Quotes From the Dead 1800–1898 CE

To consider but not believe

For context, see Quotes from the Dead Intro: An endeavor to identify recorded sapience that may matter.

Quotes a Cultural Physician Yet Unborn May Value

• “Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it.” — Victor Hugo 1802–1885 CE, Romantic author, poet, essayist, playwright, and politician

• “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent” ― Victor Hugo

• “Reason is intelligence taking exercise; imagination is intelligence with an erection.” — Victor Hugo

• “Not being heard is no reason for silence.” ― Hugo, Victor

• “To put everything in balance is good, to put everything in harmony is better.” ― Victor Hugo

• “The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved — loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.” ― Victor Hugo

• “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” ― Victor Hugo

• “Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters.” — Victor Hugo

• “As men’s prayers are a disease of the intellect, so are their creeds a disease of the will.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882 CE, essayist, lecturer, philosopher, minister, abolitionist, and poet

• “It is not the length of life, but the depth.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Traveling is s fool’s paradise. Those who travel to be amused, or to get something they don’t already have, travel away from themselves and grow old even in youth. The soul is no traveler and the wise stay at home except for when duty calls them away. But even when traveling in foreign lands, they are still at home and tour like a missionary of wisdom and virtue visiting people and cities lie a sovereign, not like an interloper or valet.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.” — 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.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “What is success? 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” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Life is a journey, not a destination.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “Politics is a deleterious profession, like some poisonous handicrafts. Men in power have no opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “The highest virtue is always against the law.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears… Success comes from within, not from without.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “In politics, there is no honor… The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.” — Benjamin Disraeli, 1804–1881 CE, statesman, Conservative politician and writer

• “The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist, because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.” — Benjamin Disraeli

• “How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

• “One of the hardest things in this world is to admit you are wrong. And nothing is more helpful in resolving a situation than its frank admission.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

• “Romance has been elegantly defined as the offspring of fiction and love.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

• “To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

• “A member of Parliament to Disraeli: ‘Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease’. ‘That depends, Sir,’ said Disraeli, ‘whether I embrace your policies or your mistress.’” ― Benjamin Disraeli

• “There is only one sex. A man and a woman are so entirely the same thing, that one hardly understands the mass of distinctions and of subtle reasons with which society is nourished concerning this subject.” — George Sand 1804–1876 CE, novelist, memoirist and journalist

• “Let us accept truth, even when it surprises us and alters our views.” ― George Sand

• “The magnet embraces the iron, the animals come together by the difference of sex… Man alone speaks with distrust, irony, and shame of the miracle which takes place simultaneously in his soul and his body. This separation of the spirit from the flesh has necesssitated convents and brothels.” — George Sand

• “It is a mistake to regard age as a downhill grade toward dissolution. The reverse is true. As one grows older, one climbs with surprising strides.” ― George Sand

• “But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level, and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom” — Alexis de Tocqueville 1805–1859 CE, aristocrat, diplomat, sociologist, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian

• “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “Men will not accept truth at the hands of their enemies, and truth is seldom offered to them by their friends” — Alexis de Tocqueville

• “Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the ‘right’ to education, the ‘right’ to health care, the ‘right’ to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “Everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

• “I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. “ — John Stuart Mill 1806–1873, philosopher, political economist, politician and civil servant

• “Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land [quarter acre] brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.” — John Stuart Mill

• “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “Any, even unintentional, deviation from truth… keeps back civilization, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends.” — John Stuart Mill

• “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.” — John Stuart Mill

• “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of prevailing opinion; against the tendency of society to impose its own… rules of conduct on those who dissent from them” — John Stuart Mill

• “The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “I have learned to seek my happiness by limiting my desires, rather than in attempting to satisfy them.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “Not only a right but a duty, voting should not have any more to do with personal wishes than when making a decision on a jury. If not able to rise above self-interest, a person is unfit to vote.” — John Stuart Mill

• “That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often become the height of wisdom in the next.” — John Stuart Mill

• “Christian morality (so called) has all the characters of a reaction; it is, in great part, a protest against Paganism. Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than action; innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good: in its precepts (as has been well said) ‘thou shalt not’ predominates unduly over ‘thou shalt.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “In the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises.” — John Stuart Mill

• “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “One of the mistakes most often committed — and which are the sources of the greatest practical errors in human affairs — is that of supposing that the same name always stands for the same aggregation of ideas.” — John Stuart Mill

• “Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “I consider it presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “It still remains unrecognised, that to bring a child into existence without a fair prospect of being able, not only to provide food for its body, but instruction and training for its mind, is a moral crime, both against the unfortunate offspring and against society; and that if the parent does not fulfil this obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled, at the charge, as far as possible, of the parent.” ― John Stuart Mill

• “The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.” — Charles Darwin 1809–1882 CE, naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology

• “I would as soon be descended from a baboon… as from a savage who delights in torturing his enemies… treats his wives like slaves… and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.” — Charles Darwin

• “A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives — approving of some and disapproving of others… I ought or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.” — Charles Darwin

• “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.” — Charles Darwin

• “The very essence of instinct is that it’s followed independently of reason.” — 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.” ― Charles Darwin

• “I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment…Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man… hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” — Charles Darwin

• “Without speculation there is no good and original observation.” — Charles Darwin

• But I was very unwilling to give up my belief… Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.” — Charles Darwin

• “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Great is the power of steady misrepresentation.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Besides love and sympathy, animals exhibit other qualities connected with the social instincts which in us would be called moral.” ― Charles Darwin

• “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

• “We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us.” ― Charles Darwin

• “One general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Every human action is determined by hereditary constitution, [the environment], the example and the teaching of others… This view should teach one profound humility — one deserves no credit for anything. Nor should one blame others… It’s right to punish criminals but solely to deter others.” — Charles Darwin

• “Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.” ― Charles Darwin

• “The love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.” ― Charles Darwin

• “We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.” ― Charles Darwin

• “I am not the least afraid to die.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.” ― Charles Darwin

• “It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.” ― Charles Darwin

• “There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.” ― Charles Darwin

• “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy of the interposition of a deity. More humble, and I believe truer, to consider him created from animals.” ― Charles Darwin

• “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts [beliefs].” — Charles Darwin

• “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.” ― Charles Darwin

• “All ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children.” — Charles Darwin

• “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” ― Charles Darwin

• “It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!” — Abraham Lincoln 1809–1861 CE, lawyer, 16th president of the United States

• “I never had a policy; I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.” — Abraham Lincoln

• “Character [noumena] is like a tree and reputation [phenomenon] like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” — Abraham Lincoln

• “Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?” — Abraham Lincoln

• “Whatever you are, be a good one.” — Abraham Lincoln

• “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “I would rather be a little nobody, than to be an evil somebody.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” — Abraham Lincoln

• “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” ― Abraham Lincoln

• “The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.” — Abraham Lincoln

• “A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.” — Abraham Lincoln

• “Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.” — Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849 CE, writer, poet, editor, and literary critic

• “​…You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if Hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream. I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand — How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep — while I weep! … Can I not save One from the pitiless wave? Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?” — Edgar Allan Poe

• “From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

• “Years of love have been forgot in the hatred of a minute.” — Edgar Allan Poe

• “Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

• “I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

• “The idea of God stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. We know nothing about the nature of God.” — Edgar Allan Poe

• “All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.” — Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allen Poe

• “I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.” — Edgar Allan Poe

• “Stupidity is a talent for misconception.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

• “True genius… prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.” — Edgar Allan Poe

• “For evidence enough. ’Tis found, no doubt: as is your sort of mind, so is your sort of search — you’ll find what you desire….” ― Robert Browning 1812–1889 CE, poet and playwright

• “Love is the energy of life.” ― Robert Browning

• “I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.” ― Robert Browning

• “Take away love and our earth is a tomb.” ― Robert Browning

• “There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness;….and, to know, rather consists in opening out a way where the imprisoned splendor may escape, then in effecting entry for a light supposed to be without.” ― Robert Browning

• “Ignorance is not innocence but sin.” ― Robert Browning

• “Love, hope, fear, faith — these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.” ― Robert Browning

• “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!” ― Robert Browning

• “Paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity.” — Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855 CE, theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic

• “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “What labels me, negates me.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “People understand me so poorly that they don’t even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ — that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

• “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “I hate this fast growing tendency to chain men to machines in big factories and deprive them of all joy in their efforts — the plan will lead to cheap men and cheap products.” — Wilhelm Richard Wagner 1813–1883 CE, composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor

• “Many’s the man who thought himself wise, but what he needed, he did not know…” ― Richard Wagner

• “The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music, the origin to which alone our music owes its being, is the human voice.” ― Richard Wagner

• “Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity. Prophecies of all sorts are rife on such occasions, and are readily believed.” — Charles Mackay 1814–1889 CE, poet, journalist, author, anthologist, novelist, and songwriter

• “Money has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence upon the turn of a piece of paper.” — Charles Mackay

• “You have no enemies, you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray of duty that the brave endure, must have made foes. If you have none, small is the work that you have done. You’ve hit no traitor on the hip. You’ve dashed no cup from perjured lip. You’ve never turned the wrong to right. You’ve been a coward in the fight.” ― Charles Mackay

• “Men, it has been well said, think in herds but it will be seen that they go mad in herds. They only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” — Charles Mackay

• “In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” ― Charles MacKay

• “Nobody blamed the credulity and avarice of the people, — the degrading lust of gain, which had swallowed up every nobler quality in the national character… These things were never mentioned.” — Charles Mackay

• “We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” ― Charles MacKay

• “Every age has its peculiar folly — some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.” ― Charles Mackay

• “Many persons grow insensibly attached to that which gives them a great deal of trouble, as a mother often loves her sick and ever-ailing child better than her more healthy offspring.” ― Charles MacKay

• “Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled.” ― Charles MacKay

• “Three causes especially have excited the discontent of mankind; and, by impelling us to seek remedies for the irremediable, have bewildered us in a maze of madness and error. These are death, toil, and the ignorance of the future.” ― Charles MacKay

• “Of all the offspring of Time, Error is the most ancient, and is so old and familiar an acquaintance, that Truth, when discovered, comes upon most of us like an intruder, and meets the intruder’s welcome.” ― Charles Mackay

• “During seasons of great pestilence men have often believed the prophecies of crazed fanatics, that the end of the world was come. Credulity is always greatest in times of calamity. Prophecies of all sorts are rife on such occasions, and are readily believed, whether for good or evil. During the great plague, which ravaged all Europe, between the years 1345 and 1350, it was generally considered that the end of the world was at hand.” ― Charles Mackay

• “Posterity is grateful if our contemporaries are not.” ― Charles Mackay

• “Theology is the science of the divine lie, jurisprudence the science of the human lie, and metaphysics and idealistic philosophy the science of the half-lie.” — Mikhail Bakunin 1814–1876 CE, revolutionary anarchist

• “Both [Church and State] have the same principle as their point of departure: that of the natural wickedness of man… Both strive to transform men, the one into a saint, the other into a citizen. But the natural man must die.” — Mikhail Bakunin 1814–1876 CE

• “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.” ― Mikhail Bakunin

• “Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.” — Anthony Trollope 1815–1882 CE, novelist and civil servant

• “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” ― Anthony Trollope

• “Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.” ― Anthony Trollope

• “No deeply-rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse argument. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic.” — George Henry Lewes 1817–1878 CE, philosopher and critic of literature and theatre

• “It is impossible to deny that dishonest men often grow rich and famous, becoming powerful in their parish or in parliament. Their portraits simper from shop windows; and they live and die respected. This success is theirs; yet it is not the success which a noble soul will envy.” — George Henry Lewes

• “We only see what interests us, and we have only insight in proportion to our sympathy.” ― George Henry Lewes

• “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.” — Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862 CE, naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher

• “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “Men have become the tools of their tools… have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels , not of trade, but of thought.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “The arts and sciences, and a thousand appliances: the wind that blows is all that anybody knows.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We all live according to rule. Some men are bed-ridden; all world-ridden.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “As for doing good, that is one of the professions which are full… There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted… If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life” — Henry David Thoreau

• “A love of nature keeps no factories busy.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams… In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior… Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Sometimes I ceased to live and began to be.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “We are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor… No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new… The head monkey in Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “The transition will occasion a rethinking of ‘prosperous,’ and early adapters can get a head start. The way down can indeed be prosperous, but only for ex-hyper-consumers who redefine their vision of prosperity. ‘A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.’” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Time is but the stream I go fishing in.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice… Can there not be a government in which majorities to not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?” — Henry David Thoreau

• “It is never too late to give up your prejudices.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “I am convinced that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown These take place only in communities where some have got more than is sufficient while others have not enough.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves… how worn and dusty, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!” — Henry David Thoreau

• “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “I have never yet met a man who was quite awake… with an infinite expectation of the dawn… the day is a perpetual morning… I went to the woods… to see if I could learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “Talk about slavery! It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or tool, and surrenders his inalienable right of reason and conscience.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “My greatest skill in life has been to want but little.” — Henry David Thoreau

• “We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..” ― Henry David Thoreau

• “The method of production of material things generally determines the social, political, and spiritual currents of life.” — Karl Marx 1818–1883 CE, philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist

• “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.” — Karl Marx

• “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.” — Frederick Douglass 1818–1895 CE, social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman

• “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” ― Frederick Douglass

• “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” ― Frederick Douglass

• “For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.” ― Frederick Douglass

• “There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of man.” — Herman Melville 1819–1891 CE, novelist, short story writer, and poet

• “Better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation” — Herman Melville

• “Nothing exists in itself… there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.” — Herman Melville

• “It is not down on any map; true places never are.” — Herman Melville

• “Sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.” — Herman Melville

• “Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.” ― Herman Melville

• “Truth is in things, and not in words. ” ― Herman Melville

• “Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.” ― Herman Melville

• “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.” — George Eliot 1819–1880 CE, novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era

• “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” — George Eliot

• “What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?” ― George Eliot

• “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” ― George Eliot

• “We all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.” — George Eliot

• “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.” ― George Eliot

• “I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.” ― George Eliot

• “And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.” ― George Eliot

• “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” ― George Eliot

• “Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake and must keep the conscience alive. But Alas! The scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.” — George Eliot

• “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.” — George Eliot

• “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief vast as a sky, and colored by but a diffused thimbleful of knowledge” — George Eliot

