Albert Einstein Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either +
Arthur Schopenhauer Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. +
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 +
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. +
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. +
Epictetus An ignorant person is inclined to blame others for his own misfortune. To blame oneself is proof of progress. But the wise man never has to blame another or himself. +
Oscar Wilde Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. +
Cicero Everything is indefinite, misty, and transient; only virtue is clear, and it cannot be destroyed by any force. +
Edmund Burke By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. +
Cicero It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment. +
Edmund Burke The balance between consumption and production makes price. The market settles, and alone can settle, that price. Market is the meeting and conference of the consumer and producer, when they mutually discover each other’s wants. Nobody, I believe, has observed with any reflection what market is, without being astonished at the truth, the correctness, the celerity, the general equity, with which the balance of wants is settled. They who wish the destruction of that balance, and would fain by arbitrary regulation decree, that defective production should not be compensated by increased price, directly lay their axe to the root of production itself. +
Seneca Reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. +
Cicero The aim of a ship's captain is a successful voyage; a doctor's, health; a general's, victory. So the aim of our ideal statesman is the citizens' happy life--that is, a life secure in wealth, rich in resources, abundant in renown, and honorable in its moral character. That is the task which I wish him to accomplish--the greatest and best that any man can have. +
Fyodor Dostoyevsky how easily the heart accustoms itself to comforts, and how difficult it is to tear one’s self away from luxuries which have become habitual and, little by little, indispensable. +
Marlene Dietrich I do not think we have a "right" to happiness. If happiness happens, say thanks. +
Henry Hazlitt Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. +
Alfred Lord Tennyson “Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all. +
Ayn Rand The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. +
Thomas Carlyle In a controversy, the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves. +
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. +
Juvenal Who will Guard the Guardians, or Who watches the watchers. +
John Dewey A problem well put is half solved. +
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. +
Leo Tolstoy Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us. +
John Maynard Keynes The commonest virtues of the individual are often lacking in the spokesmen of nations; a statesman representing not himself but his country may prove, without incurring excessive blame—­as history often records—­vindictive, perfidious, and egotistic. +
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Love does not dominate; it cultivates. +
Hippocrates There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. +
Fulton J. Sheen Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked. +
Sophocles Without labor nothing prospers. +
Cicero It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own. +
Abraham Lincoln Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. +
Napoleon Bonaparte The extent of your consciousness is limited only by your ability to love and to embrace with your love the space around you, and all it contains. +
Adam Smith It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all the wealth of the world was originally purchased; +
John F. Kennedy The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. +
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. +
Aristotle Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. +
Ludwig Von Mises Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will +
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. +
Victor Hugo To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better. +
Oliver Wendell Holmes The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size. +
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. +
Marshall McLuhan A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding. +
Leo Tolstoy We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom +
Marcus Aurelius Anger cannot be dishonest. +
Edward R. Murrow Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation. +
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. +
Arthur Conan Doyle When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. +
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. +
Adam Smith Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all. +
Montesquieu In republican governments, men are all equal; equal they are also in despotic governments: in the former, because they are everything; in the latter, because they are nothing. +