novelist, essayist, and physician (1809-1894)
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 B.C)
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
George Bernard, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.
Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 B.C.)
It is as hard for the good to suspect evil, as it is for the bad to suspect good.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 BCE)
There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.
Buddha
He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.
Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
There is a pleasure sure, in being mad, which none but madmen know.
John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Edgar Allan Poe, poet and short-story writer (1809-1849)
Every civilizing step in history has been ridiculed as 'sentimental', 'impractical', or 'womanish', etc., by those whose fun, profit or convenience was at stake.
Joan Gilbert (1931- )
As against having beautiful workshops, studios, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day.
Van Wyck Brooks, writer, critic (1886-1963)
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, writer, Nobel laureate, (1904-1991)
Laws are the spider's webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.
Solon, statesman (c. 638-c558 BCE)
If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
The supreme happiness in life is the conviction that we are loved.
Victor Hugo, poet, novelist, and dramatist (1802-1885)
If the camel once gets his nose in a tent, his body will soon follow.
Arabian proverb
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.
Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)
If you bungle raising your children, I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs--jolted by every pebble in the road.
Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
Sometimes to remain silent is to lie.
Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher and writer (1864-1936)
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher (1905-1980)
We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for.
Marie Ebner von Eschenbach, writer (1830-1916)
A handful of sand is an anthology of the universe.
David McCord, poet (1897-1997)
What is called discretion in men is called cunning in animals.
Jean de la Fontaine, poet and fabulist (1621-1695)
The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
Mark Twain, author (1835-1910)
Minds, like bodies, will often fall into a pimpled, ill-conditioned state from mere excess of comfort.
Charles Dickens, novelist (1812-1870)
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation.
John Cage, composer (1912-1992)
I do not think there is any thrill that can go through the human heart like that felt by the inventor as he sees some creation of the brain unfolding to success... Such emotions make a man forget food, sleep, friends, love, everything.
Nikola Tesla, electrical engineer and inventor (1856-1943)
After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Cato the Elder, statesman, soldier, and writer (234-149 BCE)
In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.
Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
Inside my empty bottle I was constructing a lighthouse while all the others were making ships.
Charles Simic
If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.
Theophile Gautier, writer (1811-1872)
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small space.
Gloria Steinem, women's rights activist, editor (1934- )
Sin is geographical.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.
Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)
Traveling is a fool's paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there besides me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher and writer (1803-1882)
Life is a long lesson in humility.
James M. Barrie, writer (1860-1937)
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius, philosopher and writer (121-180)
The wastebasket is a writer's best friend.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, writer, Nobel laureate (1904-1991)
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)
You can't turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again.
Bonnie Prudden, fitness trainer and author (1914- )
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
Jean Cocteau, author and painter (1889-1963)
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.
Booker T. Washington, reformer, educator, and author (1856-1915)
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
African proverb
To resist the frigidity of old age one must combine the body, the mind and the heart - and to keep them in parallel vigor one must exercise, study and love.
Karl Viktor von Bonstetten, author (1745-1832)
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than, 'try to be a little kinder'.
Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen, even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind.
Leonardo Da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (1452-1519)
Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.
Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)
We are all born originals - why is it so many of us die copies?
Edward Young, poet (1683-1765)
He whom the gods love, dies young.
Titus Maccius Plautus, dramatist (circa 254-184 BCE)
Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.
Dale Spender, writer (1943- )
Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of the billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things within that enormous immensity.
Wernher von Braun, rocket engineer (1912-1977)
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate (1928- )
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out - it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service, writer (1874-1958)
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purpose is beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Louis Dembitz Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (1856-1941)
Bed is the poor man's opera.
Italian proverb
With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
Chinese proverb
When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?
Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
Whenever you commend, add your reasons for doing so; it is this which distinguishes the approbation of a man of sense from the flattery of sycophants and admiration of fools.
Richard Steele, author and editor (1672-1729)
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
No man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.
Charles Dudley Warner, editor, and publisher (1829-1900)
If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
People who are willing to give up freedom for the sake of short term security, deserve neither freedom nor security.
Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
I was court-martialled in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Brendan Francis Behan, playwright (1923-1964)
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
William Shakespeare, poet and dramatist (1564-1616)
Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz, author (1894-1985)
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Henry Miller, novelist (1891-1980)
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Voltaire, philosopher (384-322 BCE)
To understand your parents' love, bear your own children.
Chinese saying
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.
Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)
Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.
James Matthew Barrie, author (1860-1937)
Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.
Rita Mae Brown, writer (1944- )
Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.
Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)
A full cup must be carried steadily.
English proverb
Never confuse motion with action.
Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Simplicity doesn't mean to live in misery and poverty. You have what you need, and you don't want to have what you don't need.
Charan Singh, mystic (1916-1990)
Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing.
Margaret Chittenden, writer
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg, poet (1878-1967)
Luck never gives; it only lends.
Swedish proverb
The question is not can they reason? Nor can they talk? But can they suffer?
Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)
The trouble with life in the fast lane is that you get to the other end in an awful hurry.
John Jensen
He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
One kind word can warm three winter months.
Japanese proverb
Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
What a man says drunk he has thought sober.
Flemish proverb
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
Matt Cartmill, anthropology professor and author (1943- )
A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book.
Irish proverb
Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
Elbert Hubbard, author, editor, printer (1856-1915)
In the mountains of truth you never climb in vain.
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck.
Louis-Hector Berlioz, composer (1803-1869)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton), historian (1834-1902)
All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.
Sean O'Casey, playwright (1880-1964)
It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)
Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox, poet (1850-1919)
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
Albert Camus, writer and philosopher (1913-1960)
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet and artist (1883-1931)
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.
John Bunyan, preacher and author (1628-1688)
The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
Gloria Steinem, women's rights activist, editor (1934- )
Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Education: That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.
Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed in them.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
Margaret Fuller, author (1810-1850)
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and author (1712-1778)
Conversation, n. A fair to the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) [The Devil's Dictionary]
This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
T.S Eliot, poet (1888-1965)
The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy.
John Galsworthy, author, Nobelist (1867-1933)
The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad.
Salvador Dali, painter (1904-1989)
It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet and artist (1883-1931)
Of all nature's gifts to the human race, what is sweeter to a man than his children?
Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 BCE)
So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)
Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
Erma Bombeck, author (1927-1996)
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974)
Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.
Joe Theisman, Former quarterback
When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)
The mind commands the body and the body obeys. The mind commands itself and finds resistance.
St. Augustine (354-430)
There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.
William Makepeace Thackeray, novelist (1811-1863)
To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed.
Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
God Himself, sir, does not propose to judge a man until his life is over Why should you and I?
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
Constant kindness can accomplish much. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, and musician (1875-1965)
There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
As soon as man does not take his existence for granted, but beholds it as something unfathomably mysterious, thought begins.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobelist (1875-1965)
Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
Josh Billings, columnist and humorist (1818-1885)
I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
There is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.
Thomas Carlyle, essayist and historian (1795-1881)
A brother is a friend given by nature.
Gabriel Legouve, writer (1807-1903)
Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt, British prime-minister (1759-1806)
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
Let proportion be found not only in numbers and measures, but also in sounds, weights, times, and positions, and what ever force there is.
Leonardo Da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (1452-1519)
The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.
Japanese proverb
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet and artist (1883-1931)
Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry.
Spanish Proverb
God has no religion.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven -- That word is liberty.
Epitaph on the grave of Matilda Joslyn Gage, suffragist, abolitionist (1826-1898)
Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is ... impossible.
Richard Bach, writer (1936- )
The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
Hungarian proverb
There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.
Alfred Hitchcock, film-maker (1899-1980)
I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream.
Vincent van Gogh, artist (1853-1890)
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat, author, and lecturer (1884-1962)
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)
Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even.
Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)
The happiest is the person who suffers the least pain; the most miserable who enjoys the least pleasure.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, philosopher and author (1712-1778)
People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea , at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.
Saint Augustine (354-430)
The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions--the little, soon-forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look or heartfelt compliment.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet (1772-1834)
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone.
Thomas De Quincey, writer (1785-1859)
Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
I look for what needs to be done.... After all, that's how the universe designs itself.
R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)
One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (1889-1951)
A man does not show his greatness by being at one extremity, but rather by touching both at once.
Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world?
Anne Frank, Holocaust diarist (1929-1945)
A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
Adlai Stevenson, statesman (1900-1965)
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, author and statesman (1800-1859)
A man's conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn't do - but it does not keep him from doing it.
Frank A. Clark
The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.
Maurice Maeterlinck, poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate (1862-1949)
Everyone is the son of his own works.
Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)
Kindness makes a fellow feel good whether it's being done to him or by him.
Frank A. Clark
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
Art is a house that tries to be haunted.
Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)
Not all those that wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien, novelist and philologist (1892-1973)
Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company.
George Gordon Byron, poet (1788-1824)
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.
Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin, writer (1903-1977)
I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)
A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
Doug Larson
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist (1875-1961)
We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them.
Duc de La Rochefoucauld, writer (1613-1680)
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
Greek proverb
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
e.e. cummings, poet (1894-1962)
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)
Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.
Horace Walpole, novelist and essayist (1717-1797)
We don't understand life any better at forty than at twenty, but we know it and admit it.
Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Clarence Darrow, lawyer and author (1857-1938)
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
Assassination: The extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.
Aristotle (B.C. 384-322)
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
Carl Sandburg, poet and biographer (1878-1967)
We understand death for the first time when he puts his hand upon one whom we love.