• “There’s no sort of work that could ever be done well if you minded what fools say. You must have it inside you that your plan is right, and that plan you must follow.” — George Eliot

• “In a community regulated by laws of demand and supply… those who become rich are — generally speaking — industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible, unimaginative, insensitive, and ignorant.” — John Ruskin 1819–1900 CE, polymath — a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist

• “Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty if only we have the eyes to see them.” ― John Ruskin

• “What Egyptian worship of garlic or crocodile was ever so damnable as the modern worship of money?” — John Ruskin

• “There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man’s lawful prey.” — John Ruskin

• “It is better to lose your pride with someone you love rather than to lose that someone you love with your useless pride.” ― John Ruskin

• “What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do” ― John Ruskin

• “Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. ” ― John Ruskin

• “All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time.” ― John Ruskin

• “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel.” ― John Ruskin

• “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” — Walt Whitman 1819–1892 CE, poet, essayist, novelist, and journalist

• “I like the scientific spirit — the holding off, the being sure but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: this is ultimately fine — it always keeps the way beyond open — always gives life, thought, affection, the whole man, a chance to try over again after a mistake — after a wrong guess.” ― Walt Whitman

• “I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God. Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things. Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago. Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.” ― Walt Whitman

• “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” ― Walt Whitman

• “First doubt, then inquire, then discover. This has been the process with all our great thinkers…He who knows most believes the least.” — Henry Thomas Buckle 1821–1862 CE, historian, sometimes called “the Father of Scientific History”

• “The great enemy of civilization is the notion that society cannot prosper, unless the affairs of life are watched over and protected at nearly every turn by the state and the church.” — Henry Thomas Buckle

• “Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” ― Henry Thomas Buckle

• “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.” ― Henry Thomas Buckle

• “All that people seek on earth is someone to bow down to, someone to hand their conscience to, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap.” — Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky 1821–1881 CE, novelist, short story writer, essayist and journalist

• “Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “The world says: ‘Don’t hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more.’ This is the worldly doctrine of today and they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “They have managed to accumulate a greater number of things but joy in the world has grown less… Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature for they thus engender in themselves many senseless and foolish desires, habits, and absurd fancies.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “Only you must not be like everybody else, that’s all. Even if everyone else is one way, you be the only one not like that even if you are the only one.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

• “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

• “To love someone means to see them as God intended them.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “When our hearts grow soft with infinite, universal, unquenchable love and we realize that each one of us is responsible for all of mankind and for every individual person, we will have the power to win over the whole world.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

• “The stupider one is, the closer to reality. Intelligence is a knave, it wriggles and hides but stupidity is honest and straight-forward.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “The world has proclaimed freedom but what do we see in this? Our culture says, ‘try to satisfy all of your desires and even multiply them’ but what follows from this? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, dissatisfaction, envy, and crime.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “Everyone strives to keep their individuality, to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for themselves; but instead of self-realization, this only results in impotence and complete isolation.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “You are working for the whole, you are acting for the future. Seek no reward, for great is your reward on this earth: the spiritual joy.” — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky

• “In short, one may say anything about the history of the world — anything that might enter the most disordered imagination. The only thing one can’t say is that it’s rational.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky

• “The majority never had right on its side… The stupid people are an overwhelming majority all over the world. The majority has might on its side — unfortunately; but right it has not… The minority is always in the right.” — Henrik Ibsen 1828–1906 CE, playwright and theatre director

• “Rob the average man of his life-illusions and you rob him of his happiness.” — Henrik Ibsen

• “The State is the curse of the individual… Away with the State! I will take part in that revolution.” — Henrik Ibsen

• “I don’t imagine you will dispute the fact that at present the stupid people are in an absolutely overwhelming majority all the world over.” ― Henrik Ibsen

• “The most dangerous enemy of the truth and freedom amongst us is the compact majority” ― Henrik Ibsen

• “Don’t use that exotic word ‘ideals‘. We have a good enough native word: ‘lies’.” ― Henrik Ibsen

• “It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.” ― Ibsen Henrik

• “You have never loved me. You have only thought it pleasant to be in love with me.” ― Henrik Ibsen

• “Anti-Semitism is a pathological condition.… Among all disgraceful phenomena, it is the most disgusting and abominable.” — Leo Tolstoy 1828–1910 CE, writer, regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time

• “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor — such is my idea of happiness.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking…” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “When you love someone, you love the person as they are, and not as you’d like them to be.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “Without hypocrisy, lying, punishments, prisons, fortresses and murders, no new power can arise and no existing one hold its own… thus efforts to get it are not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty.” — Leo Tolstoy

• “It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “We have only one instrument wherewith to know ourselves and our relation to the universe — we have no other — and that instrument is reason.” — Leo Tolstoy

• “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “Most men — including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity — can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” — Leo Tolstoy

• “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of human wisdom.” — Leo Tolstoy

• “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.” ― Leo Tolstoy

• “Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal — that there is no human relation between master and slave.” — Leo Tolstoy

• “How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog. To tell your name the livelong day, To an admiring bog!” — Emily Dickinson 1830–1886 CE, poet, little-known during her life, she has since come to be regarded as one of the most important figures poetry

• “Inebriate of air am I — and debauchee of dew, Reeling, through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue.” — Emily Dickinson

• “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane.” — Emily Dickinson

• “I don’t profess to be profound; but I do lay claim to common sense.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “That it will never come again is what makes life sweet. Dwell in possibility. Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” ― Emily Dickenson

• “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin
  Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “Beauty — be not caused — It Is. Chase it, and it ceases. Chase it not, and it abides.” — Emily Dickinson

• “I have been bent and broken, but -I hope- into a better shape.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “Saying nothing sometimes says the most.” — Emily Dickinson

• “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.” — Emily Dickinson

• “Nature is a haunted house — but Art — is a house that tries to be haunted.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” — Emily Dickinson

• “Because I could not stop for Death — He kindly stopped for me — The Carriage held but just Ourselves — And Immortality.” ― Emily Dickinson

• “Much Madness is divinest Sense — To a discerning Eye — Much Sense — the starkest Madness — ’Tis the Majority In this, as All, prevail — Assent — and you are sane — Demur — you’re straightway dangerous — And handled with a Chain — ” ― Emily Dickinson

• “This is my doctrine: Give every other human being every right you claim for yourself.” — Robert G. Ingersoll 1833–1899 CE, lawyer, writer, orator, “the Great Agnostic”

• “The truth shall make you free, but first it shall make you angry.”
  ― Robert Green Ingersoll

• “Why should we place Christ at the top and summit of the human race? Was he kinder, more forgiving, more self-sacrificing than Buddha? Was he wiser, did he meet death with more perfect calmness, than Socrates? Was he more patient, more charitable, than Epictetus? Was he a greater philosopher, a deeper thinker, than Epicurus? In what respect was he the superior of Zoroaster? Was he gentler than Lao-tsze, more universal than Confucius? Were his ideas of human rights and duties superior to those of Zeno? Did he express grander truths than Cicero? Was his mind subtler than Spinoza’s? Was his brain equal to Kepler’s or Newton’s? Was he grander in death — a sublimer martyr than Bruno? Was he in intelligence, in the force and beauty of expression, in breadth and scope of thought, in wealth of illustration, in aptness of comparison, in knowledge of the human brain and heart, of all passions, hopes and fears, the equal of Shakespeare, the greatest of the human race?” ― Robert G. Ingersoll

• “Like the most of you, I was raised among people who knew — who were certain. They did not reason or investigate. They had no doubts. They knew that they had the truth. In their creed there was no guess — no perhaps. They had a revelation from God. They knew the beginning of things. They knew that God commenced to create one Monday morning, four thousand and four years before Christ. They knew that in the eternity — back of that morning, he had done nothing. They knew that it took him six days to make the earth — all plants, all animals, all life, and all the globes that wheel in space. They knew exactly what he did each day and when he rested. They knew the origin, the cause of evil, of all crime, of all disease and death.” ― Robert G. Ingersoll

• “The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.” — Lord Acton 1834–1902 CE, historian, politician, and writer

• “The two forces, the two worst enemies of civil freedom are absolute monarchy and revolution.” — Lord Acton

• “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.” — Lord Acton

• “A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times.” ― Lord Acton

• “The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” ― Lord Acton

• “Judge talent at its best but character at its worst.” ― Lord Acton

• “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.” ― Lord Acton

• “In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.” — Mark Twain 1835–1910 CE, writer, humorist and essayist

• “To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.” — Mark Twain

• “It’s not what you don’t know that kills you, it’s what you know for sure that ain’t true.” — Mark Twain

• “Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.” ― Mark Twain

• “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” ― Mark Twain

• “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” — Mark Twain

• “Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” ― Mark Twain

• “You cannot trust your eyes, if your imagination is out of focus.” ― Mark Twain

• “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” — Mark Twain

• “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” ― Mark Twain

• “Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge…. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain

• “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” — Mark Twain

• “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” ― Mark Twain

• “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.” — Mark Twain

• “Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.” — Mark Twain

• “When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it.” — Mark Twain

• “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.” — Mark Twain

• “The chance reading of a book or of a paragraph in a newspaper, can start a man on a new track and make him renounce his old associations and seek new ones that are in sympathy with his new ideal; and the result for that man, can be an entire change of his way of life.” — Mark Twain

• “It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.” — Mark Twain

• “Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War… He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out… and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.” — Mark Twain

• “When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.” — Mark Twain

• “The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” ― Mark Twain

• “′Classic′ — a book which people praise and don’t read.” ― Mark Twain

• “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform… Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.” — Mark Twain

• “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” — Mark Twain

• “Familiarity breeds contempt and children.” — Mark Twain

• “There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war… Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked… and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.” — Mark Twain

• “Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.” — Mark Twain

• “It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.” — Mark Twain

• “The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” [to be stateless, associating in small groups, before modern times] — Mark Twain

• “The Jews are members of the human race — worse I can say of no man… Anti-Semitism is the swollen envy of pygmy minds, meanness, injustice.” — Mark Twain

• “Each place has its own advantages — heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.” — Mark Twain

• “Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it… Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.” — Mark Twain

• “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” ― Mark Twain

• “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” ― Mark Twain

• “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” ― Mark Twain

• “But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?” ― Mark Twain

• “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” ― Mark Twain

• “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” ― Mark Twain

• “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” ― Mark Twain

• “What is success without failure? What is a win without a loss? What is health without illness? You have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there is always going to be suffering. It’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.” — Mark Twain

• “You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?” ― Mark Twain

• “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” ― Mark Twain

• “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.” ― Mark Twain

• “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” ― Mark Twain

• “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ” ― Mark Twain

• “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.” ― Mark Twain

• “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation…” — Mark Twain

• “The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.” ― Mark Twain

• “I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” ― Mark Twain

• “Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.” ― Mark Twain

• “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.” ― Mark Twain

• “You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” ― Mark Twain

• “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” ― Mark Twain

• “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” ― Mark Twain

• “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.” ― Mark Twain

• “Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.” — Mark Twain

• “Argument is generally a waste of time and trouble. It is better to present one’s opinion and leave it to stick or no as it may happen. If sound, it will probably in the end stick, and the sticking is the main thing.” — Samuel Butler 1835–1902 CE, novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872)

• “Not only is nothing good or ill but thinking makes it so, but nothing is at all, except in so far as thinking has made it so.” ― Samuel Butler

• “We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.” — Samuel Butler

• “If I were to start as a God or a prophet I think I should take the line: ‘Thou shalt not believe in me. Thou shalt not have me for a God. Thou shalt worship any damned thing thou likest except me.” — Samuel Butler

• “[‘God’ is] but the expression for man’s highest conception of goodness, wisdom, and power; that in order to generate a more vivid conception of so great and glorious a thought, man has personified it and called it by a name… people should no more cease to love God on ceasing to believe in His objective personality than they cease to love justice on discovering that she was not really personal; they will never truly know Him until they see Him thus.” — Samuel Butler

• “Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.” — Samuel Butler

• “Until you think of things as they are, and not of the words that misrepresent them, you cannot think rightly. Words produce the appearance of hard and fast lines where there are none.” — Samuel Butler

• “For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organize our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organize our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.” — Samuel Butler

• “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.” — Samuel Butler

• “Extremes are alone logical, but they are always absurd… Reason betrays men into the drawing of hard and fast lines… there is hardly an error into which men may not easily be led if they base their conduct upon reason only… reason uncorrected by instinct is as bad as instinct uncorrected by reason.” — Samuel Butler

• “To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.” — Samuel Butler

• “Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.” — Samuel Butler

• “War to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race.” — Samuel Butler

• “So engrained in the human heart is the desire to believe that some people really do know what they say they know, and can thus save them from the trouble of thinking for themselves, that in a short time would-be philosphers and faddists became more powerful than ever, and gradually led their countrymen to accept all those absurd views of life” — Samuel Butler

• “Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.” — Samuel Butler

• “Those men are best who are not remarkable either for vice or virtue… the most that can be truly said for virtue is that there is a considerable balance in its favor… but there is much pseudo-virtue going about, which is apt to let people in very badly before they find it out.” — Samuel Butler

• “They know that they will sooner gain their end by appealing to men’s pockets, in which they have generally something of their own; than to their heads which contain for the most part little but borrowed or stolen property” — Samuel Butler

• “When we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to machines as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom, is it not plain that machines are gaining ground on us? This is the art of the machines — they serve that they may rule” — Samuel Butler

• “Perhaps the religious systems of all countries are now more or less an attempt to uphold the unfathomable and unconscious instinctive wisdom of millions of past generations, against the comparatively shallow, consciously reasoned, and ephemeral conclusions drawn from that of the last thirty or forty.” — Samuel Butler

• “Human language is too gross a vehicle of thought — thought being incapable of absolute translation… as there can be no translation from one language into another which will not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere” — Samuel Butler

• “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” — John Burroughs 1837–1921 CE, naturalist and nature essayist

• “One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: ‘To rise above little things’.” ― John Burroughs

• “I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order.” ― John Burroughs

• “I am in love with this world… I have tilled its soil, I have gathered its harvest, I have waited upon its seasons, and always have I reaped what I have sown. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings.” ― John Burroughs

• “The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.” ― John Burroughs

• “The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat, he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls, he is crushed.” ― John Burroughs

• “It never seems to occur to these farseeing teachers that Nature’s object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit—the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.“ —John Muir 1838-1914 CE, naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, botanist, zoologist, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness

