What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you.

-- Nietzsche

---

Your work is to discover your life and with all your heart to give yourself to it.

-- Buddha

---

Patriot: the person who can holler loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

-- Mark Twain

---

If you choose the lesser of two evils you are still choosing evil.

-- Ralph Nader

---

You'll find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

-- Obi wan Kenobi

---

We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

---

Happiness and enthusiasm are powerfully attractive; they draw people to you and make you successful.

-- Joan Lunden

---

The thing women have got to learn is that nobody gives you power. You just take it.

-- Roseanne Barr

---

I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse.

-- Florence Nightingale

---

Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.

-- Henry Miller

---

To know is to be ignorant. Not to know is the beginning of wisdom.

-- J. Krishnamurti

---

If fear is cultivated it will become stronger, if faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery.

-- John Paul Jones

---

You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

-- net fortune cookie

---

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

-- Thornton Wilder

---

Did you ever notice how difficult it is to argue with someone who is not obsessed with being right?

-- Wayne Dyer

---

One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives.

-- Chinese proverb

---

Life may not always be the party we hoped for, but while we are here we might as well dance.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Careful what you set your heart upon, for it surely shall be yours.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.

-- Russell Lynes

---

Dreams come a size too big so that we can grow into them.

-- Josie Bisset

---

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.

-- May Sarton

---

Though they be only breath, words that I command are immortal.

-- Sappho

---

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

-- T. S. Elliot

---

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Whenever books are burned men also in the end are burned.

-- Heinrich Heine

---

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.

-- George Eliot

---

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

-- Proverbs 27:17

---

Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste death but once.

-- William Shakespeare

---

Wrong must not win by technicalities.

-- Aeschylus

---

People say that what we're all seeking is the meaning of life... I think that what we're really seeking is the experience of being alive.

-- Rudyard Kipling

---

As intelligence rises, the need for stimulation also rises. For every brain, there is an optimum level of arousal that your brain wants to get to. If your brain doesn't reach that level during the day, you've got to play.

By consuming your daily quota of stimulation, you promote your psychological and spiritual growth. You can also expand your intellectual capacity. Some things have a certain amount of depth that pushes you, makes you think a little deeper than you have, makes you study a little more, makes you connect with things outside of the game environment.

When you become completely absorbed by a game that pushes you to your intellectual edges, you feel like what you've done is more deeply significant than what you would have done otherwise.

Good games are good for you. Fun is a vitamin for the mind, essential nourishment for your intellect.

-- Dan Bunten & Heidi E. H. Aycock (adapted), "Compute Magazine," January 1992

---

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

-- Mal Pancoast

---

When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.

-- William Blake

---

Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others.

-- Fyodor Dostoevski

---

Tell the truth and then run.

-- Proverb

---

People would rather be wrong than be different.

-- Henry Jacobsen

---

I would much rather have men ask why I have no statue, than why I have one.

-- Marcus Procius Cato

---

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

-- Elbert Hubbard

---

I shall never believe that god plays dice with the universe.

-- Albert Einstein

God not only plays dice with the universe, he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
-- Stephen Hawking

C'mon seven!
-- Richard Feynman

---

The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage -- and act accordingly.

-- Corra May White Harris

---

The number of arguments is unimportant unless some of them are correct.

-- Ralph Hartley

---

A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.

-- unknown

---

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

-- Walter Anderson

---

And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

-- Kahlil Gibran, from "The Prophet"

---

No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.

-- Sir Thomas Browne (1605 - 1682)

---

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.

-- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

---

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand -- and melting like a snowflake.

-- Marie Beynon Ray

---

See what no one sees. See what everyone chooses not to see out of fear, or conformity, or laziness. See the whole world anew! Each day!

-- Arthur Mendelson, from the movie "Patch Adams"

---

The world is my country; to do good is my religion.

-- Thomas Paine

---

Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.

-- Frank Zappa

---

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

-- Eugene S. Wilson

---

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

-- Fellini

---

For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.

-- Isaiah 55:12

---

They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.

-- Aldous Huxley

---

The Riddle of Epicurus
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

---

The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.

-- Rita Mae Brown, from "Venus Envy"

---

We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness.

-- Thucydides

---

Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I have my doubts about the former.

-- Albert Einstein

---

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

-- Aleister Crowley

---

All men by nature desire knowledge.

-- Aristotle

---

If you are not for yourself, who will be for you?
If you are for yourself, then what are you?
If not now, when?

-- net fortune cookie

---

Don't worry over what other people are thinking about you. They're too busy worrying over what you are thinking about them.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You can risk loving another, or you can guarantee no love in your life.

-- unknown

---

It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.

-- David Hume

---

Walking a straight path is difficult for those who are crooked.

-- unknown

---

As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.

-- Marian Anderson

---

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

-- Maya Angelou

---

I don't believe in marriage. It's bloody impractical to love, honor and obey. If it weren't, you wouldn't have to sign a contract.

-- Katharine Hepburn

---

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.

-- Harvey Fierstein

---

A friend can tell you things you don't want to tell yourself.

-- Frances Ward Weller

---

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

-- Martin Luther King Jr.

---

Come fill the cup and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentence fling.
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter -- and the bird is on the wing.

-- Omar Khayyam

---

[I]it is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that 'so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV.' It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

---

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

-- Abraham Lincoln

---

Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.

-- Eugene S. Wilson

---

When we truly care for ourselves, it becomes possible to care far more profoundly about other people.

-- Eda LeShan

---

Man cannot degrade woman without himself falling into degradation; he cannot elevate her without at the same time elevating himself.

-- Alexander Walker

---

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

-- Timothy Leary

---

You don't love a woman because she is beautiful, but she is beautiful because you love her.

-- unknown

---

If divorce has increased by one thousand percent, don't blame the women's movement. Blame the obsolete sex roles on which our marriages were based.

-- Betty Naomi Friedan

---

The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

-- Franklin P. Adams

---

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

-- E. M. Forster

---

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.

-- James A. Michener

---

Small communities grow great through harmony, great ones fall to pieces through discord.

-- Gaius Sallustius Crispus, Roman historian

---

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

To live in dialogue with another is to live twice. Joys are doubled by exchange and burdens are cut in half.

-- Wishart

---

Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.

-- Dr. Seuss

---

How is it that a society that will watch "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" in huge numbers would reject unions between committed couples? Which is the greater mockery of marriage?

-- Adrian Walker, "The Boston Globe," 3/9/00

---

The popular notion of love and marriage is that they are synonymous. ... Like most popular notions this also rests not on actual facts, but on superstition.

-- Emma Goldman, 1911

---

[W]e are living in a sick Society filled with people who would not directly steal from their neighbor but who are willing to demand that the government do it for them.

-- William L. Comer

---

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.

-- Clarence Darrow

---

Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds. The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition. The latter, compared to the former, are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

He has the most who is most content with the least.

-- Diogenes the Cynic

---

Dogs and philosophers do the greatest good and get the fewest rewards.

-- Diogenes the Cynic

---

Show me a hero and I'll tell you a tragedy.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

---

The Possible's slow fuse is lit
By the Imagination.

-- Emily Dickinson

---

There are few people more often in the wrong than those who cannot endure to be thought so.

-- anon.

---

A human being is a part of a whole, call by us: universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings 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. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

-- Albert Einstein
[note! this quote may not be correct]

---

How ignorant is he who knows all but not himself.

-- Valividar, Rosicrucian

---

Live with intention.

-- anon.

---

Every wall is a door.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

After the dream, the passion wrought by it remains.

-- Dante, Paradiso Canto from the "Divine Comedy"

---

Beauty, truth, friendship, love, creation -- these are the great values of life. We can't prove them, or explain them, yet they are the most stable things in our lives.

-- Jesse Herman Holmes

---

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

-- Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.

---

[O]ne thing I know; the only ones among us who will be truly happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

George Washington, when asked if he thought God was on his side, reportedly replied, "It is not that God should be on our side, but that we be on His."

---

Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.

-- R. Drabek

---

To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets.

-- Mencius, philosopher (c. 380-289 BCE)

---

The God you worship is the God you deserve.

-- Joseph Campbell

---

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

-- Marianne Williamson

---

Awareness, in and of itself, is curative.

-- Robert Marrone

---

Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.

-- Rumi

---

Make no judgements where you have no compassion.

-- Anne McCaffrey

---

Practice compassion. Live with intention.

-- anon.

---

The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.

-- Tao Te Ching

---

Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.

-- Booker T. Washington, "Up from Slavery"

---

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

-- Henry Ford

---

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

-- Eric Hoffer

---

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.

-- John Wooden

---

All learning has an emotional base.

-- Plato

---

I never try to teach my students anything. I only try to create an environment in which they can learn.

-- Albert Einstein

---

From the very beginning of his education, the child should experience the joy of discovery.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

---

Anyone who makes a distinction between games and education clearly does not know the first thing about either one.

-- Marshall McLuhan

---

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out.

-- Montaigne

---

Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.

-- Benjamin Franklin, "Poor Richard's Almanac," 1758

---

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

-- Galileo Galilei

---

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.

-- Albert Einstein

---

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be... a Christian.

-- Mark Twain

---

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

-- Seneca the Younger

---

No gods, no masters.

-- Margaret Sanger

---

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

[H]eaven for climate and hell for society.

-- Mark Twain, Tammany & Croker speech

---

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

-- Carl Sagan

---

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

-- Bertrand Russell

---

[I]f devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater ... more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking ....

-- Ayn Rand

---

The Obligation of Subjects to the Sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasts, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by Nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no Covenant be relinquished. -- Hobbes, "Leviathan" (ch. 21)

---

The branches of your intelligence grow new leaves in the wind of listening.

-- Rumi

---

Though all under heaven be at peace, if the arts of war be forgotten there is peril.

-- Chinese Proverb

---

I knew one thing: as soon as anyone said you didn't need a gun, you'd better take one along that worked.

-- Raymond Chandler

---

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.

-- Samuel Johnson

---

Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Seeker of Truth, follow no path. All paths lead where. Truth is here.

-- e.e. cummings

---

People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way -- even when these stories concern their own native countries.

-- Thucydides of Athens

---

I think it's better to have a regular sort of life, and love somebody when they're boiling cabbages and getting in tempers and curling up beside you in bed every night. That's a much better kind of love than a pretty one that ends in sad and lovely paintings.

-- "Pretty Good Year, Afternoon Light"

---

To live is to love; all reason is against it; instinct is for it.

-- Samuel Butler

---

Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

-- Frederick J. Pohl

---

What an immense mass of evil must result ... from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen.

-- Tolstoy

---

Would you care to view the ruins of my good intentions?

-- net fortune cookie

---

[T]est everything; hold on to the good....

-- 1 Thessalonians 5:21

---

Be open to other people -- they may enrich your dream.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Listen to people with your heart instead of your ears and you will hear the truth.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

The anger you project onto others can destroy you.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Be true to yourself and others, and you'll know the difference between right and wrong.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

You can only help someone when you know there’s a problem.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Together, love and forgiveness are the golden keys to a peaceful soul and a happy heart.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Everyone's life is made up of choices. If you are unhappy, it is because you choose to be. You are the only person who can change that.

-- Debbie Gisonni

---

Discourage self-help, and loyal subjects become the slaves of ruffians.

-- A. V. Dicey, 19th C English jurist

---

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

-- Albert Einstein

---

If you think that the distance Christ had to come to take the likeness of man is not so great as that from man to gorilla, then you don't know men. Or gorillas. Or God.

-- from Dian Fossey's eulogy

---

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

-- Richard Feynman

---

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program.

-- Larry Niven

And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!
-- Arthur C. Clarke

---

Real historical writers probe factual uncertainties, but they do not invent convenient facts and they do not ignore inconvenient facts. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.

-- William Kelleher Storey, "Writing History"

---

Do one thing every day that scares you.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

May you live all the days of your life.

-- unknown

---

When in despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won; there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.

-- M. K. Gandhi

---

Power corrupts but so does weakness. And absolute weakness corrupts absolutely.

-- Josef Joffe, editor of "Die Zeit"

---

Optimism is an intellectual choice.

-- Diana Scheider

---

He who is most reluctant to make a promise is most likely to keep it.

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

---

Qui male agit odit lucem.
(He who behaves badly hates the light.)

-- John 3:20

---

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

-- Adlai Stevenson

---

[P.T.] Barnum’s great discovery was not how easy it is to deceive the public, but rather how much the public enjoyed being deceived.

-- Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, in "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America"

---

If you want breakfast in bed, sleep in the kitchen.

-- anon.

---

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

-- anon.

---

Of course I don't look busy. I did it right the first time.

-- anon.

---

Commitment is the spark that lights the fire.

-- unknown

---

Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.

-- W. Clement Stone

---

Four innate sentiments dispose people to a universal moral sense. These are sympathy, fairness, self-control, and duty.

-- James Q. Wilson

---

Before the world finds a place for you, find a place for yourself in the world.