Madame De Stael, writer (1766-1817)
Liberty is given by nature even to mute animals.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, historian (55-117)
We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
William R. Inge, clergyman, scholar, and author (1860-1954)
The sparrow is sorry for the peacock at the burden of his tail.
Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)
Knowing trees, I understand the meaning of patience. Knowing grass, I can appreciate persistence.
Hal Borland, journalist (1900-1978)
The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
TV is chewing gum for the eyes.
Frank Lloyd Wright, architect (1867-1959)
Natural abilities are like natural plants; they need pruning by study.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.
Aldous Huxley, writer (1894-1963)
Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.
Thomas Edison, inventor (1847-1931)
The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg, designer (1945- )
Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Spring is a natural resurrection, an experience in immortality.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
When Alexander the Great visited Diogenes and asked whether he could do anything for the famed teacher, Diogenes replied: 'Only stand out of my light.' Perhaps some day we shall know how to heighten creativity. Until then, one of the best things we can do for creative men and women is to stand out of their light.
John W. Gardner, author and educator (1912-2002)
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Barnett Cocks
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
Garrison Keillor, radio host and author (1942- )
I call architecture frozen music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both.
John Andrew Holmes
Maybe this world is another planet's Hell.
Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
Evil is like a shadow - it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stamp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
Shakti Gawain, teacher and author (1948- )
The hypothalamus is one of the most important parts of the brain, involved in many kinds of motivation, among other functions. The hypothalamus controls the
Heard in a neuropsychology classroom
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.
William R. Inge, clergyman, scholar, and author (1860-1954)
I'm sometimes asked
George T. Angell, reformer (1823-1909)
He who would leap high must take a long run.
Danish Proverb
Love is never lost. If not reciprocated, it will flow back and soften and purify the heart.
Washington Irving, writer (1783-1859)
Nature does nothing uselessly.
Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
Lao-Tzu, philosopher (6th century BCE)
The mountain remains unmoved at seeming defeat by the mist.
Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)
If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
Epicurus, philosopher (c. 341-270 BCE)
A misery is not to be measured from the nature of the evil, but from the temper of the sufferer.
Joseph Addison, essayist and poet (1672-1719)
I feel we are all islands -- in a common sea.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, writer (1906-2001)
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 (c. 566-480 BCE)
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author (1797-1851)
The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste they hurry past it.
Soren Kierkegaard, philosopher (1813-1855)
Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?
Epicurus, philosopher (c 341-270 BCE)
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama
Believing that details are unimportant is the mantra of a problem gambler.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Judge not the horse by his saddle.
Chinese Proverb
Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
Gustave Flaubert, novelist (1821-80)
If you don't execute your ideas, they die.
Roger von Oech, author and consultant
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
We are so fond of being out among nature, because it has no opinions about us.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.
Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Seneca
My faith is that the only soul a man must save is his own.
William Orville Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice (1898-1980)
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )
A guidance counselor who has made a fetish of security, or who has unwittingly surrendered his thinking to economic determinism, may steer a youth away from his dream of becoming a poet, an artist, a musician or any other of thousands of things, because it offers no security, it does not pay well, there are no vacancies, it has no "future".
Henry M Wriston, 11th president of Brown University (1889-1978)
We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny. The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist.
E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)
To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie, writer (1947- )
Big IT mistake: Taking market market research into consideration when making IT decisions.
Bigger IT mistake: Making decisions and then using market research to justify them.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If you're worried about a software vendor not being around in 5 years the solution you need can't be had from software vendors.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Reading is seeing by proxy.
Herbert Spencer, philosopher (1820-1903)
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of discussion.
Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
If the secret sorrows of everyone could be read on their forehead, how many who now cause envy would suddenly become the objects of pity.
Italian proverb
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
In a perfect union the man and woman are like a strung bow. Who is to say whether the string bends the bow, or the bow tightens the string?
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974)
The great high of winning Wimbledon lasts for about a week. You go down in the record book, but you don't have anything tangible to hold on to. But having a baby -- there isn't any comparison.
Chris Evert Lloyd, tennis player (1954- )
A painting is never finished - it simply stops in interesting places.
Paul Gardner, painter
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou, poet (1928- )
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )
A calamity that affects everyone is only half a calamity.
Italian proverb
Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?
Thomas J Watson, industrialist (1874-1956)
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
Salvador Dali, painter (1904-1989)
There are two kinds of fool. One says,
John Brunner, science fiction writer (1934-1995)
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.
Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)
You can sometimes count every orange on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange.
A.K. Ramanujan, poet (1929-1993)
An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... The truly wise person is color-blind.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
No metaphysician ever felt the deficiency of language so much as the grateful.
Charles Caleb Colton, author and clergyman (1780-1832)
To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680)
When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson, critic (1895-1972)
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Arnold Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value to its scarcity.
Samuel Butler, poet (1612-1680)
The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reach us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiation of their personalities.
Kahlil Gibran, poet and artist (1883-1931)
Just as appetite comes by eating so work brings inspiration.
Igor Stravinsky, composer (1882-1971)
The only gift is giving to the poor; / All else is exchange.
Thiruvalluvar, poet (c. 30 BCE)
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)
A good heart is better than all the heads in the world.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, writer (1803-1873)
You become writer by writing. It is a yoga.
R.K. Narayan, novelist (1906-2001)
Beware the fury of the patient man.
John Dryden, poet and dramatist (1631-1700)
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Ludwig Van Beethoven, composer (1770-1827)
Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, literary critic (1804-1869)
You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.
Paulo Freire, educator (1921-1997)
The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher and author (1878-1969)
What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson
Please subdue the anguish of your soul. Nobody is destined only to happiness or to pain. The wheel of life takes one up and down by turn.
Kalidasa, dramatist (c. 4th century)
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller, engineer, designer, and architect (1895-1983)
Without darkness there are no dreams.
Karla Kuban, novelist
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common--this is my symphony.
William Henry Channing, clergyman, reformer (1810-1884)
Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, writer (1906-2001)
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
Lois McMaster Bujold, writer (1949- )
Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov, actor, writer and director (1921- )
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Hammerstein II, lyricist (1895-1960)
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.
Spanish proverb
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)
One of the strongest characteristics of genius is the power of lighting its own fire.
John W. Foster, clergyman (1770-1843)
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
Chinese Proverb
When people tell you how young you look, they are also telling you how old you are.
Cary Grant, actor (1904-1986)
With enough 'ifs' we could put Paris in a bottle.
French saying
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and philosopher (1772-1834)
No one has ever become poor by giving.
Anne Frank, Holocaust diarist (1929-1945)
The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.
Moliere, actor and playwright (1622-1673)
I will not play at tug o' war. / I'd rather play at hug o' war, / Where everyone hugs instead of tugs.
Shel Silverstein, writer (1930-1999)
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James, psychologist (1842-1910)
Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes, it obstructs your vision.
Hsi-Tang
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Thomas Wolfe, novelist (1900-1938)
Views from a great distance always miss details.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
If the rich could hire someone else to die for them, the poor would make a wonderful living.
Jewish Proverb
One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
Vincent van Gogh, painter (1853-1890)
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
Richard Feynman, physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)
There's no sauce in the world like hunger.
Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)
I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.
W.C. Fields, comedian (1880-1946)
A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engrafted with a foreign stock.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness.
Elsa Schiaparelli, fashion designer (1890-1973)
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: Humility is endless.
T.S Eliot, poet (1888-1965)
To know how to hide one's ability is great skill.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld, writer (1613-1680)
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds.
William Ellery Channing, clergyman and writer (1780-1842)
Swords and guns have no eyes.
Chinese proverb
It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher and writer (c. 3 BCE - AD 65)
Life is mostly froth and bubble, / Two things stand like stone, / Kindness in another's trouble, / Courage in your own.
Adam Lindsay Gordon, poet (1833-1870)
A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives the rose.
Chinese proverb
By trying to make things easier for their children parents can make things much harder for them.
Mardy Grothe, psychologist and author (1942- )
In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.
Socrates, philosopher (469?-399 BCE)
There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S general and 34th president (1890-1969)
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
The charm, one might say the genius of memory, is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental; it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.
Elizabeth Bowen, novelist (1899-1973)
Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law.
Louis D. Brandeis, lawyer, judge, and writer (1856-1941)
It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.
Richard Feynman,
physicist, Nobel laureate (1918-1988)
People change and forget to tell each other.
Lillian Hellman, playwright (1905-1984)
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.
John Keats, poet (1795-1821)
Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.
Edward Everett Hale, clergyman and author (1822-1909)
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with ten thousand people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez, musician (1941- )
The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad.
James Madison, 4th US president (1751-1836)
Self-esteem is the reputation we acquire with ourselves.
Nathaniel Branden, psychotherapist (1930- )
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)
No, no, you're not thinking, you're just being logical.
Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)
Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.
Edwin Way Teale, naturalist and author (1899-1980)
Some fellows pay a compliment like they expected a receipt.
Kin Hubbard, humorist (1868-1930)
A scholar knows no boredom.
Jean Paul Richter, writer (1763-1825)
Nature uses as little as possible of anything.
Johannes Kepler, astronomer (1571-1630)
Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.
Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
Flattery won't hurt you if you don't swallow it.
Kin Hubbard, humorist (1868-1930)
The road to wisdom? Well it's plain and simple to express: Err and err and err again, but less and less and less.
Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)
I am not one of those who believe that a great army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great profession those who form parts of it want to exercise their profession.
Woodrow Wilson, 28th US president, Nobel laureate (1856-1924)
Trees are not known by their leaves, nor even by their blossoms, but by their fruits.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204)
Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books!
Charles de Montesquieu, philosopher and writer (1689-1755)
Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education.
