Quotations by Theme
Politics - History
"I cannot say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives."
Abigail Adams, 1744-1818
"Words calculated to catch everyone may catch no one."
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr., 1900-1965
"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events."
Adrienne Rich, 1929-
"By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960
"I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960
"Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this?"
Albert Camus, 1913-1960
"The society based on production is only productive, not creative."
Albert Camus, 1913-1960
"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
"Every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving."
Albert Einstein, 1879-1955
"Which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?"
Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963
"All religions have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence. the former — of the corruption of the will."
Alexander Herzen, 1812-1870
"There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled."
Alfred Whitney Griswold, 1906-1963
"Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture."
Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997
"Justice: A commodity which in a more or less adulterated condition the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance, taxes and personal service."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914
"Dawn, n. When men of reason go to bed."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914
"Conservative: A statesman who is enamored with the existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914
"History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914
"Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage."
Ambrose Bierce, 1842-1914
"Two children of same cruel parent look at one another and see in each other the image of the cruel parent or the image of their past oppressor. This is very much the case between Jew and Arab: It's a conflict between two victims."
Amos Oz, 1939
"A conflict begins and ends in the hearts and minds of people, not in the hilltops."
Amos Oz, 1939
"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives."
Amy Lowell,
"The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditation on the past."
Andre Maurois, 1885-1967
"No man will make a great leader who wants to do it all himself, or to get all the credit for doing it."
Andrew Carnegie, 1835-1919
"Freedom has no history."
Andrew Cohen, 1955-
"They read good books, and quote,/ but never learn a language other than the scream of rocket-burn/ Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad;/ elections, money, empire, oil and Dad."
Andrew Motion, 1952-
"In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil."
Anna Jameson, 1794-1860
"For centuries the leaders of Christian thought spoke of women as a necessary evil, and the greatest saints of the Church are those who despise women the most.
This coarse and insulting way of regarding woman, as though they existed merely to be the safety-valves of men's passions, and that the best men were above the temptation of loving them, has been the source of unnumbered evils."
Annie Wood Besant, 1847-1933
"The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong."
Antiphanes, 408 BC-334BC
"Demagoguery enters at the moment when, for want of a common denominator, the principle of equality degenerates into the principle of identity."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 1900-1944
"The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."
Archibald MacLeish, 1892-1982
"The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes."
Aristotle,
"The state is a creation of nature and man is by nature a political animal."
Aristotle,
"They should rule who are able to rule best."
Aristotle, 384-322 BCE
"Poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history, for its statements are in the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars."
Aristotle, 384-322 BCE
"It is in justice that the ordering of society is centred."
Aristotle, 384-322 BCE
"Man is by nature a political animal."
Aristotle, 384-322 BCE
"Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives."
Arthur Schlesinger,
"As a historian, I confess to a certain amusement when I hear the Judeo-Christian tradition praised as the source of our present-day concern for human rights.... In fact, the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights ... not only for acquiescence in poverty, inequality, exploitation and oppression, but also for enthusiastic justifications for slavery, persecution, abandonment of small children, torture, and genocide. Religion during most of the history of the West saw the trials visited on mankind in this world as ordained by the Almighty to test and purify sinful mortals.... Moreover, religion enshrined hierarchy, authority, and inequality; hated blasphemy; and feared heresy.... It was the age of equality that brought about the disappearance of such religious appurtenances as the auto-da-fe and burning at the stake."
Arthur Schlesinger, 1917-
"Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame."
Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
"Compassion is the basis of all morality."
Arthur Schopenhauer, 1788-1860
"More and more the myths put about by these Christians are better known than the doctrines of the philosophers. Who has not heard the fable of Jesus' birth from a virgin or the stories of his crucifixion and resurrection? ... But the point is this, and the Christians would do well to heed it: One ought first to follow reason as a guide before accepting any since anyone who believes without testing a doctrine is certain to be deceived.... Just as the charlatans of the cults take advantage of the simpleton's lack of education to lead him around by the nose, so too with the Christian teachers: they do not want to give or receive reasons for what they believe. Their favorite expressions are "Do not ask questions, just believe!" and: "Your faith will save you!" "The wisdom of the world," they say, "is evil; to be simple is to be good." If only they would undertake to answer my question -- which I do not ask as one who is trying to understand their beliefs (there being little to understand!). But they refuse to answer, and indeed discourage asking questions of any sort."
Aulus Cornelius Celsus, CE First Century
"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."
Aung San Suu Kyi,
"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a "moral commandment" is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."
Ayn Rand, 1905-1982
"Life doesn't count for much unless you're willing to do your small part to leave our children – all of our children – a better world. Even if it's difficult. Even if the work seems great. Even if we don't get very far in our lifetime."