• “The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.” ― John Muir

• “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” ― John Muir

• “Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.” ― John Muir

• “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.” ― John Muir

• “I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.” ― John Muir

• “Most people are on the world, not in it — have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them — undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” ― John Muir

• “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.” — Claude Monet 1840–1926 CE, painter and founder of Impressionism painting who is seen as a key precursor to modernism

• “Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ― Claude Monet

• “I would like to paint the way a bird sings.” ― Claude Monet

• “The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.” ― Claude Monet

• “The more I live, the more I regret how little I know.” ― Claude Monet

• “Upon this first, and in one sense this sole, rule of reason, that in order to learn you must desire to learn, and in so desiring not be satisfied with what you already incline to think, there follows one corollary which itself deserves to be inscribed upon every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.” — Charles Sanders Peirce 1839–1914 CE

• “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.” ― Charles Sanders Peirce

• “Notwithstanding all that has been discovered since Newton’s time, his saying that we are little children picking up pretty pebbles on the beach while the whole ocean lies before us unexplored remains substantially as true as ever, and will do so though we shovel up the pebbles by steam shovels and carry them off in carloads.” ― Charles Sanders Peirce

• “Are you sure twice two are four? Not at all. A certain percentage of the human race are insane and subject to illusions. It may be you are one of them, and that your idea that twice two is four is a lunatic notion, and your seeming recollection that other people think so, the baseless fabric of a vision.” ― Charles Sanders Peirce

• “Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way.” ― Charles Sanders Peirce

• “Nor must any synechist say: ‘I am altogether myself, and not at all you.’ If you embrace synechism, you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness. In the first place, your neighbours are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the selfhood you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity.” — Charles Sanders Peirce

• “If one’s conclusions determine what your reasoning shall be, that reasoning is sham.” — Charles Sanders Peirce

• “It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way. So we must dig and delve unceasingly.” — Claude Monet 1840–1926 CE

• “As a rule, we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.” — William James 1842–1910 CE, philosopher and psychologist

• “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” — William James

• “Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism.” — William James

• “The praise of poverty needs to be once more boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life.” — William James

• “The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” — William James

• “There is an everlasting struggle in every mind between the tendency to keep unchanged, and the tendency to renovate… Our education is a ceaseless compromise between the conservative and the progressive” — William James

• “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” ― William James

• “Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark and neither laws… monuments.. battleships… libraries… mechanical invention… churches… universities… nor political adroitness can save us from degeneration if the inner mystery be lost.” — William James

• “To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.” ― William James

• “We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
  meaning of it all.” ― William James

• “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” — William James

• “If this be the whole fruit of victory — that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should succeed, and protract… their contented and inoffensive lives — better to lose rather than win the battle.” — William James

• “Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.” ― William James

• “The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that comes to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics” — William James

• “The Truth; what a perfect idol of the rationalistic mind!… truths are man-made products… Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process.” — William James

• “Love, n. A temporary insanity curable by marriage.” — Ambrose Bierce 1842- c. 1914 CE (MIA in Mexico as journalist), short story writer, journalist, poet, and American Civil War veteran whose The Devil’s Dictionary is considered a masterpiece of satire

• “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Selfish, adj. Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, intelligence is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Ocean, n. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man — who has no gills.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum — “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.” ― Ambrose Bierce,

• “Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something he can see and feel.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “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

• “You don’t have to be stupid to be a Christian, … but it probably helps.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Education, n. That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religions, and whoso believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Apologize: To lay the foundation for a future offence.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “HOMICIDE, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are
  four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and
  praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain
  whether he fell by one kind or another — the classification is for
  advantage of the lawyers.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Bore, n.: A person who talks when you wish him to listen.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “Positive, adj.: Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.” ― Ambrose Bierce

• “The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.” — Henry James 1843–1916 CE, novelist

• If you take it at any one spot and moment, reason is one of the most feeble of Nature’s forces. It is only in the long run that its effects become perceptible.” — Henry James 1843–1916 CE

• “She feels in italics and thinks in CAPITALS.” ― Henry James

• “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS… is our national disease.” — William James 1842–1910 CE

• “Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best that’s in you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900 CE, classical scholar, philosopher, critic of culture, and cultural physician

• “One’s belief in truth begins with a doubt of all the truths one has believed before.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “There are no facts, only interpretations.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “And so, onwards… along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence; however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through- false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes- into your goal, with nothing left over.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “You say that a good cause will even sanctify war! I tell you, it is the good war that sanctifies every cause!” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “Convictions [beliefs] are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine… a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “The means employed by the lust for power have changed, but the same volcano continues to glow… what one formerly did ‘for the sake of God’ one now does for the sake of money — that which now gives the highest feeling of power and good conscience.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions — as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “To dream of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “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

• “The Jews performed a miracle by inverting traditional values — ‘poor’ became a synonym for ‘saint,’ ‘rich’ for ‘evil’ and ‘violent.’ In this they brought about and began a slave insurrection in morals and this is where their significance as a people can be found.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “Your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles when a carriage goes past.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

• “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

• “An education isn’t how much you know… It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.” — Anatole France 1844–1924 CE, poet, journalist, and novelist

• “If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.” — Anatole France

• “I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.” — Anatole France

• “It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel.” ― Anatole France

• “It is possible that our millions of suns make up altogether but a spec in a minute insect in a world vast beyond our ability to imagine which is in some other world no more than a speck of dust.” — Anatole France

• “I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me.” — Sarah Bernhardt 1844–1923 CE, stage actress

• “We must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them.” ― Sarah Bernhardt

• “No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.” —William Kingdon Clifford 1845-1879 CE, mathematician and philosopher

• “To sum up: it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” ― William Kingdon Clifford

• “In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous. The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.” ― William Kingdon Clifford

• “Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled. It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete.” ― William Kingdon Clifford

• “There is one thing in the world more wicked than the desire to command and that is the will to obey.” ― William Kingdon Clifford

• “We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.” ― William Kingdon Clifford

• “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work… Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” — Thomas A. Edison 1847–1931 CE, inventor and businessman

• “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” ― Thomas Edison

• “Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.” ― Thomas Edison

• “Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” ― Thomas Edison

• “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this — you haven’t.” ― Thomas Edison

• “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” ― Thomas Edison

• “What you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter… Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me, He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in?” — Thomas Edison

• “The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.” — Thomas Edison

• “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.” ― Thomas Edison

• “It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.” — Robert Louis Stevenson 1850–1894 CE, novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer

• “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

• “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

• “Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.” ― Joseph Conrad 1853–1924, one of the greatest writers in the English language although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties

• “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of unextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s-breadth of the last opportunity for pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision — he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: The horror! The horror!” ― Joseph Conrad

• “The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies — which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world — what I want to forget.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream-alone.” ― Joseph Conrad

• “The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.” — Lucy Parsons 1853–1942 CE, social anarchist and later anarcho-communist

• “Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.” — Lucy Parsons

• “We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class use women to reduce them.” — Lucy Parsons

• “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it” — Oscar Wilde 1854–1900 CE, poet and playwright

• “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ― Oscar Wilde

• “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” — Oscar Wilde

• “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” — Oscar Wilde

• “One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” — Oscar Wilde

• “I am not young enough to know everything.” ― Oscar Wilde

• “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” ― Oscar Wilde

• “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” — Oscar Wilde

• “What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” — Oscar Wilde

• “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” — Oscar Wilde

• “Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.” — Sigmund Freud 1856–1939 CE, neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis

• “It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “The weakness of my position does not imply a strengthening of yours.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence. It has no critical faculty… It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness… It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative and it has a deep aversion to all innovations” — Sigmund Freud

• “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Everyone owes nature a death.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer in spite of my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What do women want.’” — Sigmund Freud

• “Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into ‘hostile life’. We may call this ‘education to reality’. Need I confess to you that the whole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?” ― Sigmund Freud

• “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison to his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it will not rest until it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “The judgements of value made by mankind are attempts to prop up their illusions with arguments.” — Sigmund Freud

• “Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
  because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “The more the fruits of knowledge become accessible to men, the more widespread is the decline of religious belief.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “It is easy, as we can see, for a barbarian to be healthy; for a civilized man [modern human], the task is a hard one.” — Sigmund Freud

• “Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to think that we can get elsewhere what science cannot give.” — Sigmund Freud

• “Men measure by false standards: everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself and admires others who attain them, while under-valuing the truly precious things in life.” — Sigmund Freud

• “Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak , pawned a part of their narcissism.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit to it openly. Some are afraid to show even the slightest sign of affection because of fear. Fear that their feelings may not be recognized, or even worse, returned. But one thing about human beings that puzzles me the most is their conscious effort to be connected with the object of their affection even if it kills them slowly within.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Time spent with cats is never wasted.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “As regards intellectual work it remains a fact, indeed, that great decisions in the realm of thought and momentous discoveries and solutions of problems are only possible to an individual, working in solitude.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “No, our science is no illusion. But an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion’s eleventh commandment is “Thou shalt not question.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.” ― Sigmund Freud

• “It is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society: it is belief.” — George Bernard Shaw 1856–1950 CE, playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist

• “Democracy substitutes selection by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “Youth is wasted on the young.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it….” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “He who can does. He who can’t teaches.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and, generally to scandalize one’s uncles.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.” — George Bernard Shaw

• “This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” ― George Bernard Shaw

• “The spread of civilization may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.” — Nikola Tesla 1856–1943 CE, engineer, futurist, and inventor

• “If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena [e.g. systems of energy/information], it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “It’s not the love you make. It’s the love you give.” — Nikola Tesla

• “The incessant stream of impressions pouring into our consciousness through all the gateways of knowledge make modern existence hazardous in many ways.” — Nikola Tesla

• “One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment… the elimination of egoism and pride which always plunges the world into primeval barbarism and strife” — Nikola Tesla

• “War cannot be avoided until the physical cause for its recurrence is removed.” — Nikola Tesla

• “Be alone, that is the secret of invention; be alone, that is when ideas are born.” — Nikola Tesla

• “Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ” ― Nikola Tesla

• “Instinct transcends knowledge.” — Nikola Tesla

• “You may live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “What we now want is closer contact and better understanding between individuals and communities all over the earth, and the elimination of egoism and pride which is always prone to plunge the world into primeval barbarism and strife… Peace can only come as a natural consequence of universal enlightenment…” ― Nikola Tesla

• “Fights between individuals, as well as governments and nations, invariably result from misunderstandings in the broadest interpretation of this term. Misunderstandings are always caused by the inability of appreciating one another’s point of view. This again is due to the ignorance of those concerned, not so much in their own, as in their mutual fields. The peril of a clash is aggravated by a more or less predominant sense of combativeness, posed by every human being. To resist this inherent fighting tendency the best way is to dispel ignorance of the doings of others by a systematic spread of general knowledge. With this object in view, it is most important to aid exchange of thought and intercourse.” ― Nikola Tesla

• “There is no failure except in no longer trying.” — Elbert Hubbard 1856–1915 CE, writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher

• “Punishment should fit the criminal, not the crime.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without a teacher.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you.” ― Elbert Hubbard

• “When we remember that some of the best and noblest men that ever lived have been reviled, indicted, and executed by so-called good men, how can we believe stories that revile and discredit anyone?” — Elbert Hubbard

• “I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.” ― Elbert Hubbard

• “Nothing is permanent but change.” ― Elbert Hubbard

• “Folks who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for any more than they do.” ― Elbert Hubbard

• “A man alone is only half a man — it takes both a man and a woman to complete the circuit… sublime thoughts and great deeds are the children of married minds.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “Of all the illusions that beset mankind, none is quite so curious a that tendency to suppose that we are mentally and morally superior to those who differ from us in opinion.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.” ― Elbert Hubbard

• “There is no doubt that a teacher — once committed to a certain line of thought — will cling to that line long after all others have deserted it. In trying to convince others, he convinces himself.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.” ― Elbert Hubbard

• “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “The line between failure and success is so fine. . . that we are often on the line and do not know it.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “Success is a constant sense of discontent broken by brief periods of satisfaction from a challenging accomplishment.” — Elbert Hubbard

• “Our present law-makers, as a body, are ignorant, corrupt and unprincipled; the majority of them are, directly or indirectly, under the control of the very monopolies against whose acts we have been seeking relief.” — Ida Tarbell 1857–1944 CE, writer, investigative journalist, biographer, and lecturer

• “I have often found it difficult to explain myself to myself, and I do not often try.” ― Ida Tarbell

• Sacredness of human life! The world has never believed it! It has been with life that we settled our quarrels, won wives, gold and land, defended ideas, imposed religions. We have held that a death toll was a necessary part of every human achievement, whether sport, war or industry. A moment’s rage over the horror of it, and we have sunk into indifference.