Chuang-Tzu, philosopher (4th c. BCE)
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, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
Assumptions are the termites of relationships.
Henry Winkler, actor (1945- )
If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
Miguel de Cervantes, writer (1547-1616)
If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is safe.
Lord Salisbury, British prime minister(1830-1903)
He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.
Confucius (c. 551-479? BC)
If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.
Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)
There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen, musician (1934- )
Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading man, and studying all the various editions of them.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, statesman and writer (1694-1773)
Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)
If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.
John Cleese, comic actor (1939- )
When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.
Rita Rudner, comedienne (1955- )
I don't necessarily agree with everything I say.
Marshall McLuhan, cultural historian and communications theorist (1911-1980)
A closed mind is like a closed book: just a block of wood.
Chinese Proverb
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
Thornton Wilder, writer (1897-1975)
Intellectuals solve problems: geniuses prevent them.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)
It is a difficult matter to argue with the belly since it has no ears.
Cato The Elder, statesman and writer (234-149 BCE)
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world.
Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)
Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.
George Washington, 1st US president (1732-1799)
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.
Imbesi's Law of Conservation of Filth
When nations grow old, the arts grow cold and commerce settles on every tree.
William Blake, poet, engraver, and painter (1757-1827)
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
Norman Cousins, author and editor (1915-1990)
Efficiency is intelligent laziness.
David Dunham
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.
Phillips Brooks, bishop and orator (1835-1893)
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
As regards intellectual work, it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realms of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual working in solitude.
Sigmund Freud, neurologist, founder of psychoanalysis (1856-1939)
Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.
Amschel Mayer Rothschild, banker (1743-1812)
A carelessly planned project takes three times longer to complete than expected; a carefully planned one will take only twice as long.
Brasington's Ninth Law
I wish you all the joy that you can wish.
William Shakespeare, playwright and poet (1564-1616)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay, inventor (1940- )
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
J. William Fulbright, US Senator (1905-1995)
The world in general doesn't know what to make of originality; it is startled out of its comfortable habits of thought, and its first reaction is one of anger.
W. Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)
If men could regard the events of their own lives with more open minds, they would frequently discover that they did not really desire the things they failed to obtain.
Emile Herzog, writer (1885-1967)
So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.
Roger Baldwin, civil rights advocate (1884-1981)
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Carl Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), rhetorician (c. 35-95)
A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
Charles Evans Hughes, jurist (1862-1948)
In solitude, when we are least alone.
Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; Some blunders and absurdities crept in; Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)
There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth said things or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life that he would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.
Marcel Proust, novelist (1871-1922)
What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.
P.D. James, writer (1920- )
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
An old miser kept a tame jackdaw, that used to steal pieces of money, and hide them in a hole, which a cat observing, asked,
Jonathan Swift, satirist (1667-1745)
You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
There is no need for temples, no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Dalai Lama
To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.
Confucius, philosopher and teacher (c. 551-478 BCE)
To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
Hippocrates, physician (460-c.377 BCE)
Those who wish to sing always find a song.
Swedish proverb
In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
In science it often happens that scientists say,
Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.
Pericles, statesman (430 BCE)
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Victor Hugo, poet, novelist, and dramatist (1802-1885)
The quarrels of lovers are like summer storms. Everything is more beautiful when they have passed.
Suzanne Necker, author (1739-1794)
What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul.
Jewish proverb
Once you hear the details of victory, it is hard to distinguish it from a defeat.
Jean-Paul Sartre, writer and philosopher (1905-1980)
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
Zen saying
Even a lie is a psychic fact.
Carl Jung, psychiatrist (1875-1961)
Life is like a ten-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use.
Charles Schulz, cartoonist (1922-2000)
If you are planning for one year, grow rice. If you are planning for 20 years, grow trees. If you are planning for centuries, grow men.
Chinese proverb
The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.
Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., US Supreme Court Justice (1841-1935)
Never spend your money before you have it.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable.
J.S Buckminster, clergyman and editor (1797-1812)
I'm proud to pay taxes in the United States; the only thing is, I could be just as proud for half the money.
Arthur Godfrey, television host, entertainer (1903-1983)
The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
To the complaint, "There are no people in these photographs," I respond, "There are always two people: the photographer and the viewer."
Ansel Adams, photographer (1902-1984)
When you enjoy loving your neighbor it ceases to be a virtue.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
When you enjoy loving your neighbor it ceases to be a virtue.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.
Harper Lee, writer (1926- )
Growth in wisdom can be measured precisely by decline in bile.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally.
Learned Hand, jurist (1872-1961)
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642)
Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Joseph Addison, writer (1672-1719)
Marriage: a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters written in prose.
Beverly Nichols, author
The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.
John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
When money speaks, the truth keeps silent.
Russian proverb
Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer.
Saadi, poet (c. 1200 AD)
Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.
Chinese proverb
Money may be the husk of many things but not the kernel. It brings you food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; acquaintance, but not friends; servants, but not loyalty; days of joy, but not peace or happiness.
Henrik Ibsen, playwright (1828-1906)
The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)
Home is not where you live but where they understand you.
Christion Morgenstern, writer (1871-1914)
Did you know that the worldwide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day, only ONE day, of modern warfare.
Peter Ustinov, actor, writer and director (1921-2004)
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter, and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President (1809-1865)
You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
Erica Jong, writer (1942- )
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Iris Murdoch, writer (1919-1999)
Love is like war; easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings.
William Clifford Roberts, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The American Journal of Cardiology
Men cannot see their reflection in running water, but only in still water.
Chuang Tzu, philosopher (c. 4th century BCE)
It (marriage) may be compared to a cage, the birds without try desperately to get in, and those within try desperately to get out.
Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
H.G. Wells, writer (1866-1946)
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weed.
Luther Burbank, horticulturist (1849-1926)
If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it.
Jerome Singer
There are no persons capable of stooping so low as those who desire to rise in the world.
Marguerite Guardiner, writer (1789-1849)
I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up - they have no holidays.
Henny Youngman, comedian, actor (1906-1998)
Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
Richard Whately, philosopher, reformer, theologian, economist (1787-1863)
He who sings scares away his woes.
Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)
It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men will do when they don't have to.
Walter Linn
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Virginia Woolf, writer (1882-1941)
A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.
Louis Nizer, lawyer (1902-1994)
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
Raymond Thornton Chandler, writer (1888-1959)
As no roads are so rough as those that have just been mended, so no sinners are so intolerant as those that have just turned saints.
Charles Caleb Colton, author and clergyman (1780-1832)
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
Robert M Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
There are three ingredients to the good life; learning, earning, and yearning.
Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
To kill time is not murder, it's suicide.
William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw, writer, Nobel laureate (1856-1950)
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
Richard Francis Burton, explorer and writer (1821-1890)
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.
George D. Aiken, US senator (1892-1984)
A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
Alexander Pope, poet (1688-1744)
A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak.
James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)
Some people think they are worth a lot of money just because they have it.
Fannie Hurst, writer (1889-1968)
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
Mary Wollstonecraft, reformer and writer (1759-1797)
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
Dwight D Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
Joseph Heller, novelist (1923-1999)
One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
James Earl Jones, actor (1931- )
The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it.
Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the U.S., Nobel peace prize winner (1856-1924)
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair, novelist and reformer (1878-1968)
Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way that it cares for its helpless members.
Pearl S. Buck, Nobelist novelist (1892-1973)
Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains.
Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
When two elephants fight it is the grass that gets trampled.
African proverb
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)
Revenge has no more quenching effect on emotions than salt water has on thirst.
Walter Weckler
A bit of perfume always clings to the hand that gives the rose.
Chinese proverb
Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
Mark Twain
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground.
Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, editor and orator (1817-1895)
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
Ray Bradbury, science-fiction writer (1920- )
Edible, adj.: Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)
Never vote for the best candidate, vote for the one who will do the least harm.
Frank Dane
The only devils in this world are those running around in our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
The phrase, "working mother", is redundant.
Jane Sellman
A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air - however slight - lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
William O. Douglas, judge (1898-1980)
If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?
John Churton Collins, literary critic (1848-1908)
The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.
Niccolo Machiavelli, political philosopher and author (1469-1527)
Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.
Edward De Bono, consultant, writer, and speaker (1933- )
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
Susan B Anthony, reformer and suffragist (1820-1906)
Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson , writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
Ivan Illich, priest (1926-2002)
Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.
Walter Benjamin, critic and philosopher (1982-1940)
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
Jesse Jackson, clergyman and civil rights leader (1941- )
In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.
Adlai Stevenson, statesman (1900-1965)
Good music is very close to primitive language.
Denis Diderot, philosopher (1713-1784)
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE)
Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all.
Fred Allen
A man is not old until his regrets take the place of dreams.
Yiddish proverb
Hatred - the anger of the weak.
Alphonse Daudet, writer (1840-1897)
It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music.
Voltaire, writer (1694-1778)
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
William Ellery Channing, clergyman, reformer (1810-1884)
Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said,
Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)
I and the public know. / What all schoolchildren learn. / Those to whom evil is done. / Do evil in return.
W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot, writer and physician (1667-1735)
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian (1906-1945)
One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.
Henry Miller, writer (1891-1980)
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Theodore M. Hesburgh, educator (1917- )
No one ever ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward.
Amar Gopal Bose, electrical engineer, inventor, founder Bose Corp. (1929- )
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt, Twenty-sixth US president (1858-1919)
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
Lord Acton, historian (1834-1902)
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and the government when it deserves it.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
Our elections are free, it's in the results where eventually we pay.
Bill Stern, sports announcer (1907-1971)
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.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.