-- Anonymous

---

No dream comes true until you wake up and go to work.

-- Anonymous

---

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.

-- Anna Louise Strong

---

Some reckon time by stars,
And some by hours;
Some measure days by dreams
And some by flowers;
My heart alone records
My days and hours.

-- Madison J. Cawein, from "Some Reckon Time by Stars"

---

Anyone too busy to say thank you will get fewer and fewer chances to do so.

-- Harvey McKay

---

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that but the really great people make you feel you too can be great.

-- Mark Twain

---

This is a time for a loud voice, open speech, and fearless thinking. I rejoice that I live in such a splendidly disturbing time.

-- Helen Keller

---

Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.

-- Neil Armstrong

---

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

-- Carl Jung

---

Things won are done; the joy lies in the doing.

-- William Shakespeare

---

But there is such a thing as genuine love, which is always considerate. Its distinguishing characteristic is, in fact, regard for personal dignity. Its effect is to stimulate self-respect in the other person. Its concern is to help the loved one become their true self. In a mysterious way such love finds its truest realization in its power to stimulate the other to attain their highest self-realization.

-- Romano Guardini

---

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

-- Herbert Spencer (1891)

---

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-- P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

---

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

---

Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.

-- Pericles (430 B.C.)

---

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

-- P.J. O'Rourke

---

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

-- Peter Drucker

---

It is amazing how much more moral people can be if they know that immorality will have painful consequences.

-- Clayton Cramer, "Rights & Revolution," writing about the FBI resolving the Montana Freeman siege without killing anyone... perhaps because there were armed U.S. citizens there watching, who were concerned about another Waco

---

An eye for an eye will blind the world.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

---

Never offend with style when you can offend with substance.

-- Sam Brown

---

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.

-- Albert Einstein

---

Conformism brings uniformity rather than unity.

-- Pope John Paul II
(much to my surprise, considering his recent incorrect, unpleasant, and anti-American pontifications regarding priestly pedophilia. I wonder when he said this? Must have been a while ago)

---

Freedom has always been an expensive thing.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

Real beauty is my aim.

-- Mohandas Gandhi

---

Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.

-- Mark Twain

---

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

-- Carl Gustav Jung

---

Knowledge is power, but power is just potential.

-- Robert Simpson, Jr.

---

Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past.

-- George Orwell

---

Whatever occurs from love is always beyond good and evil.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

---

I have always thought of a myth as something that never was but is always happening.

-- Jean Houston, "The Possible Human"

---

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.

-- Joseph Campbell

---

And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?!"

-- net fortune cookie

---

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

-- George Orwell, author of "1984"

---

When a man's conscience and the laws clash, it is his conscience that he must follow.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it, and sometimes three.

-- Alexandre Dumas

---

In a system of majoritarian rule with no protected rights, democracy is just two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for lunch.

-- Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr., in the "Wall Street Journal"

---

Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty:
it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear:
it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited where its
votaries live in confidence, equality, and un-reserve.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

---

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

---

English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

-- net fortune cookie

---

No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

-- Margaret H. Sanger

---

Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?

-- Kelvin Throop III

---

To get the most out of being single, a woman has to develop a skill that is seemingly harder to come by these days than a good man: the ability to be happy even when other people are convinced you can't be.

-- Laura Miller, "State of the single woman," Salon.com

---

[L]iberty is a practice, not a condition.

-- Michel Foucault

---

Even as they strike you down, you will remember, humanity is not our enemy. The only thing worthy of you is compassion ... Hatred will never let you face the beast in human beings. One day, when you face the beast alone, with your courage intact, your eyes kind ... out of your smile will bloom a flower. And ... on the long, rough road, the sun and the moon will continue to shine.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist monk; written in 1965, during the Vietnam War

---

They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote.

-- Rep. Ron Paul, TX, on how few Congresscritters saw the USA-PATRIOT Bill before voting overwhelmingly to impose a police state

---

The more you love, the more you can love -- and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had time enough, he could love all of the majority who are decent and just.

-- Robert A. Heinlein (Time Enough For Love)

---

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied: real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring: real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. ‘Imaginative literature,’ therefore, is either boring, or immoral, or a mixture of both.

-- Simone Weil

---

Decide to be aggressive enough, quickly enough.
The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get.
Be polite. Be professional. But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

-- USMC 'humorous rules of gunfighting'

---

The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest.

-- Steven Brust, "Five Hundred Years After"

---

To teach is to learn twice.

-- Joseph Joubert

---

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

-- Aristotle

---

In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said -- grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"?

Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."

A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

-- Carl Sagan

---

All professions are to a certain extent a conspiracy against the laity.

-- anon.

---

I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest.

-- Alexandre Dumas (fils)

---

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.

-- Henry Ford

---

Freedom is nothing else but the chance to do better.

-- Camus

---

Until you have been challenged, you don't know you're right.

-- Dr. Henry Heimlich

---

It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

-- unknown (but I wish I did know!)

---

[D]o anything you wish to do, have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish to be.

-- Robert Collier

---

Learn how to be happy with what you have while you pursue all that you want.

-- Jim Rohn

---

The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn't like to do.

-- Thomas Edison

---

Some people can't see the solution. Others can't see the problem.

-- G.K. Chesterton

---

The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer everybody else up.

-- Mark Twain

---

Sports do not build character. They reveal it.

-- Heywood Broun

---

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

-- Kurt Vonnegut

---

Goals are new, forward-moving objectives. They magnetize you towards them.

-- Mark Victor Hansen

---

There is no such thing as a good excuse.

-- Dero Ames Saunders

---

Without courage, all other virtues lose their meaning.

-- Winston Churchill

---

Nothing great has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe something inside them was superior to circumstances.

-- Bruce Barton

---

Freedom is not procured by a full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling that desire.

-- Epictetus

---

A man's doubts and fears are his worst enemies.

-- William Wrigley Jr.

---

First law of debate: Never argue with a fool. People might not know the difference.

-- unknown

---

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.

-- Franklin P. Jones

---

Feel yourself being quietly drawn by the deeper pull of what you truly love.

-- Rumi

---

Those who hear not the music, think the dancers mad.

-- unknown

---

Many people resent being treated like the person they really are.

-- unknown

---

Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.

-- R. W. Emerson

---

Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

-- Frank Hubbard

---

Life garners experience, and nothing replaces experience -- not talent nor good intentions.

-- Melissa Drake

---

The easiest way for me to grow as a person is to surround myself with people smarter than I am.

-- net fortune cookie

---

When you're in love... it shows.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Under everyone's hard shell is someone who wants to be appreciated and loved.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Ignoring the facts does not change them.