• There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

• “Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning. They begin sensing that something is amiss, and start looking for answers. Inner knowledge and anomalous outer experiences show them a side of reality others are oblivious to, and so begins their journey of awakening. Each step of the journey is made by following the heart instead of following the crowd and by choosing knowledge over the veils of ignorance.” — Henri-Louis Bergson 1859–1941 CE, philosopher who was influential in the traditions of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy

• “Intuition is instinct becoming conscious of itself, set free from the slavery of exigencies it leads us to the very depths of life itself. A type of knowledge akin to art but having for object life itself, it transcends intellect but uses intellect grow beyond the limitations of mere instinct.” — Henri-Louis Bergson

• “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” ― Henri Bergson

• “Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.” — John Dewey 1859–1952 CE, philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

• “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.” ― John Dewey

• “Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” ― John Dewey

• “A problem well put is half solved.” ― John Dewey

• “There’s all the difference in the world between having something to say, and having to say something.” ― John Dewey

• “The fear of death is the beginning of Slavery.” — Arthur Desmond 1859–1929 CE, political activist, poet and author

• “Equality before the Law, is thus a contradiction in terms for Law itself is an incarnation of Inequality. It is true only in the subjective sense, that all who OBEY the Law are equally the servants of those who make it or caused it to be made.” — Arthur Desmond

• “Government is founded on property, property is founded on conquest, and conquest is founded on Power.” — Arthur Desmond

• “He that is slow to believe anything and everything is of great understanding, for belief in one false principle, is the beginning of all unwisdom.” — Arthur Desmond

• “What is your ‘civilization and progress‘ if its only outcome is hysteria and down going? What is ‘government and law‘ if their ripened harvests are men without sap? What are ‘religions and literatures‘ if their grandest productions are hordes of faithful slaves?” — Arthur Desmond

• “Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice, but by Might. Disguise it as you may, the naked sword is still king-maker and king-breaker, as of yore. All other theories are lies and — lures.” — Arthur Desmond

• “The second and cheaper method is, first of all to inoculate those intended to be exploited with some poisonous political soporific, superstition, or theoria; something that operating insidiously, hypodermically, may render them laborious, meek, and tractable. The latter plan has ever proved itself most effective because Aryan populations that would fight to the last gasp against undisguised military despotism; may be induced to passively submit to any indignity or extortion, if their brains are first carefully soaked in some Abstract Lie.” ― Arthur Desmond

• “Civilization is a disease almost invariably fatal unless checked in time.” — William Ralph ‘Dean’ Inge 1860–1954 CE, author, Anglican priest, professor of divinity at Cambridge, and dean of St Paul’s Cathedral

• “What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.” — Dean Inge

• “It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.”
  ― Dean Inge

• “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.” — Dean Inge

• “Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.” — Dean Inge

• “A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common hatred of its neighbors.” — Dean Inge

• “The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.” — Dean Inge

• “Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.” — Dean Inge

• “To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.” — Dean Inge — Dean Inge

• “Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average person.” — Dean Inge

• “We had made a religion of our belief in progress — a baseless dream — but because we had made a religion of it, our disappointment has shaken our faith.” — Dean Inge

• “He who is too busy doing good finds no time to be good.” — Rabindranath Tagore 1861–1941 CE, polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer, and painter

• “You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.” ― Rabindranath Tagore

• “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” ― Rabindranath Tagore

• “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.” ― Rabindranath Tagore

• “Most people believe the mind to be a mirror, more or less accurately reflecting the world outside them, not realizing on the contrary that the mind is itself the principal element of creation.” ― Rabindranath Tagore

• “People are never so likely to be wrong as when they are organized. And they never have so little freedom. Perhaps that is why the people at large keep their freedom. People can be manipulated only when they are organized.” — Henry Ford 1863–1847 CE, industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company

• “Any man can learn anything he will, but no man can teach except to those who want to learn.” — Henry Ford

• “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” ― Henry Ford

• “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably the reason so few engage in it.” ― Henry Ford

• “Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.” ― Henry Ford

• “You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.” ― Henry Ford

• “The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” — Black Elk 1863–1950 CE, a wičháša wakȟáŋ and heyoka of the Oglala Lakota people

• “It is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.” — Black Elk

• “I had a vision because I was seeing in the sacred way and I saw myself on the central mountain of the world, the central mountain that is everywhere.” — Black Elk

• “I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…” ― Black Elk

• “I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw.” — Black Elk

• “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” — George Santayana, 1863–1952 CE, philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist

• “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” ― George Santayana

• A thousand reforms have left the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial abuses.” — George Santayana CE

• “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana

• “My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.” ― George Santayana

• “Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.” ― George Santayana

• “To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love… the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in another’s evil.” — George Santayana

• “Sanity is a madness put to good uses.” ― George Santayana

• “Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption within them of what they rebelled against” — George Santayana

• “Since barbarism has its pleasures, it naturally has its apologists.” — George Santayana

• “Each work has to pass through these stages — ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.” — Swami Vivekananda 1863–1902 CE, monk, philosopher, author, religious teacher, and the chief disciple of the Indian mystic Ramakrishna

• “Comfort is no test of truth. Truth is often far from being comfortable.” — Swami Vivekananda

• “In a day, when you don’t come across any problems — you can be sure that you are travelling in a wrong path” — Swami Vivekananda

• “I’m looking for the face I had before the world was made.” — W.B. (William Butler) Yeats 1865–1939 CE, poet, dramatist and writer

• “There is another world, but it is in this one.” — W.B. Yeats

• “I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.” — W.B. Yeats

• “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” — W.B. Yeats

• “We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.” — W.B. Yeats

• “When I think of all the books I have read, wise words heard… of hopes I have had, all life weighed in the balance of my own life seems to me a preparation for something that never happens.” — W.B. Yeats

• “Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” — W.B. Yeats

• “War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But ‘twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.” — Rudyard Kipling 1865–1936 CE, journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer

• “A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.” — Rudyard Kipling

• “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!” — Rudyard Kipling

• “I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” ― Rudyard Kipling

• “We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” — Rudyard Kipling

• “I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all i knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.” ― Rudyard Kipling

• “He wrapped himself in quotations — as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.” ― Rudyard Kipling

• “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” — Rudyard Kipling

• “If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise If you can dream — and not make dreams your master; If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’ If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!” ― Rudyard Kipling

• “No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books, either to discover or to control himself.” — Romain Rolland 1866–1944 CE, dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic

• “Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.” — Romain Rolland

• “There is only one true heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.” ― Roman Rolland

• “Most men die at twenty or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and loved when they were alive.” — Romain Rolland

• “To understand everything is to hate nothing.” — Romain Rolland

• “Occam was insistent upon this separation of theology and practical truth — a separation which manifestly released scientific inquiry from dogmatic control.” — H.G. Wells 1866–1946 CE, writer, prolific in many genres

• “My idea of politics is an open conspiracy to hurry these tiresome, wasteful, evil things — nationality and war — out of existence; to end this empire and that empire, and set up one Empire of Man.” — H. G. Wells

• “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” — H. G. Wells

• “Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all.” ― H.G. Wells

• “Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.” ― H. G. Wells

• “After his death, Lao Tzu’s teachings were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex and extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas grafted upon them.” — H. G. Wells

• “If we look into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and things within, and blind to the future.” — H. G. Wells

• “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” ― H.G. Wells

• “The incuriousness — the complete absence of science — of the Roman rich and the Roman rulers was more massive and monumental even than their architecture… Rome was content to feast, exact, grow rich, and watch its’ gladiatorial shows without the slightest attempt to learn anything of India, China, Persia, Buddha or Zoroaster…” — H. G. Wells

• “When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.” — H. G. Wells

• “Buddhism has done more for the advance of world civilization and true culture than any other influence in the chronicles of mankind… It is beyond all disputes the achievement of one of the most penetrating intelligence the world has ever known.” — H. G. Wells

• “Advertising is legalized lying.” — H. G. Wells

• “It is possible that in contact with western science, and inspired by the spirit of history, the original teachings of Gautama , revived and purified, may yet play a large part in the direction of human destiny.” — H. G. Wells

• “If we don’t end war, war will end us.” — H. G. Wells

• “If we look into the souls and thoughts of men, we shall find that this impressive display of material prosperity is merely the shining garment of a polity blind to things without and things within, and blind to the future.” — H. G. Wells

• “The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.” ― H.G. Wells

• “It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening.” ― H.G. Wells

• “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative. If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.” — H. G. Wells

• “Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained” — Madame (Marie) Curie 1867–1934 CE, physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity

• “All my life through, the new sights of nature made me rejoice like a child.” ― Marie Curie

• “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” ― Marie Curie

• “You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end,each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a genaral responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think can be most useful.” ― Marie Curie

• “I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. ” ― Marie Curie

• “The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think… All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet.” — Edith Hamilton 1867–1963 CE, educator, internationally known author, renowned classicist

• “Love cannot live where there is no trust.” ― Edith Hamilton

• “Men are helpless as far as their fate is concerned, but they can ally themselves with the good, and in suffering and dying, die and suffer nobly. This is the spirit of Sophocles. He had the sure instinct of the consummate artist, he had a supreme gift of poetic expression, a great intellect, and an unsurpassed sureness of beautiful workmanship” — Edith Hamilton

• “None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.” ― Edith Hamilton

• “It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated.” — Edith Hamilton

• “The mind knows only what lies near the heart.” ― Edith Hamilton

• “Love, however, cannot be forbidden. The more that flame is covered up, the hotter it burns. Also love can always find a way. It was impossible that these two whose hearts were on fire should be kept apart. (Pyramus and Thisbe)” ― Edith Hamilton

• “Liberty depends on self-restraint. Freedom is freedom only when controlled and limited.” ― Edith Hamilton

• “Euripides saw war as completely evil and he wrote the greatest anti-war piece of literature there is, the Trojan Women, but from first to last, he never mounts the pulpit.” — Edith Hamilton

• “The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.” ― Edith Hamilton

• “The attitude peculiar to Socrates among all the great teachers of the world: he will not do their thinking for the men who come to him, neither in matters small nor great.” — Edith Hamilton

• The perfect expression of anything means that that thing has reached its culmination and is on the point of declining.” — Edith Hamilton

• “A man without fear cannot be a slave.” — Edith Hamilton

• “Civilization is a matter of imponderables, of delight in the things of the mind, of love of beauty, of honor, grace, courtesy, delicate feeling. Where imponderables are the things of first importance, there is the height of civilization” — Edith Hamilton

• “The final reason for Rome’s defeat was the failure of mind and spirit to rise to a new and great opportunity. They were split into the sharpest oppositions, extremes, a narrow selfishness that kept men blind when their own self-preservation demanded a world-wide outlook. Material development outstripped human development; the Dark Ages took possession of Europe, classical antiquity ended.” — Edith Hamilton

• “It was a Roman [Horace] who said it was sweet to die for one’s country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.” — Edith Hamilton

• “…a chasm opened in the earth and out of it coal-black horses sprang, drawing a chariot and driven by one who had a look of dark splendor, majestic and beautiful and terrible. He caught her to him and held her close. The next moment she was being borne away from the radiance of earth in springtime to the world of the dead by the king who rules it.” ― Edith Hamilton

• “Guard against idols — yes, guard against all idols, of which surely the greatest is oneself.” — Alexandra David-Néel 1868–1969 CE, explorer, spiritualist, Buddhist, anarchist, opera singer, and writer

• “Who knows the flower best? — the one who reads about it in a book, or the one who finds it wild on the mountainside?” — Alexandra David-Néel

• “To travel is, like to study, to spend a long time with youth. There is no more effective fountain of youth, I believe, than these two things: travel and intellectual activity.” ― Alexandra David-Néel

• “Human credulity, be it in the East or in the West, has no limits. In India, the Brahmins have for centuries kept their countrymen to the opinion that offering presents to those belonging to their caste and feeding them, was a highly meritorious religious work.” ― Alexandra David-Néel

• “We must not wish good to people in spite of them and against their will. Everyone knows, better than anyone, what suits them.”
  ― Alexandra David-Néel

• “He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.” — W.E.B. Du Bois 1868–1963 CE, sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist

• “Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.” ― W.E.B. DuBois

• “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.” ― W.E.B. DuBois

• “The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not for fame.” ― W.E.B. Du Bois

• “There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.” ― W.E.B. DuBois

• “Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.” ― W. E. B. DuBois,

• “This [modern techno-industrial] civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed.” — Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948, lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist, and political ethicist

• “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

• “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate but it is fear.” — Mahatma Gandhi

• “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

• “Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich — yes, richer than a king. And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light,
  And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.” — Edwin Arlington Robinson 1869–1935 CE, poet and playwright

• “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, Grew lean while he assailed the seasons; He wept that he was ever born, And he had reasons. Miniver loved the days of old When swords were bright and steeds were prancing; The vision of a warrior bold Would set him dancing. Miniver sighed for what was not, And dreamed, and rested from his labors; He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot, And Priam’s neighbors. Miniver mourned the ripe renown That made so many a name so fragrant; He mourned Romance, now on the town, And Art, a vagrant. Miniver loved the Medici, Albeit he had never seen one; He would have sinned incessantly Could he have been one. Miniver cursed the commonplace And eyed a khaki suit with loathing; He missed the mediæval grace Of iron clothing. Miniver scorned the gold he sought, But sore annoyed was he without it; Miniver thought, and thought, and thought, And thought about it. Miniver Cheevy, born too late, Scratched his head and kept on thinking; Miniver coughed, and called it fate, And kept on drinking.” ― Edwin Arlington Robinson

• “I have no preconceived impressions or beliefs or opinions… Is it not the prime struggle of life to keep the mind plastic? To see and feel and hear things newly? To accept nothing as settled; to defend the eternal right of the questioner? To reject every conclusion of yesterday before the surer observations of today? — is not that the best life we know?” — David Grayson 1870–1946 CE, journalist, historian, biographer, and writer

• “99 out of every 100 human beings are desperately at work grubbing, sweating, worrying, thinking, sorrowing, enjoying, without in the least knowing why.” — David Grayson

• “He was refusing to be beaten by the past or crushed by the future. He was living, as a man ought to live, every fibre of him, in the only moment he ever really possesses — this moment!” ― David Grayson

• “It is marvelous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home? We mistake unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle foreignness. For want of that inner curiosity… we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere resemblances… With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and passes in Switzerland… a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining heights of the Alps!” — David Grayson

• “We need an enlightened education to bring to emphasize ideas of cooperation and solidarity rather than values of competition and indifference. A vision of an interdependent and connected world can be at the heart of what we pass on to future generations. This way, we may understand how interdependency and cooperation can remedy contemporary ills” — Shechen Gyaltsap 1871–1926 CE, writer, master of the Great Perfection, or Dzogchen

• “Love’s greatest deceit is that — replacing the real woman — it makes us toy with a doll that lives in our brain, the only woman whom we have always at hand and can ever really possess. And gradually, to our own sorrow, we force the real woman to resemble this facetious creation.” — Marcel Proust 1871–1922 CE, novelist, literary critic, and essayist

• “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” ― Marcel Proust

• “If prostitutes themselves attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain; it is because they are not conquests.” — Marcel Proust

• “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust

• “A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody’s opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.” — Marcel Proust

• “The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes.” — Marcel Proust

• “I adore certain symbols as much as you do. But it would be absurd to sacrifice to the symbol the reality which it symbolizes.” — Marcel Proust

• “What we call reality is a certain rapport between our sensations and the memories that encircle us at the same moment.” — Marcel Proust

• “We cannot be taught wisdom, we have to discover it for ourselves by a journey which no one can undertake fir us, an effort which no one can spare us.” — Marcel Proust

• “To believe in medicine would be the height of folly, if not to believe in it were not a greater folly still.” — Marcel Proust

• “The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of man to all that is hidden to others.” — Igjugarjuk ? to 20th century

• “The spirits do not like women with little children to stay too long away from their house… No one who is to become a skillful hunter or a good shaman must remain out too long when visiting strange houses.” — Igjugarjuk