Charles Dudley Warner, editor and author (1829-1900)
Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life.
Giorgos Seferis, writer, diplomat, Nobel laureate (1900-1971)
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L.P Hartley, writer (1895-1972)
The best writing is rewriting.
E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)
A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.
Herbert V. Prochnow, banker (1897-1998)
A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.
Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)
It is always the secure who are humble.
G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
I thank Thee first because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse they did not take my life; third, because although they took my all, it was not much; and fourth because it was I who was robbed, and not I who robbed.
Matthew Henry, minister (1662-1714)
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
Antonio Porchia, writer (1886-1968)
He's the best physician who knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan, astronomer and author (1934-1996)
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth, computer scientist (1938- )
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
Edward R. Murrow
A great war leaves the country with three armies - an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.
German proverb
May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof (White House).
John Adams, 2nd US President, and the first one to live in the White House (1735-1826)
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.
William Tecumseh Sherman, Union General in the American Civil War (1820-1891)
A fly that lands on a carabao feels itself to be higher that the carabao.
Filipino proverb
Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
Frank William Leahy, football coach (1908-1973)
What you do is of little significance; but it is very important that you do it.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back.
Turkish proverb
The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Adams, 2nd US president (1735-1826)
People rarely win wars; governments rarely lose them.
Arundhati Roy, writer and activist (1961- )
Patience is also a form of action.
Auguste Rodin, sculptor (1840-1917)
Life without industry is guilt, industry without art is brutality.
John Ruskin, author, art critic, and social reformer (1819-1900)
I knew I'd hate COBOL the moment I saw they'd used 'perform' instead of 'do'.
Larry Wall, programmer, creator of Perl programming language (1954- )
Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler, writer (1835-1902)
The mind is but a barren soil; a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.
Joshua Reynolds, painter (1723-1792)
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.
Virginia Woolf, writer (1882-1941)
There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books.
George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)
Substitute damn every time you're inclined to write very; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
I love my country too much to be a nationalist.
Albert Camus, writer, philosopher, Nobel laureate (1913-1960)
If privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy.
Phil Zimmermann, cryptographer (1954- )
If you want your children to turn out well, spend twice as much time with them, and half as much money.
Abigail Van Buren, advice columnist (1918- )
My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.
Miguel de Unamuno, writer and philosopher (1864-1936)
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
Eric S. Raymond, programmer and writer (1957- )
Those who insist on the dignity of their office show they have not deserved it.
Baltasar Gracian, philosopher and writer (1601-1658)
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
Jose Narosky, writer
Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time.
Stephen Swid, executive
During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
Knowing ignorance is strength; ignoring knowledge is sickness.
Lao-Tzu, philosopher (6th century BCE)
Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.
Fred Menger, chemistry professor (1937- )
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
John Burroughs, naturalist and writer (1837-1921)
Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy, 35th US president (1917-1963)
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
John Morley, statesman and writer (1838-1923)
The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.
Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer (1876-1973)
A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.
J.D. Salinger, writer (1919- )
That man is truly good who knows his own dark places.
Beowulf
We all love animals. Why do we call some
K.D Lang, singer (1961- )
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.
Thomas Mann, novelist, Nobel laureate (1875-1955)
I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
Alice Walker, writer (1944- )
Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914) [The Devil's Dictionary]
In the absence of touching and being touched, people of all ages can sicken and grow touch-starved.
Diane Ackerman, writer (1948- )
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities...still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin, naturalist and author (1809-1882)
Culture of the mind must be subservient to the heart.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world.
Vince Poscente, Olympian (1961- )
I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.
John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.
Emile Chartier, philosopher (1868-1951)
A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron.
Horace Mann, educational reformer (1796-1859)
Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.
Gore Vidal (1925- )
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)
I don't mind that you think slowly but I do mind that you are publishing faster than you think.
Wolfgang Pauli, physicist, Nobel laureate (1900-1958)
To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers - or both.
Elizabeth Charles, writer (1828-1896)
The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life - the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Hubert Horatio Humphrey, US Vice President (1911-1978)
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Federico Fellini, film director, and writer (1920-1993)
Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other.
Marya Mannes, writer (1904-1990)
If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.
Tom Robbins, writer (1936- )
Men always want to be a woman's first love - women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place.
Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz
One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only the truth.
Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border.
Pablo Casals, cellist, conductor, and composer (1876-1973)
Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; and adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.
Marcus Aurelius, philosopher (121-180)
Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr., writer
I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
What I like in a good author isn't what he says, but what he whispers.
Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell, inventor (1847-1922)
I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body Then I realized who was telling me this.
Emo Phillips, comedian, actor (1956- )
Good deeds are the best prayer.
Serbian proverb
I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.
Chinese proverb
In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.
Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)
He that is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.
Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and writer (1825-1995)
Every cask smells of the wine it contains.
Spanish proverb
Open source software is so great because no one has to decide if a fix or improvement is cost effective.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Let the gods avenge themselves.
Roman law maxim, on blasphemy
Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.
Jean Arp, artist and poet (1887-1948)
And none will hear the postman's knock / Without a quickening of the heart / For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
A kiss can be a comma, a question mark or an exclamation point.
Mistinguett, singer (1875-1956)
I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, -- light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.
John Constable, painter (1776-1837)
If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor and political activist (1928- )
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
A compliment is something like a kiss through a veil.
Victor Hugo, author (1802-1885)
Our admiration of fine writing will always be in proportion to its real difficulty and its apparent ease.
Charles Caleb Colton, author and clergyman (1780-1832)
The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience.
French proverb
Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny.
Carl Schurz, general and politician (1829-1906)
One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.
English Proverb
Be kind to thy father, for when thou wert young, / Who loved thee so fondly as he? / He caught the first accents that fell from thy tongue, / And joined in thy innocent glee.
Margaret Courtney, poet (1822-1862)
Nature is slow, but sure; she works no faster than need be; she is the tortoise that wins the race by her perseverance.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
Time wears away error and polishes truth.
Gaston Pierre Marc, Duc de Levis, writer (1764-1830)
A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.
G.K. Chesterton, author (1874-1936)
Shadow owes its birth to light.
John Gay, poet and dramatist (1685-1732)
I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)
Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
Bertrand Russell philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all.
Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )
It is human nature to hate the man whom you have hurt.
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, historian (c.55-c.120)
I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.
Anthony Trollope, novelist (1815-1882)
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
H.L Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
Nothing so completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straightforward and simple integrity in another.
Charles Caleb Colton, author and clergyman (1780-1832)
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
Many a secret that cannot be pried out by curiosity can be drawn out by indifference.
Sydney J. Harris, journalist (1917-1986)
The beloved of the Almighty are the rich who have the humility of the poor, and the poor who have the magnanimity of the rich.
Saadi, poet (1184-1291)
The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.
Madame de Stael, writer (1766-1817)
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges, writer (1899-1986)
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, author actor, and filmmaker (1935- )
Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind!
Henri Frederic Amiel philosopher and writer (1821-1881)
A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.
Paul Dudley White, physician (1886-1973)
It is kindness immediately to refuse what you intend to deny.
Publilius Syrus, writer (c. 1st century BCE)
Grasp the subject, the words will follow.
Cato the Elder, statesman, soldier, and writer (234-149 BCE)
I am, indeed, a king, because I know how to rule myself.
Pietro Aretino, satirist and dramatist (1492-1556)
All restraints upon man's natural liberty, not necessary for the simple maintenance of justice, are of the nature of slavery, and differ from each other only in degree.
Lysander Spooner, lawyer (1808-1887)
You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.
Rwandan Proverb
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)
Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.
Hosea Ballou, preacher (1771-1852)
The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
Thomas Pynchon, writer (1937- )
Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.
Graham Greene, novelist and journalist (1904-1991)
It's impossible to be loyal to your family, your friends, your country, and your principles, all at the same time.
Mignon McLaughlin, author (1915-)
Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)
The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Stendal (Marie Henri Beyle), novelist (1783-1842)
Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
Thomas Wolfe, novelist (1900-1938)
The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work, / And if it take the second must refuse / A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
William Butler Yeats, writer, Nobel laureate (1865-1939)
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 to practice neither.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)
In their early passions women are in love with the lover, later they are in love with love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld, writer (1613-1680)
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed, chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. Few that fell trees plant them; nor would planting avail much towards getting back anything like the noble primeval forests.
John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral.
Samuel P. Ginder, US navy captain
God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
Henry Ward Beecher, preacher and writer (1813-1887)
To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you're wrong, admit it; Whenever you're right, shut up.
Ogden Nash, author (1902-1971)
Love truth, but pardon error.
Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang van Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
Force without wisdom falls of its own weight.
Horace, poet and satirist (65-8 BCE)
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add 'within the limits of the law' because law is often but the tyrant's will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)
What's done to children, they will do to society.
Karl A. Menninger, psychiatrist (1893-1990)
Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
Harry S. Truman, 33rd US president (1884-1972)
Those who put out the people's eyes, reproach them for their blindness.
John Milton, poet (1608-1674)
True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.
Louis Nizer, lawyer (1902-1994)
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
James Baldwin, writer (1924-1987)
It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering.
Robert Lynd, writer (1879-1949)
It is as easy to dream a book as it is hard to write one.
Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)
In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.
Iroquois Nation Maxim
The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)
Who has not for the sake of his reputation sacrificed himself?
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
Nothing is so impenetrable as laughter in a language you don't understand.
William G. Golding, novelist (1911-1993)
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded.
Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more.
Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)
The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly.
Charles Reznikoff, poet (1894-1976)
The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.
John N. Bahcall, astrophysicist (1935-2005)
Humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organized society should assure to such workers the efficient means of accomplishing their task, in a life freed from material care and freely consecrated to research.
Marie Curie, scientist, Nobel laureate (1867-1934)
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
Robert King Merton, sociologist (1910-2003)
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)
Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.
B.R. Myers, author (1963- )
You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.
Naguib Mahfouz, writer (1911- )
The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for centuries surely stands in a lonely place.
Gary Zukav, author (1942- )
We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
Robert Hayden, poet and educator (1913-1980)
It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.
George H. Lorimer, editor (1868-1937)
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)
The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionist and novelist (1811-1896)
The high minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion.
Samuel James Ervin Jr., lawyer, judge, and senator (1896-1985)
An idea is not responsible for the people who believe in it.
Don Marquis, humorist and poet (1878-1937)
You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
Honore de Balzac, novelist (1799-1850)
Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.
Lebanese proverb
The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.
Madame De Stael, writer (1766-1817)
A quiet conscience sleeps in thunder.
English proverb
New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)
A timid question will always receive a confident answer.
Henry Lytton Bulwer, diplomat and author (1801-1872)
How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward.
Spanish proverb
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)
Questions show the mind's range, and answers its subtlety.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)
There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
Robert Frost, poet (1874-1963)
The power to command frequently causes failure to think.
Barbara Tuchman, author and historian (1912-1989)
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)
Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings.
W.H. Auden, poet (1907-1973)
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)
When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
Robert T. Pirsig, author and philosopher (1928- )
In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.
Margaret Halsey, novelist (1910-1997)
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
Cyril Connolly, critic and editor (1903-1974)
Emancipation from the bondage of the soil is no freedom for the tree.
Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861-1941)
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag, author and critic (1933-2004)
I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now--only that place where the books are kept.
John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
Franklin D Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring -- it was peace.
Milan Kundera
Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
Ellen Goodman
The most certain test by which we can judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton), historian (1834-1902)
Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
Kurt Vonnegut
To err is human--and to blame it on a computer is even more so.
Robert Orben
War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin
I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart, and that is softness of head.
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th US President (1858-1919)
I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
Dave Barry
For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
Johnny Carson
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. Try reality.
Unknown
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 BCE)
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Nietzsche
I contend that we are both atheists; I just believe in one fewer gods than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you'll understand why I dismiss yours.
Stephen Roberts
FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)
We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
Gene Roddenberry
To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
Cardinal Bellarmine
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Albert Einstein
If the Bible is mistaken in telling us where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?
Justin Brown
An Atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist believes that deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
I'm not convinced that faith can move mountains, but I've seen what it can do to skyscrapers.
William H. Gascoyne
It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
Robert A. Heinlein, Postscript to Revolt in 2100
Of all the strange crimes that humanity has legislated out of nothing, blasphemy is the most amazing - with obscenity and indecent exposure fighting it out for second and third place.
Robert Heinlein, Notebooks of Lazarus Long
The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.
Robert Heinlein
Religion is a path that only leads away from truth.
Riskable
A communications disruption can only mean one thing... Invasion.
Lee Maguire, teaching us how to make people go away.
Remember - if all you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of fun.
Frossie
It's not religion in itself that is dangerous, it is faith. To believe anything with no evidence is very dangerous, because belief leads to actions.
He who builds a better mousetrap these days runs into material shortages, patent-infringement suits, work stoppages, collusive bidding, discount discrimination--and taxes.
H. E. Martz
When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.
Sinclair Lewis (1935)
With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
US Vice President Henry A. Wallace
If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort.
US Vice President Henry A. Wallace, "The Danger of American Fascism," New York Times, 1944
I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.
Michel de Montaigne
The least of learning is done in the classrooms.
Thomas Merton
We love flattery, even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
A king can stand people fighting but he can't last long if people start thinking.
Will Rogers, humorist (1879-1935)
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
Dwight David Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard
Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous.
Robert G. Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
Michael Crichton
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
Gore Vidal, writer (1925- )
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
Abraham Lincoln
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the 'truth' to sink in. You gotta catapult the propaganda.
President George W. Bush, May 25th 2005
Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision and they end up alienating decent people across the globe.
President George W. Bush, October 27th 2005
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
Henri Frederic Amiel philosopher and writer (1821-1881)
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
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
Marshall McLuhan
The big thieves hang the little ones.
Czech Proverb
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)
Never judge a book by its movie
J. W. Eagan
When we have the courage to speak out -- to break our silence -- we inspire the rest of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views.
Sharon Schuster
People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.
Alice Walker, writer (1944- )
War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
Karl Kraus, writer (1874-1936)
Half the truth is often a great lie.
Benjamin Franklin
Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to the garage makes you a car.
Laurence J. Peter
To my embarrassment I was born in bed with a lady.
Wilson Mizner
When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.
Edward R. Murrow
Estimated amount of glucose used by an adult human brain each day, expressed in M&Ms: 250
Harper's Index
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg
Great geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
Robert Quillen, journalist and cartoonist (1887-1948)
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures.
Daniel Webster
You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott, writer (1954- )
Until we understand quantum gravity, we're not going to be running Linux on a black hole.
Seth Lloyd, Physicist at MIT
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
E. B. White
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Actions lie louder than words.
Carolyn Wells
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire
When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong-- or absolutely right.
Albert Guinon
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-- / The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind.
Emily Dickinson, poet (1830-1886)
A wonderful time--the War: / when money rolled in / and blood rolled out. / But blood / was far away / from here-- / Money was near.
Langston Hughes, poet and novelist (1902-1967)
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
Moses ben Maimon, philosopher (1135-1204)
Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.
Blaise Pascal, philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)
Executives think in numbers, graphs and bottom lines. IT thinks in needs and improvements.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy
James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)
Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales
Byron J. Langenfeld
There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
The question why there is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection... But this is the real question we ought to ask: Is this imperfection the final truth, is evil absolute and ultimate?
Rabindranath Tagore, poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, (1861-1941)
The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change
Richard Bach, writer (1936- )
Permanent good can never be the outcome of untruth and violence.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas.
Aldous Huxley
For every ten people who are clipping at the branches of evil, you're lucky to find one who's hacking at the roots.
Henry David Thoreau
We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)
Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side.
Stephen Colbert, speaking at the White House Correspondants Dinner
Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!
Stephen Colbert, speaking at the White House Correspondants Dinner (2006)
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Stephen Colbert, speaking at the White House Correspondants Dinner (2006)
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.
Robert Heinlein
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
George Santayana
I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)
A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)
Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.
Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace
Mann, educational reformer (1796-1859)
The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.
Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)
Once you label me you negate me.
Soren Kierkegaard, philosopher (1813-1855)
There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, writer (1803-1873)
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt, historian and philosopher (1906-1975)
Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions.
Cullen Hightower
Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey
Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to.
H. Mumford Jones
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Colette, writer (1873-1954)
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.
Chuck Reid
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
James Feibleman
Civilizations in decline are consistently characterised by a tendency towards standardization and uniformity.
Arnold Toynbee, historian (1889-1975)
You know, you can't please all the people all the time... and last night, all those people were at my show.
Mitch Hedberg
When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
Douglas Noel Adams
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
G.K. Chesterton, essayist and novelist (1874-1936)
An education is what you make of it, but college graduates would have us believe that an education is what makes you.
Originally Posted HereRiskable, blogger and geek (1978-)
I'd just like to point out a simple fact that everyone else seems to have missed: One has only to point a finger at the preceding generation to find exactly who is to blame for "kids these days".
Reference
Riskable, blogger and geek (1978-)
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to believe.
Laurence J. Peter
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Albert Einstein
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes
Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.
John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)
A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.
Edward De Bono, consultant, writer, and speaker (1933- )
Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share and sought advantage over no one.
Robert Brault
We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.
Eric Hoffer
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.
Granville Hicks
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.
John Kenneth Galbraith, economist (1908-2006)
It takes a certain maturity of mind to accept that nature works as steadily in rust as in rose petals.
Esther Warner Dendel, writer and artist (1910-2002)
Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true.
Robert Brault, software developer, writer (1938- )
You see a homeless man causing blight upon the landscape and call for justice. If the man and the blight are removed, do you declare that justice has been served? I say nay, justice has not been served. The blight has not been removed, it has simply become less visible. The man is still homeless.
Riskable, Geek (1978-)
Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.
Douglas Adams, Author of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1952-2001)
Good prose is like a windowpane.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)
Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
Edward R. Murrow
The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye. The more light you shine on it, the more it will contract.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
Ralph Hodgson
An executive is a person who always decides; sometimes he decides correctly, but he always decides.
John H. Patterson
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
Dorothy Nevill
The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught.
Marquis de Vauvenargues
The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.
Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and painter (1930-1965)
It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Carl Sagan
If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.
Peter Ustinov
Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
David Broder
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
Benjamin Franklin, statesman, author, and inventor (1706-1790)
Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?
Jay Leno
If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going.
Professor Irwin Corey
I myself am a lifelong recovering "A" student. When I think about all the energy I spent in validating someone else's concept of what's important to my destiny, it's just mind boggling. What on earth did I get A's in? What did I get 100's on tests for? They were inane. They had nothing to do with my life. They had nothing to do with reality.
Daniel Greenberg
All wholesome food is caught without a net or trap.
William Blake, poet,
engraver, and painter (1757-1827)
Testing can show the presence of errors, but not their absence.
Edsger
Dijkstra, computer scientist (1930-2002)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
Kurt Vonnegut
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Walter Lippmann
A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe. It is guilty, until found effective.