Barack Obama,
"The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them."
Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu,
"They [the Christian Europeans] forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were so many sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers' breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: "Wriggle, you little perisher." They slaughtered anyone and everyone in their path, on occasion running through a mother and her baby with a single thrust of their swords. They spared no one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burn them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles, or tie dry straw to their bodies and set fire to it.
The Christians seized all the maize the locals [of Nicaragua] had grown for themselves and their own families and, as a consequence, some twenty or thirty thousand natives died of hunger, some mothers even killing their own children and eating them.
The reader may ask himself if this is not cruelty and injustice of a kind so terrible that it beggars the imagination, and whether these poor people would not fare far better if they were entrusted to the devils in Hell than they do at the hands of the devils of the New World who masquerade as Christians."
Bartolomé de las Casas,
"The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue."
Baruch Spinoza,
"Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice."
Baruch Spinoza, 1632-1677
"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881
"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, 1804-1881
"The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do."
Benjamin Disraeli, 1804-1881
"Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He who is content. Who is that? Nobody."
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
"He that is of the opiniorn money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money."
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
"Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
Benjamin Franklin,
"We must hang together, gentlemen ... else, we shall most assuredly hang separately."
Benjamin Franklin,
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines."
Bertrand Russell,
"Machines are worshipped because they are beautiful and valued because they confer power; they are hated because they are hideous and loathed because they impose slavery."
Bertrand Russell,
"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970
"Public education is a good foundation on which to build a better life for each of us. And if we want to prove to these children who never made the mess in the first place that education is worth the trouble, our schools have to inspire them so they can do what they ought to do.
-- Bill Cosby, dismissing the theocrats' arguments for eliciting government financial support of private education, in, "Kids, Here's a Fine Mess They've Gotten Us Into," adapted from his Prologue to the book, Letters to the Next President: What We Can Do About the Real Crisis in Public Education (2004)"
Bill Cosby,
"We have the Bill of Rights. What we need is a Bill of Responsibilities."
Bill Maher,
"When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay."
Brian Aldiss, 1925-
"Don't make the mistake of thinking that you have to agree with people and their beliefs to defend them from injustice."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-
"Sometimes power is all a person has, so they will protect it even unto their own destruction, for without power they have nothing."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-
"The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-
"Truth is not a matter of fact but a state of harmony with progress and hope. Enveloped only in its wings will we ever soar to the promise of our greater selves."
Bryant H. McGill, 1969-
"What advocates of any form of censorship fail to understand is that a society of free and intelligent human beings must rest upon the premise that minds be free to think about, read about and talk about society."
Butler D Shaffer,
"We preoccupy ourselves so much with changing the lives of others not out of proclaimed sentiments of selfless human charity, but out of our selfish desire to validate our own identities. There is, of course, enormous ego gratification in the exercise of power over other people, but such satisfaction is rooted in our need to have others believe and behave as we do."
Butler D Shaffer,
"He plant trees to benefit another generation."
Caecilius Statius, 220-168 BCE
"We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."
Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961
"Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism."
Carl Gustav Jung, 1875-1961
"Economic distress will teach man, if anything can, that realities are less dangerous than fantasies, that fact-finding is more effective than fault-finding."
Carl Lotus Backer, 1873-1945
"Men are more readily contented with no intellectual light than with a little; and wherever they have been taught to acquire some knowledge in order to please others, they have most generally gone on to acquire more, to please themselves."
Charles Caleb Colton, 1780-1832
"Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys."
Charles De Lint,
"He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers."
Charles Peguy, 1873-1914
"To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind."
Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
"Every great movement in the history of Western civilization from the Carolingian age to the nineteenth century has been an international movement which owed its existence and its development to the cooperation of many different peoples."
Christopher Dawson, 1889-1970
"Idealism is like a castle in the air if it is not based on a solid foundation of social and political realism."
Claude McKay,
"He who will not economise will have to agonise"
Confucius, 551-479 BCE
"The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
Confucius, 551-479 BCE
"The cautious seldom err."
Confucius, 551-479 BCE
"I think we need to train up a new kind of educational leader [who] will need fundamental preparation in the humanities of education, those studies of history, philosophy and literature that will enable him to develop a clear and compelling vision of education and of its relation to American life. These latter studies have been under something of a cloud in recent decades because their immediate utility is difficult to demonstrate. But it is their ultimate utility, that really matters, for only as educators begin to think deeply about the ends of learning will the politics of popular education go beyond mere competition for dollars and cents and become what Plato realized it must ideally be--a constant reaching for the good society."
Cremin,
"There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master"
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930
"The more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930
"Money is our madness, our vast collective madness."