• “Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.” — Bertrand Russell 1872–1970 CE, philosopher, logician, mathematician, and public intellectual

• “Dogmatism is the greatest of mental obstacles to human happiness.” — Bertrand Russell

• “It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? …the demand for certainty is an intellectual vice.” — Bertrand Russell

• “We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.” — Bertrand Russell

• “When you want to teach children to think, you begin by treating them seriously when they are little, giving them responsibilities, talking to them candidly, providing privacy and solitude for them, and making them readers and thinkers of significant thoughts from the beginning. That’s if you want to teach them to think.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “So long as men are not trained to withhold judgement in the absence of evidence, they will be led astray by cocksure prophets, and it is likely that their leaders will be either ignorant fanatics or dishonest charlatans.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.” — Bertrand Russell

• “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The religions of Egypt and Babylonia were originally fertility cults… In Babylon, Ishtar, the earth-goddess, was supreme among female divinities. Throughout western Asia, the Great Mother was worshipped under various names. Greek colonists named her Artemis… Christianity transformed her into the Virgin Mary, and it was Council at Ephesus that legitimated the title Mother of God.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Within the herd we are more friendly to each other than are many species of animals, but in our attitude toward those outside the herd, in spite of all that has been done by moralists and religious teachers, our emotions are as ferocious as those of any animal, and our intelligence enables us to give them a scope which is denied to even the most savage beast.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.” — Bertrand Russell

• “I must confess that I am unable to appreciate the merits of Confucius. His writings are largely occupied with trivial points of etiquette, and his main concern is to teach people how to behave correctly on various occasions. When one compares him, however, with the traditional religious teachers of some other ages and races, one must admit that he has great merits… It certainly has succeeded in producing a whole nation possessed of exquisite manners and perfect courtesy. Nor is Chinese courtesy merely conventional; it is quite as reliable in situations for which no precedent has been provided.” — Bertrand Russell

• “In every important war since 1700, the more democratic side has been victorious.” — Bertrand Russell

• So long as national States exist and fight each other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race. To improve the fighting quality of separate States without having any means of preventing war is the road to universal destruction.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Trade brings men into contact with tribal customs different from their own, and in so doing destroys the dogmatism of the untravelled.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Of all evils of war the greatest is the purely spiritual evil: the hatred, the injustice, the repudiation of truth, the artificial conflict.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Averroes is more important in Christian than in Mohammedan philosophy. In the latter he was a dead end; in the former, a beginning… [he] regarded religion as containing philosophic truth in allegorical form.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The myth is of even more importance, historically, than the reality… For the reality was the source of the myth.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The distinction between words and what they designate is one which it is difficult always to remember… [Ihe confused believe that] sentences have subjects and predicates, therefore the world consists of substances with attributes.” — Bertrand Russell

• “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” — Bertrand Russell

• “What is demanded is a change in our imaginative picture of the world.” — Bertrand Russell

• “James’ doctrine is an attempt to build a superstructure of belief upon a foundation of skepticism, and like all such attempts, it is dependent on fallacies… a form of the subjectivistic madness which is characteristic of most modern philosophy.” — Bertrand Russell

• “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Pythagoras, like Saint Francis, preached to animals. In the society that he founded, men and women were admitted on equal terms; property was held in common, and there was a common way of life.” — Bertrand Russell

• “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

• “In general, I find that things that have happened to me out of doors have made a deeper impression than things that have happened indoors.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.” — Bertrand Russell

• “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Wisdom is… more needed now than ever before, because the rapid growth of technique has made ancient habits of thought and action more inadequate than in any earlier time.” — Bertrand Russell

• “To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The doctrine of the perpetual flux, as taught by Heraclitus, is painful, and science can do nothing to refute it.” — Bertrand Russell

• “What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Love is something far more than desire for sexual intercourse; it is the principal means of escape from the loneliness which afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives.” — Bertrand Russell

• “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.” — Bertrand Russell

• “William James used to preach the ‘will to believe.’ For my part, I should wish to preach the ‘will-to-doubt.’ None of our beliefs are quite true; all at least have a penumbra of vagueness and error. What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Righteousness cannot be born until self-righteousness is dead.” — Bertrand Russell

• “One should respect public opinion in so far as it is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The genuine Liberal does not say ‘this is true’, he says ‘I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best.’” — Bertrand Russell

• “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid … Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, progress is a matter of controversy.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Scientific progress without a corresponding moral and political progress may only increase the magnitude of the disaster that misdirected skill may bring about.” — Bertrand Russell

• “Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while is was recent.” — Bertrand Russell

• “I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken” — Bertrand Russell

• “One must care about a world one will not see.” — Bertrand Russell

• “The belief in a happy ‘state of nature’ in the remote past is derived partly from the biblical narrative of the age of the patriarchs, partly from the classical myth of a golden age. The general belief in the badness of the remote past only came with the doctrine of evolution.” — Bertrand Russell

• “I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “We suffer not only the evils that actually befall us, but all those what our intelligence tells us we have reason to fear… forethought averts physical disaster at the cost of worry, and general lack of joy.” — Bertrand Russell

• “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.” ― Bertrand Russell

• “Success is never so interesting as struggle.” — Willa Cather 1873–1948 CE, writer known for her novels of life on the Great Plains

• “Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.” — Willa Cather

• “There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.” ― Willa Cather

• “I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air. or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.” ― Willa Cather

• “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.” — G.K. Chesterton 1874–1936 CE, author, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic

• “Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men… In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident… they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.” — G.K. Chesterton

• “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “If there were no God, there would be no atheists.” ― G.K. Chesterton

• “A man is a failure who goes through life earning nothing but money.” — Charles Austin Beard 1874–1948 CE, historian and professor

• “Technological civilization… rests fundamentally on power-driven machinery… science in all its branches — physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology — is the servant and upholder of this system.” — Charles Beard

• “All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.” — Charles Beard

• “You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.” ― Charles Beard

• “Religion and Higher Learning. — Religious motives entered into the establishment of colleges as well as local schools. Harvard, founded in 1636, and Yale, opened in 1718, were intended primarily to train “learned and godly ministers” for the Puritan churches of New England. To the far North, Dartmouth, chartered in 1769, was designed first as a mission to the Indians and then as a college for the sons of New England farmers preparing to preach, teach, or practice law. The College of New Jersey, organized in 1746 and removed to Princeton eleven years later, was sustained by the Presbyterians.” ― Charles Beard

• “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” — Winston Churchill 1874–1965 CE, statesman, military officer, and writer

• “The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.” — Winston Churchill

• “There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues… are created, strengthened and maintained.” — Winston Churchill

• “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” ― Winston Churchill

• “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” ― Winston Churchill

• “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” ― Winston S. Churchill

• “Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.” ― Winston Churchill

• “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” ― Winston Churchill

• “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop.” ― Winston Churchill

• “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” ― Winston Churchill

• “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” ― Winston Churchill

• “From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.” ― Winston S. Churchill

• “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” ― Winston Churchill

• “The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.” ― Winston Churchill

• “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” ― Winston S. Churchill

• “Our blight is ideologies — they are the long-expected Antichrist!” — Carl Jung 1875–1961 CE, psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist and pioneering evolutionary theorist

• “Intuition is a kind of instinctive apprehension through which any one content is presented as a complete whole, the highest form of cognition… Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me, my aim became to leave things to chance…” — Carl Jung

• “We do not know whether Hitler is going to found a new Islam. (He is already on the way; he is like Mohammed. The emotion in Germany is Islamic; warlike and Islamic. They are all drunk with a wild god.” — Carl Jung

• “No nation keeps its word. A nation is a big, blind worm, following what? Fate perhaps. A nation has no honor, it has no word to keep.…” — Carl Jung

• “I had to obey an inner law which was imposed on me and left me no freedom of choice.” — Carl Jung

• “Words butter no parsnips… the reality of life is covered up by so-called clear concepts. Experience is striped of its substance, and instead mere names are substituted, which are henceforth put in the place of reality.” — Carl Jung

• “Every statement about the transcendental ought to be avoided because it is invariably a laughable presumption on the part of the human mind, unconscious of its limitations.” — Carl Jung

• “Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” ― C.G. Jung

• “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” — Thomas Mann 1875–1955 CE, novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist

• “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.” ― Thomas Mann

• “There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.” ― Thomas Mann

• “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.” ― Thomas Mann

• “Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.” ― Thomas Mann

• “All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.” ― Thomas Mann

• “War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.” ― Thomas Mann

• “I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.” ― Thomas Mann

• “Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben” [Venerate all Life]. Thought cannot avoid the ethical or reverence and love for all life.” — Albert Schweitzer 1875–1965 CE, polymath, theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician who transitioned from human to Nature centric in 1915

• “Awakening of Western thought will not be complete until that thought steps outside itself and comes to an understanding with the search for a world-view as this manifests itself in the thought of mankind as a whole.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Since we now know what a terrible evil war is, we must spare no effort to prevent its recurrence.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall. He will end up destroying the earth.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “If you own something you cannot give away, then you don’t own it, it owns you.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “The result of the voyage does not depend on the speed of the ship, but on whether or not it keeps a true course.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “The conquest of the air marked a decisive advance for humanity. Yet we grasped at once the opportunity it offered to kill and destroy from the skies…. and obliged us to seek refuge underground like a hunted animal… the more the superman gains in strength, the poorer he becomes… we are becoming inhuman to the extent that we become supermen.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually. Its balance is disturbed.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Nature compels us to recognize the fact of mutual dependence, each life necessarily helping the other lives who are linked to it. In the very fibers of our being, we bear within ourselves the fact of the solidarity of life.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Because we lack [superhuman reason], the conquests of science and technology become a mortal danger to us rather than a blessing.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “I am life which wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life which wills to live.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Many a truth has lain unnoticed for a long time, ignored simply because no one perceived its potential for becoming reality.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” — Albert Schweitzer

• “We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose such sufferings on them. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it. Until we extend our circle of compassion to all living things, humanity will not find peace.” ― Albert Schweitzer

• “We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.” ― Albert Schweitzer

• “Man is a clever animal who behaves like an imbecile.” ― Albert Schweitzer

• “Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.” ― Albert Schweitzer

• “The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.” ― Albert Schweitzer

• “Seek always to do some good, somewhere… Even if it’s a little thing, so something for those that need help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.” ― Albert Schweitzer

• “If we surrender to earth’s intelligence, we can rise up rooted, like trees.” — Rainer Maria Rilke 1875–1926 CE, poet and novelist

• “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

• “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

• “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

• “The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

• “The spirit of philosophy is one of free inquiry. It suspects all authority. Its function is to trace the uncritical assumptions of human thought to their hiding places, and in this pursuit it may finally end in denial or a frank admission of the incapacity of pure reason to reach the ultimate reality.” — Muhammad Iqbal 1877–1938 CE, Islamic philosopher, poet and politician

• “The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.” — Muhammad Iqbal

• “Democracy is a system where people are counted not weighed.” — Muhammad Iqbal

• “People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought.” — Muhammad Iqbal

• “Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.” — Hermann Hesse 1877–1962 CE, novelist and poet

• “The doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. … Truth is lived, not taught.” — Hermann Hesse

• “Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” — Hermann Hesse

• “Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.” — Hermann Hesse

• “Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else” — Hermann Hesse

• “Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.” ― Herman Hesse

• “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.” — Hermann Hesse

• “Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.” — Hermann Hesse

• “For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.” — Hermann Hesse

• “Puritanism consists in a desire to impose the natural asceticism of age upon the young, and this position is largely founded on the untenable theories of an absolute ethic and an only true theology.” — Ananda Coomaraswamy 1877–1947 CE, metaphysician, historian and a philosopher of Indian art

• “If it is decided that every man’s voice is to count equally in the councils of the nation, it follows naturally that the voice of those who think must be drowned by that of those who do not think and have no leisure.” — Ananda Coomaraswamy

• “Some men remain irresponsible, self-assertive, uncontrolled, inept to their last day; others from their youth are serious, self-controlled, talented, and friendly… it is this variation of temperament or inheritance which constitutes the natural inequality of men, an inequality that is too often ignored in the theories of Western democracy.” — Ananda Coomaraswamy

• “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.” — Ananda Coomaraswamy

• “Industry without art is brutality.” — Ananda Coomaraswamy

• “Buddhist doctrine is a medicine solely directed to save the individual from burning, not in a future hell, but in the present fire of his own thirst… Buddhists never directly attempted to organize human society, thinking the wise man should leave the dark state of life in the world” — Ananda Coomaraswamy

• “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair 1878–1968 CE, an American writer, political activist, and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for Governor of California

• “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.” ― Upton Sinclair

• “One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.” ― Uptown Sinclair

• “I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen.” — Martin Buber 1878–1965 CE, philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship

• “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” ― Martin Buber

• “The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.” — Martin Buber

• “Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save men from confusion and hard choices. They offer… simple schemes, but truth is not so simple.” — Martin Buber

• “The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.” ― Martin Buber

• “The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.” ― Martin Buber

• “Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively; […] We have no desire to dispossess them: we want to live with them. We do not want to dominate them: we want to serve with them.” — Martin Buber

• “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” — Martin Buber

• “To understand the true sense of scripture, it’s necessary to remove the palimpsest — the commentaries, interpretations, and understandings accumulated through the centuries that may have been helpful at the time but obscure the true meaning in a different age.” — Martin Buber‎‎

• “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel is as good as dead.” — Albert Einstein 1879–1955 CE, theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity

• “Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein

• “Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.” ― Albert Einstein

• “Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience.” — Albert Einstein

• “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ― Albert Einstein

• “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” ― Albert Einstein

• “The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.” — Albert Einstein

• “The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an almost fanatical love of justice and the desire for personal independence — these are the features of the Jewish tradition…. The bond that has united the Jews for thousands of years and that unites them today is, above all, the democratic ideal of social justice” — Albert Einstein

• “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” ― Albert Einstein

• “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions that differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.” — Albert Einstein

• “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” ― Albert Einstein

• “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” — Albert Einstein

• “A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.” — Albert Einstein

• “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” ― Albert Einstein

• “If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.” — Albert Einstein

• “There is no other salvation for civilization and even for the human race than the creation of an international government with the security on the basis of law,” — Albert Einstein

• “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” — Albert Einstein

• “If there is any religion that would cope with modern scientific needs, it would be Buddhism.” — Albert Einstein