Edward Teller
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Milton Friedman, economist, Novel
laureate (1912- )
Those who can laugh without cause have either found the true meaning of happiness or have gone stark raving mad.
Norm Papernick
I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
Artemus Ward
The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.
Robert Jackson
Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
James Baldwin, writer (1924-1987)
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Statistician: A man who believes figures don't lie, but admits that under analysis some of them won't stand up either.
Evan Esar
There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.
Louis Pasteur
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. It it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E.B. White, writer (1899-1985)
Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
Leo Rosten
Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de
Saint-Exupery, author and aviator (1900-1945)
The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
E. B. White
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
Saki
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
The time to relax is -- when you don't have time for it.
Sidney J. Harris
If you elect leaders that act irresponsibly towards nature, you'll find that irresponsibility is the nature of your leaders.
Riskable, Geek (1978-)
I believe that no belief has a right to be free from criticism. Even this one.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
Ludwig Feuerbach, philosopher (1804-1872)
So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
Peter Drucker
Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
Oscar Wilde
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
William G. McAdoo
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.
Bertrand Russell
The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.
Joe Ancis
Save a little money each month and at the end of the year you'll be surprised at how little you have.
Ernest Haskins
I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.
Richard Dawkins
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
Richard Dawkins
My last vestige of "hands off religion" respect disappeared in the smoke and choking dust of September 11th 2001, followed by the "National Day of Prayer," when prelates and pastors did their tremulous Martin Luther King impersonations and urged people of mutually incompatible faiths to hold hands, united in homage to the very force that caused the problem in the first place.
Richard Dawkins
Over the centuries, we've moved on from Scripture to accumulate precepts of ethical, legal and moral philosophy. We've evolved a liberal consensus of what we regard as underpinnings of decent society, such as the idea that we don't approve of slavery or discrimination on the grounds of race or sex, that we respect free speech and the rights of the individual. All of these things that have become second nature to our morals today owe very little to religion, and mostly have been won in opposition to the teeth of religion.
Richard Dawkins
Atheist, n. A person to be pitied in that he is unable to believe things for which there is no evidence, and who has thus deprived himself of a convenient means of feeling superior to others.
Chaz Bufe, The American Heretic’s Dictionary
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
Mohandas K.
Gandhi (1869-1948)
In the heart of great injustice lies a popular belief and a sacred text backing it up.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.
Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn't every war fought between men, between brothers?
Victor Hugo
If you separate the truth and wisdom in the Bible from the superstition and absurdities, you'll have a very short book and a lot of recyclable material.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
An existence that demands the insertion and spread of its message is known as a virus.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The role of logic is to predict or ensure outcomes. It is fueled by knowledge.
The role of reason is to understand or solve outcomes. It is fueled by logic.
True wisdom only comes when logic and reason intersect.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
One is not burned by belief. One is burned by believers.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The believer that chains himself to his sacred creeds may think that he has latched on to a vehicle that will carry him to paradise but the truth is that he has only added a weight that holds him back.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
I thought to myself, 'What would an atheist-Christian argument be like if the arguments were reversed?' Probably something like, 'Atheism is the only path to salvation! You must accept the truth into your heart or you will burn... Unbelievers.'
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.
Thurgood Marshall, US Supreme Court Justice (1908-1993)
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks
humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
Robert Lynd
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.
Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
War doesn't make boys men, it makes men dead.
Ken Gillespie
The dangerous patriot...drifts into chauvinism and exhibits blind enthusiasm for military actions.
Colonel James A. Donovan, Marine Corps
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
Mahatma Gandhi
In this war – as in others – I am less interested in honoring the dead than in preventing the dead.
Butler Shaffer
Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice.
Lord Acton
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
James Madison
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Issac Asimov
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
It is always easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Thomas Jefferson
Is it not a strange blindness on our part to teach publicly the techniques of warfare and to reward with medals those who prove to be the most adroit killers?
Marquis de Sade
Respect for the rights of others means peace.
Benito Juárez
The Department of Defense is the behemoth...With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire.
The 9/11 Commission Report
Our enemies...never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.
George W. Bush
Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people.
Adolf Hitler, April 26, 1933, from a speech made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
War is organized murder and torture against our brothers.
Alfred Adler
Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
Marquis de Sade
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell
Emphasis on military prowess is an indication of philosophical poverty.
Henk Middelraad
Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with...
Gerard K. O'Neill
There were no international terrorists in Iraq until we went in. It was we who gave the perfect conditions in which Al Qaeda could thrive.
Robin Cook
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop
Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.
James Wolcott
As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
Josh Billings
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
Sir Peter Ustinov
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett
War is the tool of small-minded scoundrels who worship the death of others on the altar of their greed.
John Cory
In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
Lee Iacocca,
automobile executive (1924- )
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
Carl Sagan
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
Gary Zukav
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
Hubert H. Humphrey
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
Mark Twain
In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.
Napoleon Bonaparte
It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
Bertrand Russell
I have a problem with people who take the Constitution loosely and the Bible literally.
Bill Maher
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
Bertrand Russell
These televangelists say they don't favor any particular denomination, but I think we've all seen their eyes light up at tens and twenties...
Dennis Miller
The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
Benjamin Franklin
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.
Edward R. Murrow
Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
Arthur C. Clarke
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger
My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
Charles M. Schulz
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
C.P. Snow, scientist and writer
(1905-1980)
The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.
Walter
Lippmann, journalist (1889-1974)
Religion doesn't provide answers. It only teaches you to stop asking questions.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
Leonardo da Vinci
Dissent is what rescues democracy from a quiet death behind closed doors.
Lewis H. Lapham, editor (1935- )
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
William Arthur Ward, college administrator,
writer (1921-1994)
No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
Edward Abbey
Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat.
Caroline Schoeder
The advantage of a liquid diet is that you don't have to put up with the same shit as everyone else.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes his heart entirely to money.
Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
Galileo Galilei
Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
Bertrand Russell
The least of learning is done in the classrooms.
Thomas Merton
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
William Wrigley Jr.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.
Barbara Tober
He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife.
Douglas Adams
Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.
Dr. Seuss, author and illustrator (1904-1991)
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
Leo Tolstoy
To change a person you can show them the light. To change a business it must feel the heat. Nothing motivates a company like the threat of burning money.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.
H. L. Mencken
When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.
W. S. Gilbert
A damn is a gift everyone can afford.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Fighting for freedom is an admirable cause. Fighting for the freedom to oppress is not.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Samuel Johnson
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
Henry
David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people's patience.
John Updike
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
Oscar
Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that jail 'manages freedom.'
When a person can no longer laugh at himself, it is time for others to laugh at him.
Thomas Szasz
The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.
Frank Herbert
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.
Marshall McLuhan
1. Never tell everything at once.
Ken Venturi
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)
Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal that has the true religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
It is better to be truthful and wise than to be naive, believing lies.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
America has lost it's right to be called the land of the free. As a citizen cannot claim to be free if they have a debt to pay, the American government cannot claim to be free if it is swimming in IOUs. America's freedom is currently on loan.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Debt and freedom are opposites.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
No person is free until they can tell the truth without retaliation, live without debt, and change their mind without disaffection. This is freedom from religion, freedom from inequity, and freedom from dogma.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
These days an income is something you can't live without--or within.
Tom Wilson
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)
I believe I found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.
Konrad Lorenz, ethologist, Nobel laureate (1903-1989)
Security is like an analogy. It only works up until the point that someone considers an angle or aspect that you haven't previously considered and accounted for.
Badness scales better than goodness.
Pete Lindstrom
The day before a breach, the ROI is zero. The day after,
it is infinite.
Dennis Hoffman
Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.
Bruce Schneier
The anguish of low quality lingers long after the sweetness of low cost is forgotten.
unknown
My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared.
PJ Plauger
Security, like correctness, is not an add-on feature.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.
Bruce Schneier
Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.
Sun Tzu
Good system administration is good security, and vice versa.
Douglas Gerdin
If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.
Bruce Schneier
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
People in general are not interested in paying extra for increased safety. At the beginning seat belts cost $200 and nobody bought them.
Gene Spafford
Securing an environment of Windows platforms from abuse - external or internal - is akin to trying to install sprinklers in a fireworks factory where smoking on the job is permitted.
Gene Spafford (in e-mail to organizers of a workshop on insider misuse)
Those who do not archive the past are condemned to retype it!
Garfinkel and Spafford, Practical UNIX Security (first edition)
Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
John Perry Barlow
While there is no patch available for human stupidity there is a patch available for human ignorance. You apply it like a virus.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
Albert Camus
The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur.
George w. Bush
We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and author (1900-1980)
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back.
Robert Heinlein, "Life Line", 1939
Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything -- anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.
Sam Harris, author (1967- )
There is a big difference between believing in something without evidence and believing in something in spite of evidence. The first is blind faith which is unwise but not necessarily harmful. The second is illness and should be treated as such.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.
John Burroughs
The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.
Lewis Thomas
I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.
Doug McLeod
Praying is like a rocking chair-- it'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere.
Gypsy Rose Lee
I refuse to believe in creationism because when you blame a supreme being for creationists you're giving up on human evolution.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by doing what you know is wrong.
William J. H. Boetcker
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
James Madison
Lots of people think they're charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don't want. It isn't charity to give away things you want to get rid of and it isn't a sacrifice to do things you don't mind doing.
Myrtle Reed, author (1874-1911)
If your business’s only purpose is to increase profits, your business is unnecessary and will eventually be expelled from the bowels of the economy like the excrement that it is. Businesses exist to serve the people, not the other way around.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
E. F. Schumacher
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them- who were above such trifling.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
The truth is more important than the facts.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Assuming either the Left Wing or the Right Wing gained control of the country, it would probably fly around in circles.