D.H. Lawrence, 1885-1930
"The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born."
Dean Inge, 1860-1954
"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches and the like. All these are the work of human hands aided by money. But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard, which is the common possession of all, especially to the dealings of democracies with dictatorships. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm."
Demosthenes, 384-322BCE
"In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all."
Denis Diderot,
"A man had been betrayed by his children, by his wife, and by his friends; some disloyal partners had ruined his fortune, and had plunged him into poverty. Pervaded with a profound hatred and contempt for the human race, he left society and took refuge alone in a cave. There, pressing his fists into his eyes, and contemplating a revenge proportional to his grievances, he said: "Evil people! What shall I do to punish them for their injustice and to make them all as unhappy as they deserve? Ah! if it were possible to imagine it -- to intoxicate them with a great fantasy to which they would attach more importance than to their lives, and about which they would never be able to agree!" Instantly he rushed out of the cave, shouting, "God! God!" Echoes without number repeated around him, "God! God!" This fearful name was carried from pole to pole, and heard everywhere with astonishment. At first men prostrated themselves, then they got up again, asked each other, argued with each other, became bitter, cursed each other, hated each other, cut each other's throats, and the fatal wish of the misanthropist was fulfilled. For such has been in the past, such will be in the future, the story of a being at all times equally important and incomprehensible."
Denis Diderot,
"Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it."
Denis Diderot,
"Losers live in the past. Winners learn from the past and enjoy working in the present toward the future."
Denis Waitley,
"We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means - all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."
Derrick Jensen,
"What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism."
Desiderius Erasmus,
"Humility is truth."
Desiderius Erasmus,
"Historically, more people have died of religion than cancer."
Dick Francis,
"We have two ears and one tongue so that we would listen more and talk less."
Diogenes, 412 BC-323BC
"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth."
Diogenes,
"I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world."
Diogenes,
"An effective counter to the endless succession of zealotry and fanaticism from one generation to the next, with its consequent ill effects on freedom of expression, thought, scientific inquiry, and behavior, would be to institute an age of consent for religious indoctrination."
Donald Henry Gudehus, 1939-
"The history of religion can be compared to a layer cake -- a mountain of layers of stale dogma, interspaced with the congealed blood of its victims, and overlaid with a sweetened opiate to make itself appealing to the gullible."
Donald Henry Gudehus,
"Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this."
Doris Lessing, 1919-
"All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility."
Doris Lessing, 1919-
"In America you can go on the air and kid the politicians, and the politicians can go on the air and kid the people. Personal relations are the important thing for ever and ever and not this outer life of telegrams and anger."
E.M. Forster, 1879-1970
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Edmund Burke, 1729-1797
"Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State."
Edward Abbey,
"History is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind."
Edward Gibbon, 1737-1974
"When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years."
Elbert Hubbard,
"Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915
"This will never be a civilized country (child) until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915
"Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide."
Elbert Hubbard,
"Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavoring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful -- or not, as the case may be -- has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915
"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."
Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915
"The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge."
Elbert Hubbard,
"I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity."
Elfriede Jelinek, 1946-
"I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers."
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, 1926-2004
"Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors."
Emile Cioran, 1911-1995
"Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant."
Epictetus,
"Justice... is a kind of contract not to harm or be harmed."
Epicurus, 341 BC-271
"Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980
"The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980
"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots."
Erich Fromm, 1900-1980
"Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?"
Ernst Toller,
"In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres. In the guise of ideologies, one massacres, tortures and kills. In the name of justice one punishes ... in the name of love of one's country or of one's race one hates other countries, despises them, massacres them. In the name of equality and brotherhood there is suppression and torture. There is nothing in common between the means and the end, the means go far beyond the end ... ideologies and religions ... are the alibis of the means."
Eugène Ionesco, 1912-94
"In the world of the present, in our time, we feel that suffering, anguish, the torments of body and soul, are greater than ever before in the history of mankind."
Eyvind Johnson, 1900-1976
"Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it."
Frances Wright, 1795-1852
"He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other."
Francis Bacon,
"Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred."
Frank Herbert, 1920-1986
"The truth is more important than the facts."
Frank Lloyd Wright, 1869-1959
"The laws of this world are for children."
Frank Wedekind,
"The laws of this world are for children."
Frank Wedekind, 1864-1918
"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."
Franz Kafka, 1883-1924
"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, the grossest of all libels.
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes-- ...I hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand."
Frederick Douglass,
"It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men."
Frederick Douglass,
"Theologians are all alike, of whatever religion or country they may be; their aim is always to wield despotic authority over men's consciences; they therefore persecute all of us who have the temerity to tell the truth."