• “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” ― Albert Einstein

• “Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.” — Albert Einstein

• “I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.” ― Albert Einstein

• “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” — Albert Einstein

• “The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is alleviated by their lack of consistency.” — Albert Einstein

• “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

• “Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” — Albert Einstein

• “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal. “ — Albert Einstein

• “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning. “ — Albert Einstein

• “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. “ — Albert Einstein

• “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.“ — Albert Einstein

• “We can’t solve today’s problems with the mentality that created them.“ — Albert Einstein

• “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.“ — Albert Einstein

• “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.” — Will Rogers 1879–1935 CE, vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator

• “Never miss a good chance to shut up.” ― Will Rogers

• “If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” ― Will Rogers

• “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people that they don’t like.” ― Will Rogers

• “You can’t say civilization don’t advance … in every war they kill you in a new way” — Will Rogers

• “It is better for someone to think you’re a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” ― Will Rogers

• “All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that’s an alibi for my ignorance.” ― Will Rogers

• “Everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects.” ― Will Rogers

• “When you find yourself in a hole, quit digging.” ― Will Rogers

• “The more you observe politics, the more you’ve got to admit that each party is worse than the other.” ― Will Rogers

• “A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries.” — Will Rogers

• “The map is not the territory.” — Alfred Korzybski 1879–1950 CE, independent scholar who developed a field called general semantics, a cultural physician

• “The objective level is not words, and cannot be reached by words alone. We must point our finger and be silent, or we will never reach this level.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Any proposition containing the word “is” creates a linguistic structural confusion which will eventually give birth to serious fallacies.”
  ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our institutions. And so it goes, on and on.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called ‘a chair’, but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “The fallacy that Morley in his life of Gladstone [British statesman/Prime Minister] asserts to be the greatest affliction of politicians; it is indeed a common plague of humanity. It is: The fallacy of attributing to one cause what is due to many causes.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Moreover, every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolve the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “The abuse of symbolism is like the abuse of food or drink: it makes people ill, and so their reactions become deranged.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “There is every reason why the standards in our civilization are so low, because we have “poisoned,” in a literal sense of the word, our minds with the physico-chemical effects of wrong ideas.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Ignorance is no excuse when once we know that ignorance is the only possible excuse.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “We humans, through old habits, and because of the inherent structure of human knowledge have a tendency to make static, definite, and, in a way, absolutistic one-valued statements. But when we fight absolutism, we quite often establish, instead, some other dogma equally silly and harmful. For instance, an active atheist is psycho-logically as unsound as a rabid theist.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous system in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “An individual cannot be considered entirely sane if he is wholly ignorant of scientific method and structure of nature and so retains primitive semantic reactions.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think!” ― Alfred Korzybski

• And now what shall we say of human beings? What is to be our definition of Man? Like the animals, human beings do indeed possess the space-binding capacity but, over and above that, human beings possess a most remarkable capacity which is entirely peculiar to them-I mean the capacity to summarize, digest and appropriate the labors and experiences of the past; I mean the capacity to use the fruits of past labors and experiences as intellectual or spiritual capital for developments in the present; I mean the capacity to employ as instruments of increasing power the accumulated achievements of the all-precious lives of the past generations spent in trial and error, trial and success; I mean the capacity of human beings to conduct their lives in the ever increasing light of inherited wisdom; I mean the capacity in virtue of which man is at once the heritor of the by-gone ages and the trustee of posterity. And because humanity is just this magnificent natural agency by which the past lives in the present and the present for the future, I define HUMANITY, in the universal tongue of mathematics and mechanics, to be the TIME-BINDING CLASS OF LIFE.” ― Alfred Korzybski

• “Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.” — Frances Perkins 1880–1965 CE, workers-rights advocate

• “I have discovered the rule of silence is one of the most beautiful things in the world. It preserves one from the temptation of the idle world, the fresh remark, the wisecrack, the angry challenge…. It is really quite remarkable what it does” ― Frances Perkins

• “If this robot-man can release us from chores like turning off switches — all right, but let him release us to be human beings and let us not develop a race who are going to be patterned after him.” — Frances Perkins

• “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken 1880–1956 CE, journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, scholar of American English, and watchman

• “Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got used to it.” ― H. L. Mencken

• “No matter how long he lives, no man ever becomes as wise as the average woman of forty-eight. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.” — Henry Louis Mencken

• “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Adultery is the application of democracy to love.” — H.L. Mencken

• “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, all of them imaginary. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” — H.L. Mencken

• “If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.” — H.L. Mencken

• “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.” — H.L. Mencken

• “We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Whenever you hear a man speak of his love for his country, it is a sign that he expects to be paid for it. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Temptation is a woman’s weapon and man’s excuse. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “A man may be a fool and not know it, but not if he is married. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Criticism is prejudice made plausible.“ ” — H.L. Mencken

• “Historian: an unsuccessful novelist. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary young woman for a goddess. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “It is inaccurate to say that 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

• “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Honor is simply the morality of superior men.“ — H.L. Mencken

• “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Most people want security in this world, not liberty. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “A newspaper […internet] is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.“ — H.L. Mencken

• “A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers.“ — H.L. Mencken

• “An idealist is one who, on noticing that roses smell better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.“ — H.L. Mencken

• “The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.” — H.L. Mencken

• “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” — H.L. Mencken

• “No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” — H.L. Mencken

• “The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear — fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.” — H.L. Mencken

• “Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That’s the way the mind of man operates.” — H.L. Mencken

• “Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.” — H.L. Mencken

• “It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man. “ — H.L. Mencken

• “Time stays, we go.” — H.L. Mencken

• “For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.” — H.L. Mencken

• “One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.” — H.L. Mencken

• “As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.” — H.L. Mencken

• “Democracy is only a dream: it should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven.” — H.L. Mencken

• “Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.” — H.L. Mencken

• “It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.” — H.L. Mencken

• “The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.” — H.L. Mencken

• “The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.” — H.L. Mencken

• “A professor must have a theory as a dog must have fleas.” — H.L. Mencken

• “Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.” — H.L. Mencken

• “A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.” — H.L. Mencken

• “You have to reform yourself before reforming society and the world.” — Lǔ Xùn 1881–1936 CE, writer, critic, and revolutionary thinker

• “People hate Buddhist monks and nuns, Mohammedans, and Christians. But no one hates a Taoist [there is no Taoist ideology]. To understand the reason for this is to understand half of China.” — Lǔ Xùn

• “Trust only those who doubt [i.e. don’t believe in belief].” — Lǔ Xùn

• “By the time a great man becomes fossilized and is worshiped as great, he is already a puppet.” — Lǔ Xùn

• “Is it right because its always been like that?” — Lǔ Xùn

• “The ability to forget the past enables people to free themselves gradually from the pain they once suffered; but it also often makes them repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.” — Lu Xun

• “True, we must dare look things in the face before we dare think, speak, act, or assume responsibility. If we dare not even look, what else are we good for?” — Lu Xun

• “Confucius so ritualized his ethical culture that conduct of life took on forms similar to those of religion, whereas Lao Tzu spurned both religious and civil ceremony as misleading and harmful, his faith and conduct depending upon no outward prop but upon inner accord with the conscience of the universe.” — Witter Bynner 1881–1968 CE, poet and translator

• “Man at his best, like water… loves living close to the earth, living clear down in his heart.” — Witter Bynner

• “Lao Tzu knew that organization and institution interfere with man’s responsibility to himself and therefore with his proper use of life… yet Taoism in China is a cult compounded of devils and derelicts, a priest-ridden clutter of superstitions founded on ignorance and fear.” — Witter Bynner

• “The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.” — A.A. Milne, writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh

• “Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing [wu wei], of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” — A.A. Milne

• “Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.” ― A.A. Milne

• “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” — A.A. Milne

• “Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.” ― A.A. Milne

• “She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.” — Virginia Woolf 1882–1941 CE, author and essayist

• “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” ― Virginia Woolf

• “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” — Virginia Woolf

• “I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great.’ I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped.” — Virginia Woolf

• “He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.” — Virginia Woolf

• “No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.” — Virginia Woolf

• “When you’ve struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.” — Virginia Woolf

• “Blake wrote, “I will not cease from mental flight.” Mental flight means thinking against the current, not with it. And the current flows fast and furious. It issues a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians.” — Virginia Woolf

• “The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.” — Virginia Woolf

• “Decorate the dungeon with flowers… As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners” — Virginia Woolf

• “In the particular is contained the universal.” — James Joyce 1882–1941 CE, novelist, poet, and literary critic

• “I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.” ― James Joyce

• “There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were.” — Hazrat Inayat Khan 1882–1927 CE, professor of musicology, singer, exponent of the saraswati vina, poet, philosopher, and pioneer of the transmission of Sufism to the West

• “Everything in life is speaking in spite of its apparent silence.” — Inayat Khan

• “When we pay attention to nature’s music, we find that everything on the Earth contributes to its harmony.” ― Inayat Khan

• “Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.” ― Inayat Khan

• "The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation." —Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington 1882-1944 CE

• “Something unknown is doing we don't know what.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine.” ― Arthur Eddington [A J.B.S. Haldane quote with ‘queerer’ replaced by ‘stranger’ due to change in word meaning.]

• “Never trust an experimental result until it has been confirmed by theory.” ― Arthur Eddington [And never trust a theory unless supported by evidence.]

• “We are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star gone wrong.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two, because 'two' is 'one and one'. We forget that we have still to make a study of 'and'.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “It is impossible to trap modern physics into predicting anything with perfect determinism because it deals with probabilities from the outset.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “Whether in the intellectual pursuits of science or in the mystical pursuits of the spirit, the light beckons ahead, and the purpose surging in our nature responds.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “You will understand the true spirit neither of science nor of religion unless seeking [inquiry] is placed in the forefront.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water.” ― Arthur Eddington

• “Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and bounds.” — Ortega y Gassett, José 1883–1955 CE, philosopher and essayist

• “Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.” ― José Ortega y Gasset

• “We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.” ― José Ortega y Gasset

• “To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.” ― José Ortega y Gasset

• “In their choice of lovers both the male and the female reveal their essential nature. The type of human being we prefer reveals the contours of our heart. Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss. A skilled naturalist, by filing these materials, can reconstruct the oceanic depths from which they have been uprooted.” ― Jose Ortega y Gasset

• “The ideas of economists and political philosophers are much more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” — John Maynard Keynes 1883–1946 CE, economist and philosopher whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments

• “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?” ― John Maynard Keynes

• “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” ― John Maynard Keynes

• “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” ― John Maynard Keynes

• “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” ― John Maynard Keynes

• “The moral problem of our day is concerned with the love of money, with the habitual appeal to the money motive in nine-tenths of the activities of life, with the universal striving after individual economic security as the prime object of endeavor” — John Maynard Keynes

• “Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.” — John Maynard Keynes

• “Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking…. Ideas shape the course of history.” — John Maynard Keynes

• “A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.” ― John Maynard Keynes

• “Too large a proportion of recent “mathematical” economics are mere concoctions, as imprecise as the initial assumptions they rest on, which allow the author to lose sight of the complexities and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols.” ― John Maynard Keynes

• “Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.” — Nikos Kazantzakis 1883–1957 CE, writer, journalist, politician, poet and philosopher

• “My struggle to make a synthesis of… two antagonistic impulses has lent purpose and unity to my life… the visible world round about fell into order and my inner and outer lives made peace with each other.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them! D’you see?” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “This mine, mine and me, me was my friend’s terrible prison, a dungeon without windows or doors. ‘Do you know the highest peak a man can reach? It is to conquer the self, the ego. When we reach that peak, and only then, Angelos, we shall be saved.’” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “All those who actually live the mysteries of life haven’t the time to write, and all those who have the time don’t live them!” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “The highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “Man’s soul seems to have grown bigger; it cannot fit any longer within the old molds. A pitiless civil war has broken out between the old, formerly omnipotent myth and the new myth which is battling to govern our souls.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “Die every day. Be born again every day. Deny everything you have every day. The superior virtue is not to be free but to fight for freedom.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model, the longer the tether of our slavery?” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “I knew full well that a name imprisons the soul, cramps it so that it can fit inside a word, obliges it to take whatever it has of the inexpressible, all the most precious qualities for which no substitute can be found, and abandon them outside this name’s boundaries.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “I have a passionate love for solitude and silence; I can gaze for hours at a fire or the sea without feeling any nee for additional companionship. These have always been my most faithful, most beloved comrades… Direct contact with human beings I had always found irksome.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “You should not ask if you will succeed or not. That isn’t what matters. The only thing that matters is your struggle to carry it further.” — Nikos Kazantzakis

• “Life is trouble. Only death is not. To be alive is to undo your belt and look for trouble.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else — he never dares cut the rope and be free.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create their
  own.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “I was happy, I knew that. While experiencing happiness, we have difficulty in being conscious of it. Only when the happiness is past and we look back on it do we suddenly realize — sometimes with astonishment — how happy we had been.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows.” ― Nikos Kazantzakis

• “Morals are the memory of success that no longer succeeds.” — William Carlos Williams 1883–1963 CE. medical doctor, poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright

• “We sit and talk, quietly, with long lapses of silence and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of
  your eyes which has no speech” ― William Carlos Williams

• “It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” ― William Carlos Williams

• “I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.” — Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962 CE, political figure, diplomat, and activist

• “I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their minds, someone will do it for them.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

• “Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

• “A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

• “If someone betrays you once, it’s their fault; if they betray you twice, it’s your fault.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

• “Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you’ll be criticized anyway.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

• “We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

• “To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

• “Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art. ” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

• “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

• “My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there’s hardly any difference.” — Harry S. Truman 1884–1972 CE, president of the United States

• “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” ― Harry S. Truman

• “Fame is a vapor, popularity is an accident, riches take wings, those who cheer today may curse tomorrow and only one thing endures — character.” ― Harry Truman

• “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.” ― Harry S. Truman

• “You want a friend in this city? [Washington, DC.] Get a dog!” ― Harry S. Truman

• “In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self-discipline with all of them came first.” ― Harry Truman

• “Protestantism was the triumph of Paul over Peter. Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885–1981 CE