Pat Paulsen
Apologists have a long, scandalous history of referencing scandals from history to downplay present scandals engendered by apologists that will make history for being scandalous. Then again, this is not a new development.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)
Things are more like they are now than they have ever been.
Gerald R. Ford
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Carl Sagan
Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker
When one admits that nothing is certain one must, I think, also admit that some things are much more nearly certain than others.
Bertrand Russell
When you're through changing, you're through.
Bruce Barton
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
Abraham Lincoln
I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
Frederick Douglass
I am determined that my children shall be brought up in their father's religion, if they can find out what it is.
Charles Lamb
Soul Search Box: A broken search engine (i.e. you search for answers and only get 404s).
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
POTUS: Politician Obfuscating Truth and Undermining Science
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.
Jascha Heifetz
Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people.
Kin Hubbard
Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
Alvin Toffler, futurist and author (1928- )
A conservative is a man who sits and thinks, mostly sits.
Woodrow Wilson
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.
Louis L'Amour, novelist (1908-1988)
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
De La Lastra's Law
If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Isaac Asimov
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick
In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes.
Mogens Jallberg
The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'.
Larry Hardiman
History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins, editor and author (1915-1990)
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
Henry Ford, industrialist (1863-1947)
Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)
A hair in the head is worth two in the brush.
Oliver Herford, writer and illustrator (1863-1935)
How can a society that exists on instant mashed potatoes, packaged cake mixes, frozen dinners, and instant cameras teach patience to its young?
Paul Sweeney
TEAL'C: I thought it fitting that on this day when we must sacrifice our short lived freedom that we do so here...at the site of the Battle of salsacksor...where you're father gave his life for this very cause...he began to doubt the Goa'uld long before this rebellion took shape Gerak. It was your father's death at their hands that led you to question what god is so deserving of my worship.
GERAK: you were not one who was chosen...you did not witness the wonders I beheld.
TEAL'C: did that erase the dead...heal the sick and wounded? Destroy their enemy with but a wave of their hand.
GERAK: the Goa'uld deceived us...the Ori's powers are pure.
TEAL'C: then what is the measure of a God Gerak... is it the scope of their power or how they choose to wield that power? Would a god who is prepared to lead us on the path of enlightenment so contradict this divine benevolence by destroying all those who refuse to believe in him?
GERAK: Those who refuse to believe... must die
From episode 9-11 of Stargate SG-1... Gerak is Teal'C's former ally who recently converted to the religion of the Ori (and gave him great power in return)
There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
G. K. Chesterton
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
John Gaule
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made.
Oscar Wilde
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
P. J. O'Rourke
When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.
Benjamin Disraeli
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
Howard Aiken
There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher.
Victor Hugo
Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.
E. H. Gombrich
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over.
Aneurin Bevan
Never answer a critic, unless he's right.
Bernard M. Baruch
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive.
Thomas Jefferson
It is often easier to invent a use for something than it is to neglect its purchase. The trouble is coming up with an invention that can pass muster with your spouse.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Want is a fish that grows with the size of its habitat.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Beauty lies in the why of the boulder.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
History teaches us that history is often not taught very well.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are of subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)
I searched for answers but all I got was 404s.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
It is a truism that almost any business or industry cartel will legislate more profit into law if it acquires the power to do so, and will follow it by attempting to keep influence over the politicians that passed it, attacking those against it, and attempting to improve upon the previous legislation with even more profitable laws.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
All IT people carry a sword that's perfect for cutting costs but all management ever wants is golden armour.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
We kicked out the British and formed this country because King George III (a special interest) was taxing Americans (legislating more profit) to fund an unpopular war which did not benefit Americans in any way (negative impact). Current politicians would do well to remember this.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
George Santayana
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.
Jules Renard
You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
John Wooden, sports coach (1910- )
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
Arthur C Clarke, science fiction writer (1917- )
A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.
Arnold Toynbee, historian (1889-1975)
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Jean Giraudoux
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
The astronomical improbability of life is a wonderment and the inevitability of death is our last great shared experience. We are all equals in this way and that in itself is beautiful.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
There are two things to aim at in life; first to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.
Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)
How would you feel if you were forced to spend six hours every day under an authoritative regime that treats you like a prisoner, force-feeds you "education", punishes you and your colleagues for the most trivial of things, and regularly reminds you that your entire future depends upon the degree to which you keep them pleased?
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
After its beginning but before it ends
Our life is our families, our achievements, and our friends.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
H L Mencken
If you truly believe your religion is without flaw
You will have no desire to make it the law
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If you truly want to "protect our children" from troubling predators
You should focus your attention on well-financed senators
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Modern technology / Owes ecology / An apology.
Alan M. Eddison
For a market to be fair and just
Regulations are a must
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time.
Alfred E. Wiggam
America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Evan Esar
Ceaseless construction ensures environmental destruction.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The automobile has not merely taken over the street, it has dissolved the living tissue of the city. Its appetite for space is absolutely insatiable; moving and parked, it devours urban land, leaving the buildings as mere islands of habitable space in a sea of dangerous and ugly traffic.
James Marston Fitch, historic preservationist (1909-2000)
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
Mark Twain
Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.
Chili Davis
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Mark Twain
Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life.
Robert Southey, The Doctor
A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
John Barrymore
Age is absolute. Old is a relative.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If our brains were books we'd have volumes on sustenance, replication, and self-repair alongside a small selection of original works to fill in what little space remains on the shelf.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If our leaders are elected by way of gold
It should be expected that they'll be bought and sold
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
A closed mind cannot open another.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.
Unknown
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
What is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so.
Bertrand Russell
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.
Rene Descartes
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The surprising thing about young fools is how many survive to become old fools.
Doug Larson
The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.
Roy Blount Jr.
Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression.
Amos Bronson Alcott
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.
John Ciardi
There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.
Gore Vidal
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Tom Stoppard
The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
There's a grand difference between government secrets and politician's secrets.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
A government that operates in secrecy is a government that operates inefficiently.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Underground nuclear testing, defoliation of the rain forests, toxic waste ... Let's put it this way: if the world were a big apartment, we wouldn't get our deposit back.
John Ross
Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious.
Letitia E. Landon, author (1802-1838)
I've always found paranoia to be a perfectly defensible position.
Pat Conroy
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice
J. Porter Clark
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Hanlon's razor
It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?
Richard Bach, writer (1936- )
There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another.
Emma Goldman, social activist (1869-1940)
Do not commit the error, common among the young, of assuming that if you cannot save the whole of mankind, you have failed.
Jan de Hartog, playwright and novelist (1914-2002)
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not under proper control.
Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and writer (1825-1895)
An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
Robert A. Humphrey
Vaguely defined questions can only be answered in vague terms.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
To define a problem incorrectly is to ensure that it will never be solved.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.
Henry Adams
The value of a person can never be determined objectionably. Therefore the only just method of determining who gets what is to have a system that treats everyone equally.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
When money becomes a factor injustice becomes a fact.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The road to injustice is paved with gold.
The road to tyranny is paved with ambivalence.
The road to destruction is paved with ignorance.
The road to utopia isn't paved at all.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Why run a desktop from your server when you can run a server from your desktop?
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Sacrificing diversity for the sake of efficiency increases profit *and* risk.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Bertrand Russell
Compatibility resistance is not and never has been a feature. It is a flaw and it has and will continue to be exploited... by Microsoft.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Making bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet.
Bruce Schneier
The last voice heard before the collapse of the U.S. economy will be from an expert exclaiming, "There's still hundreds of billions of barrels of oil in the ground!"
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The United States has over 250,000 laws. Keep that in mind next time you think you have nothing to hide from the government. Even if that doesn't phase you, they make new ones all the time.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money.
David Richerby
The man who thinks he can do without the world is indeed mistaken; but the man who thinks the world cannot do without him is mistaken even worse.
Francois, duc de La Rochefoucauld, writer (1613-1680)
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr
Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis)
Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Freedom isn't free but open source software comes damned close.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
Andy Finkel
A short saying oft contains much wisdom.
Sophocles
Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
Peter Drucker, management consultant, professor and writer (1909-2005)
A bad law can be a hundred times more destructive than a bad man.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams (1838-1918)
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.
G. K. Chesterton
The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Like me or like me not there are much like me who, like me, like me much.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
A person who trusts no one can't be trusted.
Jerome Blattner
Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.
Robert Byrne
The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.
Ralph W. Sockman
Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.
Dame Edna Everage
Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Sidney J. Harris
To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it.
Scott Granneman
Just as a cautious businessman avoids tying up all his capital in one concern, so, perhaps, worldly wisdom will advise us not to look for the whole of our satisfaction from a single aspiration.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
A man who is 'ill-adjusted' to the world is always on the verge of finding himself. One who is adjusted to the world never finds himself, but gets to be a cabinet minister.
Hermann Hesse, novelist, poet, Nobel laureate (1877-1962)
To use bitter words, when kind words are at hand is like picking unripe fruit when the ripe fruit is there.
Thiruvalluvar, poet (c. 1st century BCE or 6th century CE)
Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.
Murray Edelman, professor, author (1919-2001)
No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P.J. O'Rourke, writer (1947- )
Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
Robert A. Heinlein, science-fiction author (1907-1988)
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)
Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral significance.
Everett Dean Martin, columnist, preacher, and philosopher (1880-1941)
The real measure of our wealth is how much we'd be worth if we lost all our money.
John Henry Jowett, preacher (1864-1923)
Windows admins click away at the branches of evil.
