User:Kasreyn/quotes

Note: These are some of my favorite quotes. Note that I do not necessarily agree with absolutely everything they say; I just found them very insightful or meaningful. This page is a work in progress, and I'll be adding more quotes over time. To the best of my knowledge, each is correctly attributed. If you find an error or misquotation, please contact me! -Kasreyn 09:41, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

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Political

"If a nation dreams of being ignorant and free, it dreams of what never was, and never shall be."
-Thomas Jefferson.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
-Patrick Henry.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, ~1784

"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
-A.J. Liebling.

"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
-MLK.

"Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country."
-Gen. George Washington.

"Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking-Glass is dead; Ta-Hool-Hool-Shute is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are - perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever."
-Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce.

"...the broad masses of a nation ... more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie..."
-Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.

"While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-Eugene V. Debs.

"Senator, I knew Jack Kennedy. I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."
-Lloyd Bentsen, to Dan Quayle.

"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left."
-Margaret Thatcher.

"My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man."
-William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist.

"The ballot is stronger than the bullet."
-Abraham Lincoln.

"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people."
-MLK, "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

"I will make a bargain with the Republicans. If they will stop telling lies about Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them."
-Adlai Stevenson.

"You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man's freedom. You can only be free if I am free."
-Clarence Darrow, address to the court in "The Communist Trial", People v. Lloyd (1920).

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives. Popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy - or perhaps both."
-James Madison.

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."
-Arthur C. Clarke, scientist and science fiction writer.

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-John Locke.

"One arises from a low to a high station more often by using fraud instead of force."
-Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, Chapter 8.

"On all levels American society is rigged. I am troubled by the cynical immorality of my country. It cannot survive on this basis."
-John Steinbeck, in a letter to Adlai Stevenson.

"The problem with political jokes is they get elected."
-Henry Cate VII

"I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution."
-Ulysses S. Grant.

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
-George Orwell.

Philosophical

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought."
-Bashō.

"But it is now time to depart - for me to die, for you to live. But which of us is going to a better state is unknown to everyone but the gods."
-Socrates, to his judges, upon being condemned to death.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss looks also into you."
-Friedrich Nietzsche.

"The sleep of reason breeds monsters."
-Goya.

"Better to hold your peace and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
-Abraham Lincoln.

"Early in life, I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no reason to change."
-Frank Lloyd Wright.

"I cried because I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet."
-Saadi Shirazi

.

"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
-Umberto Eco.

"Choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil."
-The Tao of Shinsei (? alleged).

"Somebody shoot me while I'm happy!"
-The late, great Fats Waller.

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is."
-Albert Camus.

"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.

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
-Poul Anderson.

"Ignorance is Vice."
-Socrates.

"Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink, that they may live."
-Socrates. (validity uncertain)

"Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money."
-Gerald Brenan.

"Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits."
-Robert Louis Stevenson.

"My hunger serves me instead of a clock."
-Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation, 1738.

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."
-Norman Cousins (1915-1990).

"There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of those whom one has ceased to love."
-Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

"Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, "The Books of Bokonon."

"It may be remarked in passing that success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblences to merit."
-Victor Hugo.

"Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the neccessary steadfastness and determination... Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions."
-Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, vol. I.

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
-George Bernard Shaw.

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."
-Diderot.

"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
-Haile Selassie.

"The best stomachs are not those which reject all foods."
-Plato.

"Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." (Where they have burned books, they will end in burning people.)
-Heinrich Heine, from his play Almansor, 1821.

"History teaches us that men and nations only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives."
-Abba Eban.

Literary

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
-Marc Antony, attributed by Plutarch, as related by William Shakespeare.

"I have heard of an eastern monarch who once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence which would be true and appropriate in all situations. They presented him the words, 'And this too shall pass away.'"
-Abraham Lincoln, in the play Lincoln in Illinois.

"When the stars threw down their spears
and watered Heaven with their tears
did he smile, his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?"
-William Blake, The Tyger.

"Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate
to say that for destruction, ice is also great, and would suffice."
-Robert Frost, Fire and Ice.

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known."
-Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and Dreadful, for thou art not so; For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me."
-John Donne.

"What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore - and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load...

...Or does it explode?"

-Langston Hughes, Harlem.

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
-Wm. Shakespeare, "Macbeth".

"How dreadful knowledge of the truth can be, when there's no help in truth!"
-Sophocles, "Oedipus Rex".

"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?"-Wm. Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

"The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."
-Omar Khayyám.

"Why do you laugh? Change the name, and the story is told of you."
-Horace.
(lit. Latin Quid rides? Mutato nomine, de te fabula narratur.)