-- net fortune cookie

---

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere 'being.'

-- Carl Jung

---

Girls are being taught in school how to put a condom on a boy, but they don't know how to talk to them!

-- Anne Bernays, granddaughter of Sigmund Freud

---

Question with boldness even the existence of a God, because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

-- Thomas Jefferson

---

The so-called dark side is not wholly an evil or negative place or force; after all, some things remain in the shadows because we've placed them there out of fear or squeamishness.

-- Jay Kinney

---

Stars are not seen by sunshine.

-- Spanish Proverb

---

Without darkness there are no dreams.

-- Karla Kuban

---

When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.

-- African Proverb

---

Why are we scared to die? Do any of us remember being scared when we were born?

-- Trevor Kay

---

It is not enough for us to have an abstract, intellectual concept of our common community; we need to have places that enable us to go there and feel it as a real sensation. There's a reason they held that rally in Tiananmen Square, not a parking lot. And of course the same is true of other, humbler, values.

Anything less makes us live in either a fantasy world or an abstraction with no emotional substance to give it depth, resonance, stability, and a sense of being shared with others.

-- Robert Locke, "America’s Greatest Architect Is A Conservative," from FrontPageMagazine.com, 6 May 2001

---

The world is full of people who have never, since childhood, met an open doorway with an open mind.

-- E.B. White

---

Ultimately, we become what we love.

-- Kenneth L. Woodward, "Why We Need Hell, Too" from Newsweek, 12 Aug 2002

---

When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

When I dare to be powerful -- to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

-- Audre Lord

---

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

-- Aesop

---

A long memory is the most subversive idea in America.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You can make it illegal, but you can't make it unpopular.

-- net fortune cookie

---

The trouble with political jokes is that too often, they get elected.

-- anon.

---

A sincere smile warms the coldest of hearts.

-- anon.

---

What ever happens with us, your body will haunt mine.

-- Adrienne Rich

---

Comedy is tragedy plus time.

-- Carol Burnett

---

The best portions of a good man's life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.

-- William Wordsworth

---

Life is too short to be small.

-- Benjamin Disraeli

---

Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

-- John Henry Cardinal Newman

---

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

-- Helen Keller

---

A friend is one who makes me do my best.

-- Oswald Chambers

---

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

'Tis better to be alone than in bad company.

-- George Washington

---

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.

-- Ben Johnson

---

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

-- William Blake

---

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.

-- Eric Hoffer

---

Happiness to me means constant growth.

-- Eddie Albert

---

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

-- Plato

---

A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small package.

-- Benjamin Franklin

---

Be a friend to thyself, and others will be so too.

-- Thomas Fuller

---

Look to be treated by others as you have treated others.

-- Publilius Syrus

---

Unshared joy is an unlighted candle.

-- Spanish proverb

---

The older you get, the more you realize that kindness is synonymous with happiness.

-- Lionel Barrymore

---

If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got.

-- Anonymous

---

Tell me with whom thou art found and I will tell thee who thou art.

-- Goethe

---

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

-- Marcus Aurelius

---

At seventy, I would say the advantage is that you take life more calmly. You know that "this too will pass."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

-- Karl Barth

---

Our life is what our thoughts make it.

-- Marcus Aurelius

---

Life is what we make it. Always has been. Always will be.

-- Grandma Moses

---

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

-- Aristotle

---

I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you have still chaos in yourselves.

-- Nietzsche

---

He who wants to kill most thoroughly, laughs. Not by wrath but by laughter does one kill.

-- Nietzsche

---

Whatever you do, do it with all your heart and soul.

-- Bernard Baruch

---

Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

-- Nietzsche

---

Happiness is a habit. Cultivate it.

-- Elbert Hubbard

---

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

-- Mark Twain

---

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

-- Marie Curie

---

My recipe for life is not being afraid of myself.

-- Eartha Kitt

---

Assume responsibility for the quality of your own life.

-- Norman Cousins

---

The heart that loves is always young.

-- Greek proverb

---

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

-- Kafka

---

Keep company with those who may make you better.

-- English saying

---

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

-- Jonathan Swift

---

Get the advice of everybody whose advice is worth having -- they being very few -- then do what you think best yourself.

-- Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish poet & playwright

---

It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.

-- Rene Descartes

---

The problem with any unwritten law is that you don't know where to go to erase it.

-- Glaser and Way

---

You are your problem, and you are your solution.

-- Bill Bailey

---

Your Truth will not be my Truth!

-- Bruce Lee

---

We childproofed our home 3 years ago and they're still getting in!

-- net fortune cookie

---

Advice for the day: If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: "Take two Aspirin," and "Keep away from children."

-- net fortune cookie

---

Where there is much light there is also much shadow.

-- Goethe

---

If music be the food of love, play on.

-- Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 1

---

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

-- Ayn Rand

---

Everyone has problems. Everyone. But successful people figure out how to solve theirs. That's the difference between successful and unsuccessful people.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet, and the winds long to play with your hair.

-- Kahlil Gibran

---

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.

-- Josh Billing

---

Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors.

One would look in vain for reasons to justify it, by differences in physical constitution, intelligence, moral sensibility. This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.

-- Marquis de Condorcet

---

The cynic is his own worst enemy. It requires far less skill to run a wrecking company than it does to be an architect.

-- U.S. Andersen

---

We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful new world. We will see it when we believe it.

-- Saul Alinsky

---

We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.

-- net fortune cookie

---

I understood that within the soul from its primordial beginnings there has been a desire for light and an irrepressible urge to rise out of the primal darkness. The longing for light is the longing for consciousness.

-- C.G. Jung

---

What we wish, that we readily believe.

-- Demosthenes

---

In Blythe, California, a city ordinance declares that a person must own at least two cows before he can wear cowboy boots in public.

-- net fortune cookie
[I feel so much more... genuine now! ;-)]

---

You don't always win your battles, but it's good to know you fought.

-- Lauren Bacall

---

Blasphemy is ignoring your dreams.

-- srini

---

Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.

-- Edmund Brown, Jr.

---

Garbage In -- Gospel Out

-- net fortune cookie

---

Today when a man gets married he gets a home, a housekeeper, a cook, a cheering squad, and another paycheck. When a woman marries, she gets a boarder.

-- net fortune cookie

---

The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't.

-- Ernest Rutherford

---

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

-- Herbert Prochnow

---

People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

-- Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Grey," 1891

---

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Graduating in four years is like leaving the party at ten o'clock.

-- graffiti on a wall at Chico State

---

A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Old age is too high a price to pay for maturity.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Sure the world is full of trouble, but as long as we have people undoing trouble we have a pretty good world.

-- Helen Keller

---

God has granted to every people a prophet in its own tongue.

-- The Koran

---

Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.

-- Seneca, "Epistolae ad Lucilium, Epis. XLVII, 11"

---

Believe you have it, and you have it.

-- Latin Proverb

---

Love conquers all.

-- Virgil, "Eclogues, X"

---

Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life. The great enduring realities are love and service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.

-- Helen Keller

---

By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love he may rule the world forever.

-- Lao-tze, "The Simple Way"

---

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

-- Bhagavad-Gita

---

Believe nothing, O monks, merely because you have been told it... or because it is traditional, or because you yourselves have imagined it. Do not believe what your teacher tells you merely out of respect for the teacher. But whatsoever, after due examination and analysis, you find to be conductive to the good, the benefit, the welfare of all beings -- that doctrine believe and cling to, and take it as your guide.

-- Gautama Buddha

---

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.

-- Aristotle

---

There is a difference between him who does no misdeeds because of his own conscience and him who is kept from wrong-doing because of the presence of others.

-- The Talmud

---

The broad-minded see the truth in different religions; the narrow-minded see only their differences.

-- Lao-tze

---

Good and kind people outnumber all the others by thousands to one. The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people. Complex systems can only be built step by step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant.

Thus in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry: every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible as the ordinary effects of a vast majority.

-- Stephen Jay Gould, in Britain's "Leftist Guardian" in the wake of 9-11

---

The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.

-- the "Colonel," in actuality a damaged computer passing the Turing test, from Metal Gear Solid 2

---

Building the future and keeping the past alive are one and the same thing.

-- "Solid Snake," from Metal Gear Solid 2

---

These are the times that try men's souls.... Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

-- Thomas Paine

---

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face... You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

A nation is not conquered
Until the hearts of its women are on the ground.
Then it is finished,
No matter how brave its warriors
Or how strong their weapons.

-- Cheyenne proverb

---

In the age of Oprah and Clinton, empathy -- or the confession thereof -- is an end in itself.

-- Ken Silverstein

---

I learned everything I know about hustling from the Baptist Church.

-- Morris Dees, primary fundraiser for the "Southern Poverty Law Center"

---

The great thing about the internet is its leveling effect; online all opinions are equally worthless.

-- Grant Morrison

---

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

-- Robert Heller

---

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will -- his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

And no, reason and logic are not masculine instruments of oppression. To suggest that they are is an insult to women.

-- Richard Dawkins, "Unweaving the Rainbow"

---

Self-education is a continuing source of pleasure to me, for the more I know, the fuller my life is and the better I appreciate my own existence.

-- Isaac Asimov, "My Favorite Writing"

---

Computer programmers tend, by and large, to be quirky and highly individualistic. Trying to organize or manage such awkward characters is normally as thankless as herding cats.

-- John Naughton, "A Brief History of the Future"

---

Leaders are people who do the right thing; managers are people who do things right.

-- Warren Bennis

---

When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why everybody isn't eager to hear it.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

-- Richard Bach, "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"

---

They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

-- Carl Sagan

---

Going to church does not make a person religious, nor does going to school make a person educated, any more than going to a garage makes a person a car.

-- net fortune cookie

---

In a free country we punish men for crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.

-- Harry Truman

---

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club.

-- John W. Campbell

---

Pohl's law: Nothing is so good that somebody, somewhere, will not hate it.

-- Frederick Pohl

---

Gentleness is not a weakness... gentleness is power under control.

-- unknown

---

Ignorance leads to fear. Fear causes anger. Anger gets you into trouble. Pride keeps you there.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority; Always be afraid to stand with the majority which is wrong, for the majority which is wrong will one day be the minority.

-- William Jennings Bryan

---

Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.

-- Dick Brandon

---

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

-- Robert Frost

---

The Tao of heaven is to take from those who have too much and give to those who do not have enough.
Man's way is different.
He takes from those who do not have enough to give to those who already have too much.
What man has more than enough and gives it to the world?
Only the man of Tao.

Therefore the sage works without recognition.
He achieves what has to be done without dwelling on it.
He does not try to show his knowledge.

-- Tao Te Ching, part of verse 77

---

Live as those who have the Self as lamp, the Self as refuge, and no other.

-- Gautama Buddha

---

I am awake.

-- Gautama Buddha

---

It is your concern when your neighbor's wall is on fire.

-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

---

It is necessary, therefore, to obey the universal; but although the Logos is universal most people live as though they had a private understanding.[v.2]
Listening to the Logos and not to me, it is wise to agree that all things are One.[v.3]
When they are spoken to, the ignorant are like the deaf: they bear witness to the proverb that when present they are absent.[v.6]
Human nature does not have true judgment, but divine nature does.[v.12]
To God all things are beautiful, good and just, but human beings have supposed some things to be unjust, others just.[v.13]
A hidden connection is stronger than an apparent one.[v.14]
Nature prefers to hide.[v.15]
Good and bad are the same.[v.20]
The sun is new each day.[v.32]
To be wise is one thing: to know the thought that directs all things through all things.[v.34]
The One, the only wisdom, does and yet does not consent to be called Zeus.[v.35]
Human beings are carried away by every new theory.[v.45]
Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living their death and dying their life.[v.46]
Those who sleep also share in the work of the cosmos.[v.50]
I searched my nature.[v.53]
Ethos anthropoi daimon (For human beings, character is the divine force).[v.54]

-- Heraclitus, from Richard Geldard's "Remembering Heraclitus"

---

When myths lose their meaning and understanding gives way to fairy tale, language must necessarily change accordingly, and philosophy takes up the cause of meaning.

-- Richard Geldard

---

To define is to confine.

-- Richard Geldard

---

A Fanatic is someone who doubles his effort while losing his aim.

-- Chuck Jones (?)

---

We all remember how many religious wars were fought for a religion of love and gentleness; how many bodies were burned alive with the genuinely kind intention of saving souls from the eternal fire of hell.

-- Karl Popper

---

Marriage is important when you're afraid, insecure, or need something. It's possible to be married just by being together.

-- Tina Turner, 60 year old singer who has cohabited with her partner Erwin Bach, a record company executive, for the last 14 years

---

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

-- Katharine Hepburn

---

It may be that if the job description of wife were spelled out in full no sensible woman would apply.

-- Rebecca Mead, "Conditional Surrender," The New Yorker, April 2, 2001

---

[The] idealization of marriage is typical of those who are excluded from it: priests, gays, adolescents. It shows an extraordinary willful blindness.