Frederick II, 1740-1786
"The state is nothing but an instrument of opression of one class by another - no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy."
Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895
"By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live."
Friedrich Engels,
"State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous and then dies of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of the processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers way."
Friedrich Engels,
"From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization."
Friedrich Engels,
"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad."
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
"We must think of men who are cruel today as stages of earlier cultures, which have been left over ... They show us what we all were, and frighten us. But they themselves are as little responsible as a piece of granite for being granite."
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
"There are people who want to make men's lives more difficult for no other reason than the chance it provides them afterwards to offer their prescription for alleviating life; their Christianity, for instance."
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900
"Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
"Tell me straight out, I call on you -- answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears -- would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
"One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it."
Gaston Bachelard,
"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own."
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 1742-1799
"Society is becoming less and less transparent. People no longer know where decisions that substantially affect their lives are taken, nor by whom, nor how."
Georg Henrik von Wright, 1916-2003
"Transnational, gigantic industrial companies no longer operate within political systems, but rather above them."
Georg Henrik von Wright, 1916-2003
"The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of a purely objective life."
Georg Simmel, 1858-1918
"I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy."
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
"And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand."
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
"Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything."
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950
"Anybody can see that the little money you get is half-wasted, because you cannot spend it to advantage. The worst food comes to the poor, which their poverty makes them buy and their necessity makes them eat. Their stomachs are the waste-basket of the State. It is their lot to swallow all the adulterations on the market."
George Jacob Holyoake, 1817-1906
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink."
George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), 1903-1950
"The wisest mind has something yet to learn."
George Santayana,
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana,
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, 1874-1936
"Melancholy has ceased to be an individual phenomenon, an exception. It has become the class privilege of the wage earner, a mass state of mind that finds its cause wherever life is governed by production quotas."
Gunther Grass,
"We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place."
Gunther Grass, 1927-
"The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor."
H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956
"Honor is simply the morality of superior men."
H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956
"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, 1880-1956
"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, 1880-1956
"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956
"Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals."
H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956
"Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live."
Hans-Georg Gadamer,
"Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people."
Harry Emerson Fosdick, 1878-
"The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker."
Helen Keller, 1880-1968
"It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal."
Hellen Keller,
"To claim "humanitarian motives" when the motive is envy and its supposed appeasement, is a favorite rhetorical device of politicians today, and has been for at least a hundred and fifty years."
Helmut Schoeck,
"Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be outraged by silence."
Henri Frédéric Amiel,
"These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow."
Henrik Ibsen, 1828-1906
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostilities."
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
"Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror."
Herb Brody,
"The First Crusade ... set off on its two-thousand-mile jaunt by massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan. "In the temple of Solomon," wrote the ecstatic cleric Raimundus de Agiles, "one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses" bridles, by the just and marvellous judgment of God."
Herbert J Muller,
"I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature."
Herbert Read,
"Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past."
Herbert Read,
"To realize that new world we must prefer the values of freedom and equality above all other values - above personal wealth, technical power and nationalism."
Herbert Read, 1893-1968
"If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical."
Herbert Read,
"The future unit is the individual, a world in himself, self-contained and self-creative, freely giving and freely receiving, but essentially a free spirit."
Herbert Read,
"Man is everywhere still in chains."
Herbert Read,
"Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom."
Herbert Spencer, 1820-1903
"Society exists for the benefit of its members, not the members for the benefit of society."
Herbert Spencer,
"No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy."
Herbert Spencer,
"There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance."
Hippocrates, 460BC- 377BC
"A generation of men is like a generation of leaves; the wind scatters some leaves upon the ground, while others the burgeoning wood brings forth - and the season of spring comes on. So of men one generation springs forth and another ceases."
Homer,
"I detest that man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks for another."
Homer,
"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."
Immanuel Kant, 1724 - 1804
"Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy."
Isaac Newton,
"We build too many walls and not enough bridges."
Isaac Newton,
"The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor."
Isaiah Berlin,
"All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate."
Isaiah Berlin,
"Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not."
Isaiah Berlin,
"It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale."
Jacques Ellul, 1912-1994
"Education teaches people how to think, while propaganda teaches people what to think."
James A C Brown, 1911-1964
"People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned."
James A. Baldwin, 1924-1987
"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it."
James A. Baldwin,
"It's not enough just to be a mother. It's not only the social pressure on mothers by certain kinds of feminism and other sources. There is also economic pressure on them. It's a terrible cruelty."
James Hillman,
"The word power has such a generally negative implication in our society. What are people talking about? Are they talking about muscles, or control?"
James Hillman,
"Problems come from the environment, the cities, the economy, the racism. They come from architecture, school systems, capitalism, exploitation."
James Hillman,
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