Linux admins hack at the root $.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.
Plato, philosopher (427-347 BCE)
Any monetary punishment greater than reasonable living expenses is indentured servitude.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)
What men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up.
Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobelist (1875-1965)
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)
They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They're not laughing now.
Bob Monkhouse, comedian (1928-2003)
It is not giving children more that spoils them; it is giving them more to avoid confrontation.
John Gray, author (b. 1951)
Perfect order is the forerunner of perfect horror.
Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.
Francis Bacon, essayist, philosopher, and statesman (1561-1626)
There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either.
Robert Graves, poet and novelist (1895-1985)
A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad, novelist (1857-1924)
If I could go back in time, I would make a lot of mistakes.
Nathan Hamiel
To make some nickels, you need to split some dimes.
Nathan Hamiel
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
Laurens van der Post, explorer and writer (1906-1996)
That some good can be derived from every event is a better proposition than that everything happens for the best, which it assuredly does not.
James Kern Feibleman, philosopher and psychiatrist (1904-1987)
To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior "righteous indignation" -- this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.
Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
If you don't like traffic stop having so many kids!
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
What a strange delusion it is to suppose that a good-looking thing is a well-designed thing.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
A politician is a man who thinks of the next election; while the statesman thinks of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke, preacher and author (1810-1888)
Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.
Henry Fielding, author (1707-1754)
When power goes unused we call it inefficiency. People with power often forget this.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
People regularly accept hearsay as fact whilst rejecting or ignoring hard evidence to the contrary. This explains politics, religion, nationalism, racism, and pop music.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
There's only so much a man can stand. Sooner or later he'll have to sit or lay down.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
Ethan Allen, revolutionary (1738-1789)
A market exists when it is cheaper--in time or money--to purchase a thing than it is to DIY. When you find a business that prospers despite this rule you can be assured that it is either going to die very soon or it is abusing a government-granted monopoly.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.
Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion.
Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.
Banksy, street artist (b. 1974)
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
Robert Louis Stevenson, novelist, essayist, and poet (1850-1894)
Fanaticism is to superstition what delirium is to fever, and what fury is to anger. The man who has ecstasies and visions, who takes dream for realities, and his imaginings for prophecies, is an enthusiast. The man who backs his madness with murder is a fanatic.
Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)
Privacy protects you from the morals of others. One person's meaningless private information is another's smoking gun.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
There's a difference between making a change and making a difference.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
When a government fails to police monopolies it is enabling tyranny.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Why is "borrow and spend" better than "tax and spend"?
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.
Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?
James Richardson, poet, professor (b. 1950)
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)
Science provides truth. Religion provides answers.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Why isn't the best technology chosen to solve any given problem? Humans are risk-averse. The less a person knows about any given thing the more likely they are to evaluate it as risky. "New technology" only seems "great" (i.e. not risky) to those who understand it. So the key to getting new technology adopted is to demonstrate it as "not risky" or "less risky" than the old stuff. It also helps if it is actually useful.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
There is no greater gift to an insecure leader that quite matches a vague enemy who can be used to whip up fear and hatred among the population.
Paul Rusesabagina, humanitarian (b. 1954)
Criticizing someone's beliefs is not the same as criticizing their race or gender. You can't choose your race or gender but you can most certainly choose what you believe.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
What is more insulting? Telling someone that their beliefs have no basis in reality or telling someone that their lack of belief makes them untrustworthy, barbarous, worthless?
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
When governments go bad good people have everything to hide.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James, psychologist (1842-1910)
There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.
Sun Tzu, general (6th century BCE)
What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
Having someone to blame is not an effective IT strategy.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If George W. Bush and John McCain got what they wanted after Bush was elected--privatized social security--a lot of Americans would have had their savings in places like Baer Sterns which recently went from $100/share to $2/share. Those Americans would have lost nearly everything.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If you use a trouble ticket system as a blame thrower you will get burned.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The best way to be more free is to grant more freedom to others.
Carlo Dossi, author and diplomat (1849-1910)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of Human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt
The only way Governments can induce citizens to surrender their rights is convincing them that by doing so, they will gain a measure of safety in exchange.
Thomas Jefferson
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
We are all equal before the law, but not before those appointed to apply it.
Stanislaw J. Lec, poet and aphorist (1909-1966)
What matters is not the idea a man holds, but the depth at which he holds it.
Ezra Pound, poet (1885-1972)
Utility invites use and use is the measurement of all tools.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
'One tool to rule them all' was the governance policy of Mordor.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
To find a solution with Linux you merely search the Internet. To find a solution with Windows you have to search your IT budget.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse
like angels but they live like men.
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
Nothing, to my way of thinking, is a better proof of a well-ordered mind than a man's ability to stop just where he is and pass some time in his own company.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher (BCE 3-65 CE)
Many are concerned about the monuments of the West and the East- to know who built them. For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them- who were above such trifling.
Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Lillian Hellman, playwright (1905-1984)
It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.
Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana, philosopher (1863-1952)
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stay there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again - and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.
Mark Twain
A fool is someone who can't relate to others. A wise person is someone to whom others can't relate.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
It is irrational to believe something is wrong just because it is illegal or unpopular.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Nothing is wrong simply because it is illegal or unpopular. Believing otherwise is slavery.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The only 'investment' you can make in Information Technology is hiring or training technical workers. All else is just expense.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Benito Mussolini, invented fascism (1883-1945)
Profit motives are incompatible with public services. As soon as something moves from being a luxury to being an essential "public service" it is best handled by governments and/or non-profits.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Indoctrination Quiz: Are you eager to believe? Are you eager to serve? Are you eager to sacrifice?
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.
Samuel Johnson, lexicographer (1709-1784)
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.
Adolf Hitler
Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you're not really interested in order to get where you're going.
Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)
History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins, editor and author (1915-1990)
The disbelief part of skepticism comes after the questioning part.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Wisdom doesn't come from the heart. Remember this the next time you're impassioned by something.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
All wars are the progeny of wars lost.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Truth in beliefs is not the same thing as believing in the truth.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Never trust a vendor that doesn't offer their product documentation for free to the public.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Market research is nothing more than documented hearsay.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Do not think of knocking out another person's brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.
Horace Mann, educational reformer (1796-1859)
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.
Patrick Henry, revolutionary (1736-1799)
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little.
Sydney Smith, writer and clergyman (1771-1845)
When everyone gets a subsidy no one gets a subsidy.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Holistic--in terms of how it relates to medicine--means that it has yet to be proven effective.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
One does not advance the swimming abilities of ducks by throwing the eggs in the water.
Multatuli (pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker), novelist (1820-1887)
There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
As soon as you've gotten as good as you want you've given up on being better.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
For disappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedly left after eight of sleep and eight of work.
Doug Larson
All kids are gifted; some just open their packages earlier than others.
Michael Carr
Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
The least qualified politician is the one who believes he alone knows best.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
When an entity opposes the public disclosure of security vulnerabilities we must carefully examine their motivation: Do they fear that someone might take advantage of the vulnerability or do they fear that someone might fix it?
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If you believe in predestination you shouldn't be filing change requests!
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Location-based restrictions on the Internet are like a broken-down car on a 10-lane highway. You can either suffer a slowdown and work your way past the blockage or you can take an entirely different route. Those who put up these barriers would do well to know that circumnavigating is often superior to the direct route.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Circumventing digital restrictions is like taking the scenic route to get around a highway accident.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If your religious authority derives its morals from the Old Testament remember that in the Old Testament the ten punishments for violating the Ten Commandments are death, death, death, death, death, death, death, death, death, and "feces on their faces".
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The fruit of greed never ripens; it only spoils.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The Supreme Court ruled that political contributions are to be considered free speech. Apparently the more money you have the more free speech you get!
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
One company outsourceth; another taketh their business away.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The road to inefficiency is paved with the pink slips of IT professionals and cemented with proprietary products.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The standard by which standards are measured is appropriateness.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.
Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Illogical beliefs cannot be undone by logic.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If your choice of tools is limitless every problem can be implemented with limitless complexity.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Irrational beliefs do not deserve respect just because they're religious. Human beings, on the other hand, do deserve respect even if they're religious.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Microsoft Sharepoint is the very definition of vendor lock-in: Data goes in but it does not come out. It is like a black hole that sucks away knowledge, time, and money for all eternity. Oh, but how pretty a spiral of doom looks from a distance!
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Administration of windows isn't about loving it. It's about loving how it keeps you employed.
Travis Ingram (Windws Admin of 10 years)
Car analogies are like Toyota Camrys. They're everywhere but not appropriate for all purposes.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If you have a plethora of tools every problem starts to look like a chance to use your imagination.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
When politics turns into a comedy the comedians win.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Memory lane is a dead end.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Cars are single-purpose, single-tasking devices designed to take you from point A to point B. Computers are multi-purpose and multi-tasking, designed to do everything you ask of them after they've been given instructions on how to answer your questions.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Taxes are an investment in civilization.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If Microsoft made trains railroad crossings would not be allowed on their tracks.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
I'm sorry if the correct way of doing things offends you.
Unknown
All potential competitive advantages are lost when a business function is outsourced.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
If you're against the public disclosure of security vulnerabilities you're anti-education.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
Zero-day events occur because somebody *didn't* disclose a security vulnerability.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
There are two types of jobs in IT: Infrastructure jobs and Development jobs. Infrastructure jobs require discipline and a strong desire to automate (i.e. useful laziness). Development jobs just require that you live in a foreign country where the cost of living is cheap.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
The heart grows cold if all it ever holds is gold.
Riskable, self-quoting geek (1978-)