"I have, alas, studied philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine, too,
And worst of all, theology
With keen endeavor, through and through -
And here I am, for all my lore,
The wretched fool I was before."
-Goethe, Faust, Part I.

"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real... but it is true."
-J.R.R. Tolkien.

Musical

"If you gotta ask, you'll never know."
-Satchmo, on jazz.

On Religion

"Who is it that they say I am?"
-Jesus of Nazareth.

"...Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him."
-Sojourner Truth.

"I do not pretend to know, where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means."
-Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Trial.

On Science

"I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam."
-Paul Broca, on evolution.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-Arthur C. Clarke

"Photons have neither morals nor visas."
-David Farber, internet guru.

"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done."
-Peter Ustinov.

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
-Charles Darwin.

"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition."
-Carl Sagan.

On Computer Science

"The best thing about Perl is that you can do anything with it. The worst thing about Perl is that you can do anything with it."
-unknown.

"At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer."
-unknown.

Voltaire

"To hold a pen is to be at war."

"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

"I may not agree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." This is a misquote often associated to voltaire.

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
-Candide.

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."

"Give me five minutes to talk away my face, and I'll bed the Queen of France."

"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."

"It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong."

"A witty saying proves nothing."
(ha!)

"They that can make you believe in absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

"Doubt is not an agreeable condition, but certainty is an absurd one."

"The Eternal has his designs from all eternity. If prayer is in accord with his immutable wishes, it is quite useless to ask of him what he has resolved to do. If one prays to him to do the contrary of what he has resolved, it is praying that he be weak, frivolous, inconstant; it is believing that he is thus, it is to mock him. Either you ask him a just thing, in which case he must do it, the thing being done without your praying to him for it, and so to entreat him is then to distrust him; or the thing is unjust, and then you insult him. You are worthy or unworthy of the grace you implore: if worthy, he knows it better than you; if unworthy, you commit another crime by requesting what is undeserved. In a word, we only pray to God because we have made him in our image. We treat him like a pasha, like a sultan whom one may provoke or appease."

Mahatma Gandhi

"Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up."

"The strength to kill is not essential for self-defence; one ought to have the strength to die."

"A semi-starved nation can have neither religion nor art not [sic?] organization."

"God is conscience. He is even the atheism of the atheist."

Einstein

"Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boschaft ist er nicht." (Loosely translated, "God is slick, but he ain't mean.")

"Newton did not know what happened to the apple, and I can prove this when the next eclipse comes."

"I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world!"
-in objection to quantum indeterminacy.

"Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem - in my opinion - to characterize our age."

"When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity."

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." (attributed)

"Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding."

"Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence."

"We should take care not to make the intellect our god. It has great muscles, but no personality."

Mark Twain

"Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."

"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to."

"For practice, God invented the idiot. Then he invented the school board."

"The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice - and always has been."

"The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful."

"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform."

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."

"When you catch an adjective, kill it."
-perhaps the best possible advice for budding writers.

"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress."

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

Kurt Vonnegut

"Extenuating circumstance to be mentioned on Judgement Day: We never asked to be born in the first place."
-from Timequake.

"Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been, and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful."
-from Timequake.

"All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

"Envy is ignorance, imitation is suicide."

"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."

Henry David Thoreau

"As if one could kill time, without injuring eternity."

"I have travelled a great deal in Concord."

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Comical

"If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
-Sir Winston Churchill.

"Madam, I may be drunk, but you are ugly, and in the morning I shall be sober."
-Sir Winston Churchill (anecdotal).

"You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting by the fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, 'I shoveled shit in Louisiana.'"-Lt. Gen. George S. "Old Blood and Guts" Patton.

"Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals."
-Abraham Lincoln.

"An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff."
-Adlai Stevenson.

"Consult. To seek another's approval of a course already decided on."
-Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary".

"Egotist. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than me."
-Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary".

"I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself."
-Oscar Wilde.

""If you think penguins are fat and waddle, you have never been attacked by one running at you in excess of 100 miles per hour."
-Linus Torvalds.

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
-Benjamin Disraeli.

"Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."
-Mohammed Ali, on Life.

"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
-Alfred Hitchcock (1899 - 1980).

Unclassifiable

"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members."
-Groucho Marx, on MENSA.

"Money is how people with no talent keep score."
-Michael Hart, quoted in Brief History of the Internet, 1995.

"When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite."
-Sir Winston Churchill, on the need for formal declarations of war.

"Vae, puto deus fio..." ("Alas, I think I am about to become a god.")
-Roman emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed.

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
-H. L. Mencken.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
-The character Lazarus Long, in Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein.