Bias of Priene All men are wicked +
Blaise Pascal In a word, the Self has two qualities: it is unjust in itself since it makes itself the centre of everything; it is inconvenient to others since it would enslave them; for each self is the enemy, and would like to be the tyrant of all others. You take away its inconvenience, but not its injustice, and so you do not render it lovable to those who hate injustice; you render it lovable only to the unjust, who do not any longer find in it an enemy. And thus you remain unjust, and can please only the unjust +
Cicero Kindness is stronger than fear. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Where is the man who has the strength to be true, and to show himself as he is? +
Ralph Waldo Emerson The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs. +
Baruch Spinoza I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them. +
Euripides Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. +
Ronald Reagan Any system that penalizes success and accomplishment is wrong. Any system that discourages work, discourages productivity, discourages economic progress, is wrong. If, on the other hand, you reduce tax rates and allow people to spend or save more of what they earn, they'll be more industrious; they'll have more incentive to work hard, and money they earn will add fuel to the great economic machine that energizes our national progress. The result: more prosperity for all and more revenue for government. A few economists call this principle supply-side economics. I just call it common sense. +
George Bernard Shaw Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. +
Alvin Toffler Society needs people who take care of the elderly and who know how to be compassionate and honest," he said. "Society needs people who work in hospitals. Society needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone. +
Socrates There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance. +
Golda Meir Don't be so humble - you are not that great. +
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. +
Friedrich A. Hayek It should be noted, moreover, that monopoly is frequently the product of factors other than the lower costs of greater size. It is attained through collusive agreement and promoted by public policies. When these agreements are invalidated and when these policies are reversed, competitive conditions can be restored. +
Hannah Arendt Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty. +
Leo Tolstoy Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. +
Arthur Conan Doyle There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe One should not search for anything behind the phenomena. They themselves are the message. +
Socrates Mankind is made of two kinds of people: wise people who know they're fools, and fools who think they are wise. +
René Descartes Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power. +
Hannah Arendt The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist. +
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. +
H. L. Mencken Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. +
Arthur Conan Doyle Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. +
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. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The ordinary man places his life’s happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed. +
Søren Kierkegaard People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. +
Sophocles Without labor nothing prospers. +
Leo Tolstoy We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom +
Arthur C. Clarke Civilization and Religion are incompatible and Faith is believing what you know isn't true. +
Ralph Waldo Emerson The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. +
Thomas Jefferson Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that it is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand. That if there be but one right, and ours that one, we should wish to see the 999 wandering sects gathered into the fold of truth. But against such a majority we cannot effect this by force. Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves. +
John Pilger The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food. +
Elbert Hubbart The friend is the person who knows all about you, and still likes you. +
William Cullen Bryant Can anything be imagined more abhorrent to every sentiment of generosity and justice, than the law which arms the rich with the legal right to fix, by assize, the wages of the poor? If this is not slavery, we have forgotten its definition. Strike the right of associating for the sale of labor from the privileges of a freeman, and you may as well bind him to a master, or ascribe him to the soil. +
Mark Twain If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Real obscurantism is not to hinder the spread of what is true, clear, and useful, but to bring into vogue what is false. +
Friedrich Nietzsche Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. +
Kurt Vonnegut Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are, It might have been. +
Tacitus The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates. +
Sophocles Of evils current upon earth The worst is money. Money 'tis that sacks Cities, and drives men forth from hearth and home; Warps and seduces native innocence, And breeds a habit of dishonesty. +
Montesquieu If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, which is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are. +
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. +
Voltaire It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. +
Ralph Waldo Emerson What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. +
Oscar Wilde Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. +
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. +
Adam Smith The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine +
Ludwig von Mises He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them. +
John Steinbeck And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. +