-- Michael Warner, "The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life" (1999)

---

I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married.

-- Queen Elizabeth I

---

Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

-- Ellen Key, Swedish social feminist circa 1900

---

"I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence?

-- unknown

---

Let no one ever say that marriages are made in Heaven; the gods would not commit so great an injustice!

-- Queen Marguerite of Valois (wife of Henry IV of France)

---

Marriage is an institution. I'm not ready for an institution.

-- Mae West

---

Any intelligent woman who reads the marriage contract, and then goes into it, deserves all the consequences.

-- Isadora Duncan

---

What it boils down to is this: Marriage feels wrong. My relationship with Hugh feels very, very right. Marriage is irrelevant to the daily hubbub of our relationship. Marriage is like lipstick or high heels or party dresses: so incredibly foreign and so clearly the trappings of someone else's idea of womanhood.

-- Rachel Fudge on why she hasn't married her partner of seven years; "Why I Don't," an essay in the book "Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership" (2001)

---

[A] mistake of great historical significance has been made in modern times in the construction of a doctrine which treated traditions as the detritus of the forward movement of society. ... [A] life without piety, including piety to the past, courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual.

-- Edward Shils

---

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

-- Rebecca West

---

You're never too old to become younger.

-- Mae West

---

Westheimer's Discovery: A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple of hours in the library.

---

The help people need most urgently is help in admitting that they need help.

-- net fortune cookie

---

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

-- Lazarus Long

---

Justice without mercy is not justice.

-- Clarence Darrow

---

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

-- George Orwell

---

When I'm old, I don't want them to say of me, "She's so charming." I want them to say, "Be careful, I think she's armed."

-- G. Stoddart

---

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Because most people do not read books, reading is sometimes labeled elitist. But, in fact, it is no more elitist than walking -- less so, because the government pays for you to learn to read, whereas you have to pick up walking by yourself. Nor are books just for the moneyed. You can get them free from public libraries. Some people are too lazy to read or walk, but that has nothing to do with elitism.

-- British critic John Carey

---

If hate is what you want to censor, then shut down the churches: No artist has ever produced so much bile and hate as spew forth from pulpits in the name of God.

-- Brad Fraser, author of "Unidentified Human Remains," commenting on the furor surrounding Brooklyn Museum of Art's "Sensation" exhibit

---

Fear is the greatest salesman.

-- Robert Klein

---

Professional wrestling: ballet for the common man.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.

-- Epicurus (341 BCE - 271 BCE)

---

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.

-- Jack London

---

A proper fairy tale is anything but an untruth; it goes to the very heart of truth. It goes to the hearts of men and women and speaks of the things it finds there: fear, courage, greed, compassion, loyalty, betrayal, despair, and wonder. It speaks of these things in a symbolic language that slips into our dreams, our unconscious, steeped in rich archetypal images.

-- Terri Windling, "White as Snow: Fairy Tales and Fantasy," in Snow White, Blood Red

---

A good fairy tale, or fantastic novel, may indeed lead us through a door from daily life to the magic lands of Once Upon a Time, but it should then return us back again with a sharper vision of our own world. Instead of replacing real life, good fantasy whets our taste for it and opens our eyes to its wonders.

The fairy tale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairy tale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious.

To travel to the wood, to face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience.

-- Terri Windling, "White as Snow: Fairy Tales and Fantasy," in Snow White, Blood Red

---

The people sensible enough to give good advice are usually sensible enough to give none.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world -- even if what is published is not true.

-- Richard Bach, "Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul"

---

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

-- Dom Helder Camara

---

Neither slave nor tyrant.

-- Basque motto

---

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn't necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity, or compassion.

-- Saul Alinsky

---

Our bodies are our gardens -- our wills are our gardeners.

-- William Shakespeare

---

The price of greatness is responsibility.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Honesty pays, but it doesn't seem to pay enough to suit some people.

-- F. M. Hubbard

---

Satan, it will be remembered, is not a conqueror, not an exploiter. He is a tempter, a seducer, most dangerous when he smiles.

-- Bernard Lewis

---

Your motives for doing whatever good deed you may have in mind will be misinterpreted by somebody.

-- anon. from the net

---

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena... who strives valiantly, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in worthy causes. Who, at best, knows the triumph of high achievement and who, at worst, if he fails, fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

-- Teddy Roosevelt

---

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends
It gives a lovely light

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

---

There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind are nothing but a dream. They are right. It is a dream. It is the American dream.

-- Archibald MacLeish

---

The Fall of man, as the Bible recounts it, is really the Fall of God.

-- Theodore Roethke, American Poet, 1937

---

...the prescriptive distinction that states that we practice religion but they practice magic should be seen for what it is, a political validation of the approved and the official against the unapproved and unofficial.

-- John Dominic Crossan

---

What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!

-- Pope Leo X

---

Rejoice with everlasting joy
[Un]ceasingly, worship in the common assembly.
Bless the one who
Wonderfully does majestic deeds, and makes known his strong hand.

-- One of the Dead Sea scrolls

---

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Love seeketh not Itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care;
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

-- William Blake

---

The healthy man does not torture others -- generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

-- Carl Jung (1875­1961), "Return to the Simple Life," (Zurich, May 1941)

---

Put your trust in those who are worthy.

-- net fortune cookie

---

...the more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.

-- St. Catherine of Siena

---

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

-- Giordano Bruno (1548 - burned at the stake 1600)

---

It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose Liberty.

-- Francis Bacon

---

Knowledge's kiss,
Given the chance,
Is twice the bliss
of ignorance.

-- unknown (mazerpriest?)

---

Henceforth I ask not good fortune -- I myself am good fortune

-- Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"

---

There is no god; there is only the illusion you see of yourself.

-- JoeK.com

---

Here I am, fifty-eight, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

-- Peter Drucker

---

The only really decent thing to do behind a person's back is pat it.

-- from the net

---

Take it for granted, that by far the greatest part of mankind do neither analyse nor search to the bottom; they are incapable of penetrating deeper than the surface. All have senses to be gratified, very few have reason to be applied to. Graceful utterance and action please their eyes, elegant diction tickles their ears; but strong reason would be thrown away upon them.

-- Lord Chesterfield, in a letter to his adult son, 12 February 1754

---

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's.

-- Kee Hinckley

---

Ancoro imparo
(I am still learning).

-- Michelangelo's motto (1475 - 1564)

---

Lo! Men have become the tool of their tools.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity.

