William James Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. +
Lao Tzu The wise man is one who, knows, what he does not know. +
George Santayana Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said. +
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 Divide and rule, the politician cries; Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise. +
Kurt Vonnegut Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow. +
Abraham Lincoln Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. +
Henry James Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. +
Plato Can I by justice or by crooked ways of deceit ascend a loftier tower which may he a fortress to me all my days? For what men say is that, if I am really just and am not also thought just profit there is none, but the pain and loss on the other hand are unmistakable. But if, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. +
Euripides Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish. +
Arthur Conan Doyle Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius. +
Seneca There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them... Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Belief is not the beginning of knowledge- it is the end.” +
Henry Hazlitt Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. +
Elizabeth Barrett Browning How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach +
John Dewey Truth, in final analysis, is the statement of things “as they are,” not as they are in the inane and desolate void of isolation from human concern, but as they are in a shared and progressive experience….Truth, truthfulness, transparent and brave publicity of intercourse, are the source and the reward of friendship. Truth is having things in common. +
Friedrich Nietzsche Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how. +
Plato The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. +
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. +
H.L. Mencken Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. +
Arthur Schopenhauer there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself? +
George Washington It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Nothing is worth more than this day. +
Arthur Conan Doyle There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. +
Marcus Aurelius Anger cannot be dishonest. +
Immanuel Kant Seek not the favor of the multitude; it is seldom got by honest and lawful means. But seek the testimony of few; and number not voices, but weigh them. +
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 +
Albert Einstein We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life. All that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about. +
Hegel Man is an animal, but even in his animal functions, he is not confined to the implicit, as the animal is; he becomes conscious of them, recognizes them, and lifts them, as, for instance, the process of digestion, into self-conscious science. In this way man breaks the barrier of his implicit and immediate character, so that precisely because he knows that he is an animal, he ceases to be an animal and attains knowledge of himself as spirit. +
Hegel It is easier to discover a deficiency in individuals, in states, and in Providence, than to see their real import and value. +
Ludwig von Mises What is thus improperly regarded as profit, instead of as part of capital, is consumed by the entrepreneur or passed on either to the consumer in the form of price-reductions that would not otherwise have been made or to the labourer in the form of higher wages, and the government proceeds to tax it as income or profits. In any case, consumption of capital results from the fact that monetary depreciation falsifies capital accounting. +
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. +
John F. Kennedy The supreme reality of our time is the vulnerability of our planet. +
Arthur Conan Doyle When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. +
Cicero If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started. +
Mark Twain Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. +
Arthur Schopenhauer Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are in my opinion not philosophers; for they lack the first requirement of a philosopher, namely a seriousness and honesty of inquiry. They are merely sophists who wanted to appear to be rather than to be something. They sought not truth, but their own interest and advancement in the world. Appointments from governments, fees and royalties from students and publishers, and, as a means to this end, the greatest possible show and sensation in their sham philosophy-such were the guiding stars and inspiring genii of those disciples of wisdom. And so they have not passed the entrance examination and cannot be admitted into the venerable company of thinkers for the human race. Nevertheless they have excelled in one thing, in the art of beguiling the public and of passing themselves off for what they are not; and this undoubtedly requires talent, yet not philosophical. +
Mark Twain Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. +
Adam Smith It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion. +
John Maynard Keynes When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir? +
Virgil Evil is nourished and grows by concealment. +
Susan Sontag The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque. +
Juvenal Who will Guard the Guardians, or Who watches the watchers. +
W.B. Yeats I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. +
Arthur Schopenhauer The middle ages showed us the results of thinking without experimentation, our present century shows us what experimentation without thinking leads to. +
John Maynard Keynes It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong. +
François de La Rochefoucauld No persons are more frequently wrong, than those who will not admit they are wrong. +
John Locke The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. +
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 +
Stephen Spielberg The past may dictate who we are, but we get to determine what we become. +