• “Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government since it requires the widest spread of intelligence.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you’re going to do now and do it.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “History is a fragment of biology… the laws of biology are the fundamental lessons of history. We are subject to the processes and trials of evolution, to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest to survive.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• Love generated by physical attraction of boy and girl is an accident of hormones and propinquity; to found a lasting marriage upon such a haphazard and transitory condition is ridiculous.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “When liberty exceeds intelligence, it begets chaos, which begets dictatorship.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “All faiths alike are cloaks to cover our shivering ignorance.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Prostitution has been perennial and universal, from the state-regulated brothels of Assyria to the ‘night clubs’ of West-European and American cities today.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Since inequality grows in an expanding economy… internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “By the time of Plato’s death, his hostile analysis of Athenian democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history… the gap between rich and poor widened… the rich organized themselves for protection against the poor… debtors massacred their creditors en masse… the middle classes, as well as the rich began to distrust democracy as empowered envy and the poor distrusted it as a sham… the class war left Greece internally as well as internationally divided” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “The essential cause of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars… it was an empty shell when Christianity arose and invasion came.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Since inequality grows in an expanding economy… internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control” — Will (and Ariel) Durant “It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “How can man progress if he is forbidden to question tradition?” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process and we are the same trousered apes at 2000 MPH as when we used legs.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Probably every vice was once a virtue — i.e. a quality making for the survival of the individual, family or the group. Man’s sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant“All technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends… we repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “How much more suffering is caused by the thought of death than by death itself.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Progress in knowledge, science, comforts, and power is only progress in means; if there is no improvement in ends, purposes, or desires, progress is a delusion.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Only the fortunate can take life without mythology.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “In ancient Greece the philosophers destroyed the old faith… in many nations of modern Europe the philosophers achieved similar results. Protagoras became Voltaire, Diogenes Rousseau, Democritus Hobbes, Plato Kant, Thrasymachus Nietzsche, Aristotle Spencer, Epicurus Diderot.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “What thoughtful person has not at 50 discarded the dogmas he swore by in his youth and will not at 80 smile at the ‘mature’ views of his middle age?” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Greek religion paved the way for philosophy by emphasizing Fate which became the idea of law, a force more powerful than personal fiat creating the fundamental difference between mythology and science.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.” — Will (and Ariel) Duran

• “There have been only 268 of the past 3,421 years free of war.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant [92% war, 8% merely preparing for war]

• “We must, at the start, clear our minds of all preconceptions, prejudices, assumptions, and theories.” — Will (and Ariel) Durant

• “Confucianism checked too thoroughly the natural and vigorous impulse of mankind…kept women in supine debasement… froze the nation into a conservatism hostile to progress… no room was left for pleasure and adventure, little for friendship and love” — Will Durant 1885–1981 CE, historian and philosopher

• “We are being destroyed by knowledge, which has made us drunk with our power. And we shall not be saved without wisdom.” — Will Durant

• “A wise man can learn from other men’s experience; a fool cannot learn even from his own.” — Will Durant

• “The basic reality in life is not politics, nor industry, but human relationships — the associations of a man with a woman… the family is greater than the State, devotion and despair sink deeper into the heart than economic strife, in the end our happiness lies not in possessions, place, or power, but in the gift and return of love.” — Will Durant

• “Our schools are the open sesame to Utopia… There is nothing that man might not do if our splendid organization of schools and universities were properly developed and properly manned, and directed intelligently to the reconstruction of human character.” — Will Durant

• “Every solution bares a new problem. The progress of science has brought new evils with new boons, and its latest victory has given frail minds the power to destroy Western civilization… I morn when I see so much scientific genius dedicated to the art of massacre, so little to the organization of peace… Meanwhile I breathe air and drink water and eat food polluted by the products of science: by the burning of fuels in factories and cars by industrial waste poured into our rivers and seas, by dangerous chemicals used in growing or processing foods or disguising their decay.” — Will Durant

• “Childhood may be defined as the age of play; therefore some children are never young, and some adults are never old.” — Will Durant

• “I mourn when brilliant writers… tell us that we should yield to every impulse and desire, and ‘be ourselves’! What jejune nonsense! Civilization… is at almost every moment dependent upon the repression of instincts, and intelligence itself involves discrimination between desire that may be pursued and those that should be subdued.” — Will Durant

• “I know that life is in its basis a mystery; a river flowing from an unknown source and in its development an infinite subtlety, ‘a dome of many-colored glass,’ too complex for thought, much less for utterance.” — Will Durant

• “There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present.” — Will Durant

• “Philosophers tend to look upon themselves as apologists for the cosmos, press-agents for the Deity; the smell of theology is still strong upon them, and they are never quite content until they have justified all the ways of God to man.” — Will Durant

• “In the world of life, the male is a tributary incident, usually subordinate, sometimes superfluous… No biologist could think of God except in feminine terms” — Will Durant

• “We are temporary organs of the race, cells in the body of life… In truth we are not individuals and it is because we think ourselves such that death seems unforgivable.” — Will Durant

• “In my Utopia, every family, including philosophers, would apply half of its working hours to growing its essential vegetables on a plot of land around or near its house” — Will Durant

• “I am quite content with mortality; I should be appalled at the thought of living forever, in whatever paradise… We must make room for our children.” — Will Durant

• “I would ask our doctors to devote as much time to preventive as to curative procedures, and to put less curative reliance upon drugs and more upon natural cures by diet and physiotherapy [e.g. walking].” — Will Durant

• “Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths… Since it is contrary to good manners to exalt ourselves, we achieve the same result by slyly indicating how inferior are the great” — Will Durant

• “It’s delightful to contemplate a society where art is more respected than wealth; but, art can only be the flower that grows out of wealth. It cannot be wealth’s substitute. The Medici came before Michelangelo” — Will Durant

• “It is almost a law of history that the same wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it softens a people to the ways of luxury and peace, invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths.” — Will Durant

• “Darwin offered a world-picture totally different from that which had contented the mind of man before. His name will stand as a turning point in the intellectual development of our Western civilization. If he was right, men will have to date from 1859 the beginning of modern thought.” — Will Durant

• “It was to meet the challenge of communism, as well as to end a critical depression, that Franklin Roosevelt, in the most brilliant statesmanship of the 20th century, devised the welfare state.” — Will Durant

• “Popular theologians took the misty doctrine of Lao Tzu and gradually transformed it into a religion. People flocked to it, built temples, supported its priesthood and poured into the new faith their inexhaustible superstitious lore. Lao Tzu was made a god… For a thousand years the Taoist faith had millions of adherents, converted many emperors, and fought long battle of intrigue to wrest from the Confucians the divine right to tax and spend.” — Will Durant

• “Legend, which loves personalities more than ideas, attributes to a few individuals the laborious advances of many generations.” — Will Durant

• “This god was identified by Xenophanes with the universe [Nature]… all change in history, and all separateness in things, are superficial phenomena; beneath the flux and variety of forms is an unchanging unity, which is the innermost reality of God. From this starting point, Xenophanes’s disciple, Parmenides, proceeded to that idealistic philosophy [error] what was in turn to mold the thought of Plato and Platonists throughout antiquity, and of Europe even to our day.” — Will Durant

• “Most economic advances in early society were made by the woman rather than the man… she developed agriculture, made cotton cloth, developed sewing, weaving, basketry, pottery, woodworking, building, primitive trade, and slowly added man to her list of domesticated animals training him in those social dispositions which are the psychological basis and cement of civilization.” — Will Durant

• “Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time.” — Will Durant

• “Women had domesticated the sheep, the dog, the ass, and the pig; now she domesticated man. Man is woman’s last domestic animal, only partially and reluctantly civilized… if pugnacity was not checked, it would lead to brawls at every corner… If sex were not controlled, it would make not only every park, but every street, unsafe for any woman… if acquisitiveness were not checked, it would lead to retail theft, wholesale robbery, political corruption, and to such concentration of wealth as would invite revolution.” — Will Durant

• “The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.” — Will Durant

• “You are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had… And so it is with a city, a country, a race… It is only the past that lives.” — Will Durant

• “We are choked with news, and starved of history… we give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past.” — Will Durant

• “If we could find a way to restore marriage to its natural age, we should at one stroke reduce by half the prostitution, the venereal disease, the fruitless celibacy, the morbid chastity, and the experimental perversions that stigmatize our contemporary life.” — Will Durant

• “War is the Darwinism or natural selection of states, and not all our tears will wash it out of history until the people and governments of the world agree, or are forced, to yield theri sovereignties to some superstate; and then there will be revolutions and civil wars.” — Will Durant

• “The end is happiness, and philosophy is only a means; if we take it as an end, we become like the Hindu mystic whose life-purpose is to concentrate upon his navel.” — Will Durant

• “Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities, slavery had been unknown.” — Will Durant

• “I said nothing. I had learned that this is usually the best thing to say.” — Will Durant

While insightful and quotable, Will Durant, like all humans, can be ‘not even wrong’, e.g. this quote: “Ancient civilizations were little isles in a sea of barbarism, prosperous settlements surrounded by hungry, envious and warlike hunters and herders” — Will Durant [Civ 0 predates Civ 2 within which hunters are needed to exterminate predators and competing wildlife and herders overgraze to maximize short-term self interest unto overshoot.]

• “Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.” — Ezra Pound 1885–1972 CE, poet and critic

• “Do not move, let the wind speak — that is paradise.” — Ezra Pound

• “A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.” — Ezra Pound

• “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.” — Ezra Pound

• “No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.” ― Ezra Pound

• “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” — Aldo Leopold 1887 -1948 CE, writer, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist

• “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Civilization has so cluttered this elemental man-earth relationship with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.” — Aldo Leopold

• “The modern dogma is comfort at any cost.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “Ethical behavior is doing the right thing when no one else is watching- even when doing the wrong thing is legal.” ― Aldo Leopold

• “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” — T.S. Eliot 1888–1965 CE, poet, essayist and playwright

• “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” — T. S. Eliot

• “Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.” — T. S. Eliot

• “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.” — T. S. Eliot

• “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.” ― T.S. Eliot

• “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.” — T. S. Eliot

• “Culture is the one thing that we cannot deliberately aim at. It is the product of a variety of more or less harmonious activities, each pursued for its own sake.” — T. S. Eliot

• “Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow” ― T.S. Eliot

• “To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” ― T.S. Eliot

• “We cannot — in literature any more than in the rest of life — live in a perpetual state of revolution.” — T. S. Eliot

• “What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” — T. S. Eliot

• “We do not pass through the same door twice or return to the door through which we did not pass.” — T. S. Eliot

• “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning; at the source of the longest river the voice of the hidden waterfall and the children in the apple-tree not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness between two waves of the sea.” — T. S. Eliot

• “Human kind cannot bear much reality.” — T. S. Eliot

• “We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.” — T. S. Eliot

• “The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.” — T. S. Eliot

• “To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life.” — T. S. Eliot

• “Success is relative. It is what we make of the mess we have made of things.” — T. S. Eliot

• “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” ― T.S. Eliot

• “We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us — if at all — not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men.” — T.S. Eliot

• “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our [Indo-European] language. “ — Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951 CE, philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language

• “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “Only describe, don’t explain.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change… what men and women consider reasonable alters. At certain periods, men and women find reasonable what at other periods they found unreasonable. And vice versa.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again ‘I know that that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that’s unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” ― Wittgenstein Ludwig

• “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “If anyone is unwilling to descend into himself, because this is too painful, he will remain superficial in his writing. . . If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “If life becomes hard to bear, we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change — a change in our own attitude — hardly even occurs to us.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “Freud’s fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in ‘explaining’ symptoms of an illness.)” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity… like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein

• “To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.” ― Adolf Hitler 1889–1945, politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his suicide in 1945

• “If you win, you need not have to explain…If you lose, you should not be there to explain!” ― Adolf Hitler

• “Do not compare yourself to others. If you do so, you are insulting yourself.” ― Adolf Hitler

• “When diplomacy ends, War begins.” ― Adolf Hitler

• “As in everything, nature is the best instructor.” ― Adolf Hitler

• “The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act” — Walter Lippmann 1889–1974 CE, writer, reporter, and political commentator

• “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “These various remedies, eugenic, educational, ethical, populist and socialist, all assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress towards such an ideal. I think [democracy] is a false ideal.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “It is often very illuminating…to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?” ― Walter Lippmann

• “For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “For language is by no means a perfect vehicle of meanings. Words, like currency, are turned over and over again, to evoke one set of images to-day, another to-morrow. There is no certainty whatever that the same word will call out exactly the same idea in the reader’s mind as it did in the reporter’s.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truth from its errors.” ― Walter Lippman

• “Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character. We extend this into all our thinking. Between us and the realities of social life we build up a mass of generalizations, abstract ideas, ancient glories, and personal wishes. They simplify and soften experience. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. We worry about their fate and forget their original content.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride. They have yielded to the perennial temptation.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “If we cannot fully understand the acts of other people, until we know what they think they know, then in order to do justice we have to appraise not only the information which has been at their disposal, but the minds though which they have filtered it.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?” ― Walter Lippmann

• “Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.… It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense or our own value, our own position, and our own rights.… They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.” ― Walter Lippmann

• “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969 CE, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and president of United States

• “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “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. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the seat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “We seek victory — not over any nation or people — but over ignorance, poverty, disease, and human degradation wherever they may be found.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “Get it all on record now — get the films — get the witnesses -because somewhere down the road of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes… Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

• “They don’t ask much of you. They only want you to hate the things you love and to love the things you despise.” — Boris Pasternak 1890–1960 CE, poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator

• “When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it. ” ― Boris Pasternak

• “To run true to type is the extinction of a man, his condemnation to death.” — Boris Pasternak

• “I don’t think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don’t like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn’t revealed its beauty to them.” ― Boris Pasternak

• “History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.” ― Bhim Rao Ambedkar 1891–1956 CE, economist, jurist, social reformer and political leader

• “I measure the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved.” — B.R. Ambedkar

• “Humans are mortal. So are ideas. An idea needs propagation as much as a plant needs watering. Otherwise both will wither and die.” — B.R. Ambedkar

• The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation.” — Henry Miller 1891–1980 CE, novelist, short story writer and essayist

• “The one thing we can never get enough of is love. And the one thing we never give enough of is love.” ― Henry Miller

• “Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music — the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself.” ― Henry Miller

• “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” ― Henry Miller

• “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

• “An intelligent, energetic, educated woman cannot be kept in four walls — even satin-lined, diamond-studded walls — without discovering sooner or later that they are still a prison cell.” — Pearl S. Buck 1892–1973 CE, writer and novelist