-- Max Horkheimer

---

[W]e must not judge the society of the future by considering whether or not we should like to live in it; the question is whether those who have grown up in it will be happier than those who have grown up in our society or those of the past.

-- Joseph Wood Krutch

---

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

-- Elie Wiesel

---

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

-- Salman Rushdie

---

Je n'ai pas besoin de cet hypothese
(Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis).

-- Pierre Laplace (1749-1827), to Napoleon, on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.

---

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

---

The truth is more important than the facts.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

---

Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

-- Wernher Von Braun (1912-1977)

---

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 (1879-1955)

---

Now, now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.

-- Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking he renounce Satan

---

I criticize by creation -- not by finding fault.

-- Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

---

There is only one nature -- the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.

-- Bill Wulf

---

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

---

The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.

-- Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live

---

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)

---

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

-- Tom Clancy

---

Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions -- it only guarantees equality of opportunity.

-- Irving Kristol

---

Well done is better than well said.

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

---

The average person thinks he isn't.

-- Father Larry Lorenzoni

---

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

-- Sun Tzu

---

Never mistake motion for action.

-- Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

---

Men have become the tools of their tools.

-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

---

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

-- Mark Twain (1835-1910)

---

The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.

-- Gloria Leonard

---

You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

-- Al Capone (1899-1947)

---

The gods too are fond of a joke.

-- Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

---

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

---

I am not young enough to know everything.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

---

Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.

-- Gail Godwin

---

University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

-- Henry Kissinger (1923-)

---

When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

-- Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

---

Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.

-- Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

---

I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure -- that is all that agnosticism means.

-- Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925

---

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

-- Will Durant

---

A witty saying proves nothing.

-- Voltaire (1694-1778)

---

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

---

Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.

-- Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)

---

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

-- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

---

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

-- Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), Inaugural Address, January 20, 1953

---

A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship.

-- John D. Rockefeller (1874-1960)

---

How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself.

-- Anais Nin (1903-1977)

---

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

---

God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

-- Voltaire (1694-1778)

---

I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

---

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)

---

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

-- Plato (427-347 B.C.)

---

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

---

Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right.

-- Henry Ford (1863-1947)

---

If a man does his best, what else is there?

-- General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

---

You are scrupulously honest, frank, and straightforward. Therefore you have few friends.

-- off the web

---

As I argued in "Beloved Son," a book about my son Brian and the subject of religious communes and cults, one result of proper early instruction in the methods of rational thought will be to make sudden mindless conversions -- to anything -- less likely. Brian now realizes this and has, after eleven years, left the sect he was associated with.

The problem is that once the untrained mind has made a formal commitment to a religious philosophy -- and it does not matter whether that philosophy is generally reasonable and high-minded or utterly bizarre and irrational -- the powers of reason are surprisingly ineffective in changing the believer's mind.

-- Steve Allen, comedian, from an essay in the book "The Courage of Conviction," edited by Philip Berman

---

For I can see that in the midst of death, life persists. In the midst of untruth, truth persists. In the midst of darkness, light persists.

-- Gandhi

---

The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole carloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity.

-- John Adams

---

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

-- Mark Twain

---

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.

-- Maya Angelou

---

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

-- Rasselas

---

Happiness isn't having what you want, it's wanting what you have.

-- anon.

---

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.

-- G.B. Shaw

---

I guess I've been so wrapped up in playing the game that I never took time enough to figure out where the goal line was -- what it meant to win -- or even how you won.

-- Cash McCall

---

Shame is an improper emotion invented by pietists to oppress the human race.

-- Robert Preston, playing Toddy in "Victor/Victoria"

---

To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form -- and the local human passions and conditions and standards -- are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes.

-- H. P. Lovecraft

---

As for seriously-written books on dark, occult, and supernatural themes -- in all truth they don't amount to much. That is why it's more fun to invent mythical works like the 'Necronomicon' and 'Book of Eibon.'

-- H. P. Lovecraft

---

Adulthood is hell.

-- H. P. Lovecraft

---

For some, sex leads to sainthood; for others it is the road to hell... all depends on one's point of view.

-- Henry Miller

---

The difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.

-- Brendan Francis

---

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

-- Terry Pratchett

---

The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.

-- Plutarch

---

Fear nothing but the failure to experience your true nature.

-- Zenji

---

Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.

-- Vittorio Alfieri

---

The idea is like grass. It craves sunlight, likes crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin

---

Science and fun cannot be separated.

-- Sir Roger Penrose

---

...that as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by an Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.

-- Benjamin Franklin

---

Life doesn't make any sense, and we all pretend it does. Comedy's job is to point out that it doesn't make sense.

-- Eric Idle

---

Despair is the price one pays for setting himself an impossible aim.

-- Graham Greene

---

Others may argue about whether the world ends with a bang or a whimper. I just want to make sure that mine doesn't end with a whine.

-- Barbara Gordon

---

I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.

-- Artur Rubenstein

---

Few rich men own their own property. The property owns them.

-- Robert G. Ingersoll

---

The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

-- Thomas Szasz

---

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

-- Amelia Earhart

---

Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.

-- Condorcet

---

All serious daring starts from within.

-- Eudora Welty

---

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

-- Anais Nin

---

What are politicians going to tell people when the Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?

-- William Simpson, A.C.L.U.

---

You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered.

-- Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.

---

Perhaps I am stronger than I think.

-- Thomas Merton

---

Trouble shared is trouble halved.

-- Dorothy Sayers

---

The most drastic, and usually the most effective remedy for fear is direct action.

-- William Burnham

---

Many of our fears are tissuepaper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us through them.

-- Brendan Francis

---

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

---

For me, singing sad songs often has a way of healing a situation. It gets the hurt out in the open -- into the light, out of the darkness.

-- Reba McEntire

---

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.

-- Vince Lombardi

---

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.

-- Jawaharlal Nehru

---

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

-- George Eliot

---

Liberal whites need black anger to prove the persistence of racism among their unenlightened neighbors, which they alone can atone for by the noblesse oblige of liberal paternalism. Thus, to reinforce their own sense of moral superiority, they confer racial authenticity only on blacks like Damon Lynch (a provocateur), self-proclaimed angry victims of American bigotry.

-- Heather MacDonald

---

No man is free who is not master of himself.

-- Epictetus

---

discipline, passion
yoked in harness create that
rarity: power

-- anon.

---

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

-- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

---

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

-- Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

---

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

-- E. F. Schumacher

---

I can trust my friends... These people force me to examine myself, encourage me to grow.

-- Cher

---

Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.

-- A. Whitney Griswold

---

Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation.

-- James Thurber

---

Do not blame anybody for your mistakes and failures.

