Cicero 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. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious. +
William Shakespeare This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. +
Friedrich Nietzsche When we have to change an opinion about any one, we charge heavily to his account the inconvenience he thereby causes us. +
Leo Tolstoy Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us. +
Friedrich A. Hayek It is because every individual knows little and, in particular, because we rarely know which of us knows best that we trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it. +
William Pitt the Younger Necessity is the plea for every infringement on human rights. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. +
Juvenal Who will Guard the Guardians, or Who watches the watchers. +
Charles Darwin It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change. +
Arthur Schopenhauer Scoundrels are always sociable. +
Ayn Rand The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. +
Arthur Conan Doyle When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. +
Abraham Lincoln Whatever you are, be a good one. +
Robert G. Ingersoll As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason. +
Edmund Burke But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. +
Oliver Wendell Holmes The biggest tragedy in America is not the great waste of natural resources - though this is tragic; the biggest tragedy is the waste of human resources because the average person goes to his grave with his music still in him. +
Thomas Jefferson Everything predicted by the enemies of banks, in the beginning, is now coming to pass. We are to be ruined now by the deluge of bank paper. It is cruel that such revolutions in private fortunes should be at the mercy of avaricious adventurers, who, instead of employing their capital, if any they have, in manufactures, commerce, and other useful pursuits, make it an instrument to burden all the interchanges of property with their swindling profits, profits which are the price of no useful industry of theirs. +
Montesquieu Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. +
Plato The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. +
Samuel Johnson But the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness. +
Khalil Gibran One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life. +
Stephen Hawking There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. We are all different. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope. +
Arthur Schopenhauer Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. +
Arthur Schopenhauer A poet or philosopher should have no fault to find with his age if it only permits him to do his work undisturbed in his own corner; nor with his fate if the corner granted him allows of his following his vocation without having to think about other people. For the brain to be a mere laborer in the service of the belly, is indeed the common lot of almost all those who do not live on the work of their hands; and they are far from being discontented with their lot. But it strikes despair into a man of great mind, whose brain-power goes beyond the measure necessary for the service of the will; and he prefers, if need be, to live in the narrowest circumstances, so long as they afford him the free use of his time for the development and application of his faculties; in other words, if they give him the leisure which is invaluable to him. It is otherwise with ordinary people; for them leisure has no value in itself, nor is it, indeed, without its dangers, as these people seem to know. The technical work of our time, which is done to an unprecedented perfection, has, by increasing and multiplying objects of luxury, given the favorites of fortune a choice between more leisure and culture upon the one side, and additional luxury and good living, but with increased activity, upon the other; and true to their character they choose the latter, and prefer champagne to freedom. And they are consistent in their choice; for, to them, every exertion of the mind which does not serve the aims of the will is folly. Intellectual effort for its own sake, they call eccentricity. +
Mark Twain Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. +
Claude Bernard When we meet a fact which contradicts a prevailing theory, we must accept the fact and abandon the theory, even when the theory is supported by great names and generally accepted. +
Thomas Jefferson The opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Nothing is worth more than this day. +
Bias of Priene Gain your point by persuasion, not by force. +
Sophocles Without labor nothing prospers. +
Socrates The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers. +
Seneca you shall be told what pleased me to-day in the writings of Hecato; it is these words: "What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself." That was indeed a great benefit; such a person can never be alone. You may be sure that such a man is a friend to all mankind. +
Cicero Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do. +
Adam Smith No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged. +
Jean-Paul Sartre the worst part about being lied to is knowing you werent worth the truth +
Lao Tzu When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you. +
Seneca One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we’re seduced by convention. +
Virgil Evil is nourished and grows by concealment. +
Seneca In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is? +
George Santayana Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said. +
Napoleon Bonaparte Ability is of little account without opportunity. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Nothing is more disgusting than the majority: because it consists of a few powerful predecessors, of rogues who adapt themselves, of weak who assimilate themselves, and the masses who imitate without knowing at all what they want. +
Marcus Aurelius If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance. +
H. L. Mencken Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. +
Juvenal For no deity is held in such reverence amongst us as Wealth; though as yet, O baneful money, thou hast no temple of thine own; not yet have we reared altars to Money in like manner as we worship Peace and Honour, Victory and Virtue +
Albert Einstein The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. +
Kurt Vonnegut How nice - to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive. +
Jean-Paul Sartre Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk. +
Thomas Carlyle In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves. +
Virgil Fortune favors those who dare. +