• “Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.” ― Pearl Buck

• “The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.” ― Pearl Buck

• “I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.” — Pearl Buck

• “The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration. ” ― Pearl Buck

• The woman is the root and the man the tree. The tree grows only as high as the root is strong.” — Pearl Buck

• “Such men as this puppet are our worst and our true enemies, for they have betrayed themselves and us in them. The enemy from outside is a disease but the puppets are our own weakness” — Pearl Buck

• “You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.” — Pearl Buck

• “Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.” — Pearl Buck

• “I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.” ― Pearl Buck

• “I came gradually to want to prove nothing.” — Gilbert Seldes 1893–1970 CE, writer and cultural critic

• “Comedy is the last refuge of the non-conformist mind.” — Gilbert Seldes

• “Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.” — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi 1893–1986 CE, biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

• “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought.” — Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

• “A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.” ― Albert Szent-Györgyi

• “I am troubled by grave doubts about the usefulness of scientific endeavor and have a whole drawer filled with treatises on politics and their relation to science, written for myself with the sole purpose of clarifying my mind, and finding an answer to the question: will science lead to the elevation or destruction of man , and has my scientific endeavor any sense?” ― Albert Szent-Györgyi

• “One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them, finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons.” — Aldous Huxley 1894–1963 CE, writer and philosopher

• “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” ― Aldous Huxley

• “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line… that we only have to go on being yet cleverer to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.” — Aldous Huxley

• “If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.” ― Aldous Huxley

• “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials. The illumination of a city, for example, was once a rare event, reserved for victories and national holidays, for the canonization of saints and the crowning of kings. Now it occurs nightly and celebrates the virtues of gin, cigarettes and toothpaste.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic.” — Aldous Huxley

• “For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.” — Aldous Huxley

• “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” — Aldous Huxley

• “You prefer to use Pavlov for brainwashing, Pavlov for selling cigarettes and vodka and patriotism. Pavlov for the benefit of dictators, generals and tycoons… but Pavlov could be used for good purposes, for friendliness and trust and compassion.” — Aldous Huxley

• “There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.” — Aldous Huxley

• “It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ that we can truly possess the world in which we live… And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else’s.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” ― Aldous Huxley

• “This history of Europe during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance is largely a history of the social confusions that arise when large numbers of those who should be seers abandon spiritual authority in favor of money and political power.” — Aldous Huxley

• “While you people are over-consuming, the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Dualism… Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The aim of Western psychiatry is to help the troubled individual to adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals — back to a normality, which is defined [as] to be a member of the majority party… Statistical normality is perfectly compatible with a high degree of folly and wickedness.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” ― Aldous Huxley

• “[Recipe for renormalizing humans]: Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantric Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.” — Aldous Huxley

• “After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Never have so many capable writers warned mankind against the dangers of wrong speech — and never have words been used more recklessly by politicians or taken more seriously by the public.” — Aldous Huxley

• “To suppose that people can be saved by studying and giving assent to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by poring over a map of Africa. ” — Aldous Huxley

• “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.” ― Aldous Huxley

• “The organized Christian churches have persisted in the fatal habit of mistaking means for ends… that souls are saved if assent is given to what is locally regard as the correct formula, lost if it is withheld… The over-valuation of words and formulae so fatally characteristic of historic Christianity.” — Aldous Huxley

• “That which, in the language of religion, is called ‘this world’ is the universe of reduced awareness, expressed, and, as it were, petrified by language.” — Aldous Huxley

• “[We are] victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Gray Life.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Belief is the systematic taking of unanalyzed words much too seriously. Paul’s words, Mohammed’s words, Marx’s words, Hitler’s words — -people take them too seriously, and what happens?…sisters of charity selflessly tending the victims of their own church’s inquisitors and crusaders.” — Aldous Huxley

• “They thought they would improve on Nature by turning dry prairies into wheat fields, and produced deserts; chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda… the free press is everywhere the servant of its advertisers, of a pressure group, or of the government.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” ever have so many capable writers warned mankind against the dangers of wrong speech — and never have words been us — Aldous Huxley

• “Knowledge of God is possible only to those who ‘have ceased to cherish opinions’ [Jianzhi Sengcan] — even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.” — Aldous Huxley

• “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Devotees of the apocalyptic religion of Inevitable Progress [believe] that the Kingdom of Heaven is outside you and in the future. ” — Aldous Huxley

• “This Power Elite directly employs several millions of the country´s working force in its factories, offices and stores, controls many millions more by lending them the money to buy its products, and, through its ownership of the media of mass communication, influences the thoughts, the feelings and the actions of virtually everybody. To parody the words of W. Churchill, never have so many been manipulated so much by few.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Given the nature of spiders, webs are inevitable. And given the nature of human beings, so are religions. Spiders can’t help making fly-traps, and men can’t help making symbols. That’s what the human brain is there for — to turn the chaos of given experience into a set of manageable symbols.” — Aldous Huxley

• “The Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms, has a place in every one of the higher religions… treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages.” — Aldous Huxley

• “Maps are symbols, and even the best of them are inaccurate and imperfect. But to anyone who really wants to reach a given destination, a map is indispensably useful” — Aldous Huxley

• “Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.” — Aldous Huxley

• “As long as you ask questions you are breaking through, but the moment you begin to accept, you are psychologically dead.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti 1895–1986 CE, philosopher, speaker, writer, and spiritual figure

• “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Neither your gods, nor your science can save you, can bring you psychological certainty; and you have to accept that you can trust in absolutely nothing.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “There is no end to education…the whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Religion is the frozen thought of mankind out of which they build temples.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking… which has so unfortunately divided humanity.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “The very perception of seeing what is false is the truth.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. … The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent… separating yourself from the rest of mankind.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “When you once see something as false which you have accepted as true, as natural, as human, then you can never go back to it.” ― J. Krishnamurti

• “You want to be loved because you do not love; but the moment you love, it is finished, you are no longer inquiring whether or not somebody loves you.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “The world now with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression… still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and a society that supports this… How very important it is to bring about in the human mind a radical revolution.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Fear withers the mind, distorts thought, and leads to all kinds of extraordinarily clever and subtle theories, absurd superstitions, dogmas, and beliefs.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence” — J. Krishnamurti

• “The problem goes much deeper than religion or politics, it starts in our minds, in our habits, in the constant conditioning that has gone on and on for centuries. Judging, prejudice, likes and dislike are all part of this same problem.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Thought is so cunning, so clever, that it distorts everything for its own convenience.” ― J. Krishnamurti

• “If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.” ― J. Krishnamurti

• “Intelligence comes into being when the brain discovers its fallibility.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Religious, political, personal… symbols, ideas, beliefs… are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man in every relationship.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “A person seeking to end violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party… they are only concerned with the total understanding of mankind.” — J. Krishnamurti

• “From the time we began to build houses and cities, since we invented the wheel, we have not advanced one step toward happiness. We have always been in halves. As long as we invent and progress in mechanical things and not in love, we shall not achieve happiness.” — Jean Giono 1895–1970 CE, novelist

• “When we speak of democracy as a way of life and talk of the spirit of democracy, we can talk about ‘Chinese democracy’ — the idea of government for the people and by the consent of the people, but not government by the people and of the people. While parliamentary government is based on distrust of the ruler, Confucian ideals emphasized moral harmony as the basis of political harmony, laissez faire as the key policy and only one that has ever worked; the Great Chinese empire was always ruled without police depending — not on government or soldiers — but on the self-government of the people.” — Lín Yǔtáng 1895–1976 CE,inventor, linguist, novelist, philosopher, and translator

• “When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “The human soul is nine-tenths subliminal urges representing the animal heritage of millions of years and considerably less than one-tenth conscious reason, which has had great development only since ten thousand years ago,” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Does the West have a philosophy? The answer is clearly, ‘No’. We need a philosophy of living and we clearly haven’t got it… There are professors of philosophy, but there are no philosophers… philosophy itself has become a branch of physics or biology or mathematics.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Of all human vices, the greatest is ingratitude, and we must conclude that the world looks sick because the soul looking on it is sick.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Only one thing is right, and that is the Truth, but nobody knows what it is. It is a thing that changes all the time, and then comes back to the same thing.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Truth we shall never know; it is only clarity we are striving for… even more important than knowing the truths is the general unsettling of our complacent beliefs and gilt-edged assumptions… No one begins to think until he has some of that brute complacency thoroughly thrashed out of him with the rawhide of wiser minds.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Myths represent certain broad human generalizations of the early perceptions of man and these perceptions are as good as our own.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “This chapter [40] seems to be the summing up of Lao Tzu’s teachings in a nutshell. Most basic of all is the statement of the principle of reversion… each ending becoming a new beginning. The life of things passes by like a rushing, galloping horse, changing at every turn, at every hour.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “He who talks about truth injures it; he who tries to prove it thereby maims and distorts it; he who gives it a label and a school of thought kills it; and he who declares himself a believer buries it.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “A wise man would be careful not to let any particular frame of mind settle down into a permanent attitude… A crusty old fool will delight in being just a crusty old fool, and a young sophisticated cynic will wallow in his cynicism.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Professional philosophers are usually only apologists absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Where there are too many policemen [or any], there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers [or any], there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers [or any], there is no justice.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “A good traveler does not know where he is going to, a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “The principal teaching of Lao Tzu is humility… gentleness, resignation, the futility of contention, the strength of weakness.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Confucians worship culture and reason; Taoists reject them in favor of nature and intuition, and the one who rejects anything always seems to stand on a higher level and therefore always seems more attractive than the one who accepts it… Lao Tzu’s aphorisms communicate an excitement which Confucian humdrum good sense cannot. Confucian philosophy is a philosophy of social order, and order is seldom exciting.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “Above all, the one important message of Taoism is the oneness and spirituality of the material universe.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “The principle of leveling of all opposites, and the theory of cycles and universal reversion to opposites are basic for the understanding of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu philosophy and its practical teachings. All Lao Tzu’s paradoxes arise from this point of view.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• When a civilization loses simplicity, it becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. People become slaves of external ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “The medieval theologians gave us, on rather dogmatic grounds, two things, a ‘soul’ and ‘original sin’… without a soul there would be nothing to save and without original sin there would be no need of saving it.” — Lín Yǔtáng

• “It is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person.” — Richard Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983 CE, architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist

• “It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity’s most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.”
  ― R. Buckminster Fuller

• “I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

• “Either war is obsolete or men are. ” ― R. Buckminister Fuller

• “I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called.” — R. Buckminster Fuller

• “The minute you choose to do what you really want to do, it’s a different kind of life.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his co-ordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “Humans beings always do the most intelligent thing…after they’ve tried every stupid alternative and none of them have worked.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “Geniuses are just people who had good mothers.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

• “I’m not trying to counsel any of you to do anything really special except dare to think. And to dare to go with the truth. And to dare to really love completely.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

• “Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” ― R. Buckminster Fuller

• “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “All the present bureaucracies of political governments, great religious organizations, and all big businesses find that physical success for all humanity would be devastating to the perpetuation of their ongoing activities.” — Buckminster Fuller

• “One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer. The rich get richer and the poor get — children.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald 1896–1940 CE, author and screenwriter

• “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “Question everything, don’t believe anything.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj 1897–1981 CE, guru of nondualism

• “True teaching can be on an individual basis only. The same medicine cannot be prescribed for all.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj

• “You are looking for a cure while I am concerned with prevention. As long as their are causes, there must also be results… If you want peace and harmony in the world, you must first have peace and harmony in your hearts and minds.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj

• “You will receive everything you need when you stop asking for what you do not need” ― Nisargadatta Maharaj

• “The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.” — Margaret Chase Smith 1897–1995 CE, a U.S. representative and a U.S. senator

• “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize. The right to hold unpopular beliefs. The right to protest. The right of independent thought.” ― Margaret Chase Smith

• “It is good a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.” — Ariel Durant 1898–1981 CE, researcher and writer

• “We must operate with partial knowledge, and be provisionally content with probabilities.” ― Ariel Durant

• “The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.” — Ariel Durant

• “History is subject to geology.” ― Ariel Durant

• “If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny — and, perhaps, even do it well.” — Ariel Durant

• “The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” — Ariel Durant 1898–1981 CE

• “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” — Ariel Durant

• “No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history” ― Ariel Durant

• “The absolute reality is inconceivable and inexpressible and the more a master speaks of it, the more he will stray from it. For this reason, Yun Men said that the old masters were talking nonsense and asked the monk if they had stopped ‘talking in their sleep’.” — Charles Luk 1898–1978 CE, early translator of Chinese Buddhist texts

• “[Everyone has] an inner potentiality which can absorb the truth but cannot be activated as long as the mind is not disentangled from its attachments to the phenomenal.” — Charles Luk

• “The ultimate way of Being lies beyond all contradictory pairs of opposites with which our two dimensional thinking mind operates. As soon as we are successful in silencing the restless activity of the thinking mind and give a chance to intuition, the pure all embracing spirit in us will manifest effortlessly.” — Anagarika Govinda 1898–1985 CE, an expositor of Tibetan Buddhism

• “Taoism and Buddhism pursue the same aims… The highest goal of Taoism as well as Buddhism is a state of enlightenment which the Buddha defines as the overcoming of greed, hatred, and ignorance — not stupidity but the ignoring of facts which appear uncomfortable or against our desires.” — Anagarika​ Govinda

• “Some got stuck in magic, some in religion, some in science, some in metaphysics or other logical speculations. Only very few remained open to all facets of reality without getting caught in the nets of speculation and wishful thinking.” — Anagarika Govinda

• “The Egyptians lost themselves in trying to preserve the bodily form, the Greeks in trying to capture the beauty of the human body, the pre-Columbian Americans, by establishing cosmic laws over human considerations, Christianity and Islam — the daughters of Jewish monotheism — by overpowering the human mind through dictatorship of a a partially world-creating and at the same time world-negating spirit.” — Anagarika​ Govinda

• “We learn to desist from concentrating on what might be good for us in the short run; because, when we study underlying trends, we often find that what is good for us in the short run may be far from good in the long run.” — Anagarika​ Govinda

• “However unpalatable certain aspects of reality may be, they have to be faced as facts and met at their own level. Problems cannot be solved by disapproval but only by facing them.” — Anagarika​ Govinda

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