My Collection of Quotes
"Think, or be damned." - Bryan Penton
"I can resist everything except temptation." - Oscar Wilde
"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it." - Jack Handy
"A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory" - Steven Wright
"The unexamined Life is not worth living." - Socrates
"The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." - Albert Einstein
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed." - Albert Einstein
"The wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise." - Cato the Elder
"In Vino Veritas" (In wine there is truth) - Pliny the Elder
"If what Proust says is true, that happiness is the absence of fever, then I will never know happiness. For I am possessed by a fever for knowledge, experience, and creation." -Anais Nin
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anais Nin
"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, course, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask." -Oscar Wilde
"He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how." - Nietzche
"Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Premises of Materialism
"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." -George Bernard Shaw
Thoughtfulness for others, generosity, modesty and self-respect are the qualities which make a real gentleman or lady. - Thomas H. Huxley
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying." - Woody Allen
"Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain -- and most fools do." - Dale Carnegie
"Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation." - Edward R. Murrow
"The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge." - Anonymous
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russel
"Things are more like they are now than they ever were before." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken
"All generalizations are false." - Unknown
Politics / Civil Rights"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither." -John Stuart Mill
"A state which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands, even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished." -John Stuart Mill
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." -Nietzsche
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there." - Claire Boothe Luce
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber." - Unknown
"Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." - Ronald Reagan
"The extremist speech makes us perhaps more conscious of the full potential that lurks behind seemingly more innocent versions of the same ideas." - Lee Bollinger: The Tolerant Society, p.132
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." - Karl Marx, Theses on Feurbach
"This was but a prelude; where books are burnt, humans will be burned in the end." - Heinrich Heine (in 1820)
"The view that literature may be proscribed because it may change accepted moral standards flies squarely in the face of the guarantee of free expression. Back of this fundamental freedom lies the basic conviction that our democratic society must be free to perfect its own standards of conduct and belief through the heat of unrepressed controversy and debate. The remedy against those who attack currently accepted standards is defense of those standards, not censorship." - Lockhart & McClure: Literature, the Law of Obscenity, and the Constitution
Science/Arts"There are no facts, only interpretations." - Friedrich Nietzsche
"We are an impossibility in an impossible universe" - Ray Bradbury
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." - Albert Einstein
"The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things." - Leonardo DaVinci
-In 1969 Robert Wilson, the first director of Fermilab, a big American particle-physics facility, was asked by Congress what his new laboratory would contribute to America's defense. He replied: “This new knowledge has all to do with honor and country, but it has nothing to do directly with defending our country, except to help make it worth defending.”
"A physicist can abandon all the central beliefs of current physics and still remain a physicist. A priest cannot abandon certain central beliefs without giving up the vocation. Commitment is a virtue in religion, and a sin in science." - James Robert Brown
"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." - Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
"...a typical chromosomal DNA molecule in a human being is composed of about 5 billion pairs of nucleotides. The genetic instructions of all other taxa on earth are written in the same language, with the same code book. Indeed, this shared genetic language is one line of evidence that all the organisms on earth are descended from a single ancestor, a single instance at the origin of life some five billion years ago." - Carl Sagan: Dragons of Eden, p.23
"The common primate practice of pseudo-sexual mounting of males by males to express dominance is not widespread in humans, and some have taken comfort from this fact. But the most potent form of verbal abuse in English and many other languages is "Fuck You" with the pronoun "I" implicit at the beginning. The speaker is vividly asserting his claim to higher status, and his contempt for those he considers subordinate. Characteristically, humans have converted a postural image into a linguistic one with barely a change in nuance. The phrase is uttered millions of times each day, all over the planet, with hardly anyone stopping to think what it means. Often, it escapes our lips unbidden. It is satisfying to say. It serves its purpose. It is a badge of the primate order, revealing something of our nature despite all our denials and pretensions." -Carl Sagan, "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors", p. 409.
"On the view of earth from 3.7 billion miles away: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home, That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [...] There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." -Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot"
Religion"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw
"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." - H.L. Mencken
"I'm not concerned about all hell breaking loose, but that a PART of hell will break loose.. it'll be much harder to detect." - George Carlin