-- Bernard M. Baruch

---

You will do foolish things, but do them with enthusiasm.

-- Colette

---

Practice being excited.

-- Bill Foster

---

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.

-- Saint Thomas Aquinas

---

Class is... the sure-footedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.

-- Ann Landers

---

All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no.

-- Susan Sontag

---

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

-- Abraham Lincoln

---

One of the best temporary cures for pride and affectation is seasickness; a man who wants to vomit never puts on airs.

-- Josh Billings

---

If you deny yourself commitment, what can you do with your life?

-- Harvey Fierstein

---

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom of Europe.

-- Noah Webster

---

Laws that forbid the carrying of arms ... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. ... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

-- Thomas Jefferson, 1774, "Commonplace Book"

---

There seemed to be endless obstacles... it seemed that the root cause of them all was fear.

-- Joanna Field

---

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.

-- Dante

---

The Church says the Earth is Flat, But I know that it is Round, For I have seen the Shadow on the Moon, and I have more Faith in a Shadow than in the Church.

-- Magellan

---

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

-- a saying from Zimbabwe

---

Seven Deadly Social Sins:
Politics without principle
Wealth without work
Commerce without morality
Pleasure without conscience
Education without character
Science without humanity
Worship without sacrifice

-- Gandhi

---

Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.

-- Arnold Schwarzenegger

---

Change occurs when one becomes what she is, not when she tries to become what she is not.

-- Ruth P. Freedman

---

Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections.

-- Saint Francis de Sales

---

He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.

-- Napoleon

---

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

-- net fortune cookie

---

A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.

-- Marcus Aurelius

---

Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is... It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.

-- Sir Laurence Olivier

---

Learn to see in another's calamity the ills which you should avoid.

-- Publius Syrus

---

It's weak and despicable to go on wanting things and not trying to get them.

-- Joanna Field

---

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

-- Mario Cuomo

---

I'm happier... I guess I made up my mind to be that way.

-- Merle Haggard

---

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

-- John F. Kennedy

---

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.

-- William James

---

The only way to enjoy anything in this life is to earn it first.

-- Ginger Rogers

---

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

-- Napoleon

---

Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.

-- Ella Fitzgerald

---

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.

-- Sacha Guitry

---

If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.

-- Anon.

---

Be wary of the man who urges an action in which he himself incurs no risk.

-- Joaquin Setanti

---

Once harm has been done, even a fool understands it.

-- Homer

---

Quigley's Law: Whoever has any authority over you, no matter how small, will atttempt to use it.

---

The way you overcome shyness is to become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.

-- Lady Bird Johnson

---

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

-- Albert Einstein

---

Rarely do people communicate; they just take turns talking.

-- unknown

---

Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.

-- Carol Burnett

---

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an unchartered land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

-- Helen Keller

---

If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

-- Michael Evans

---

Miseranda vita qui se mitui quam amari malunt.
(Pitiful are the lives of those who would rather be feared than loved.)

-- Cicero(?)

---

No one grows old by living, only by losing interest in living.

-- Marie Beynon Ray

---

'Martyrdom' is the only way a person can become famous without ability.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

If we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom.

-- Samuel Adams

---

I never give them hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it is hell.

-- Harry S. Truman

---

Fate loves the fearless.

-- James Russell Lowell

---

The education of a man is never complete until he dies.

-- Robert E. Lee

---

Make sure you have finished speaking before your audience has finished listening.

-- Dorothy Sarnoff

---

I quote others only the better to express myself.

-- Michel de Montaigne

---

Trouble is a sieve through which we sift our acquaintances. Those too big to pass through are our friends.

-- Arlene Francis

---

Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.

-- Napoleon

---

Ask the next Question. Keep on asking questions, and don't stop; sooner or later you'll be asking intelligent ones. If you live long enough.

-- Theodore Sturgeon

---

Censorship removes the ability of people to experience what they wish. Anarchy removes the ability of people to avoid what they wish.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition aspired, and success achieved.

-- Helen Keller

---

All of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

-- Dale Carnegie

---

We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them.

-- Thucydides

---

If you can, help others. If you can't, at least don't hurt others.

-- the Dalai Lama

---

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

-- Gen. George S. Patton

---

Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.

-- Judy Garland

---

Dwelling on the negative simply contributes to its power.

-- Shirley MacLaine

---

People ask you for criticism, but they only want praise.

-- W. Somerset Maughm

---

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

-- Mark Twain

---

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

-- unknown

---

Traditional human government consists of thieves and murderers. By adopting the electoral process, we have weeded out the murderers. This is actually about as good as it gets.

-- unknown

---

Stop tolerating in your leaders what you would not tolerate in your friends.

-- Michael Ventura

---

A man who was handsome, intelligent, and elegant, was asked who he was. "I am the Devil", he replied. "But that cannot be," said the questioner, "for the Devil is evil and ugly!" "My friend," was the reply, "you have been listening to my detractors."

-- Idries Shah

---

We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

-- Sir Francis Bacon

---

One man is no more than another if he does no more than another.

-- Miguel de Cervantes

---

It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.

-- Queen Christina of Sweden

---

It is better to wear chains than to believe you are free, and weigh yourself down with invisible chains.

-- unknown

---

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

-- Karl Marx

---

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

-- Christopher Morle

---

We are each only one drop in a great ocean -- but some of the drops sparkle!

-- net fortune cookie

---

The time is always right to do what is right.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

---

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the cruelest words.

-- Dr. Joyce Brothers

---

Only fools and dead men don't change their minds. Fools won't and dead men can't.

-- John H. Patterson

---

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

-- Robert Maynard Hutchins

---

If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered.

-- Stanley Kubrick

---

Truth is what stands the test of experience.

-- Albert Einstein

---

Hope is a waking dream.

-- Aristotle

---

Pauca sed matura
(Few but excellent).

-- Gauss

---

The key to change... is to let go of fear.

-- Rosanne Cash

---

Love the moment and the energy of the moment will spread beyond all boundaries.

-- Corita Kent

---

That friendship will not continue to the end which is begun for an end.

-- Francis Quareles

---

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence.

-- Helen Keller

---

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not care to be herself.

-- Anais Nin

---

Those who are mentally and emotionally healthy are those who have learned when to say yes, when to say no and when to say whoopee.

-- W.S. Krabill

---

What on earth would a man do with himself if something did not stand in his way?

-- H.G. Wells

---

Examine the contents, not the bottle.

-- The Talmud

---

If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.

-- Jules Renard

---

Any fool can make a rule.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

-- Honore de Balzac

---

Wise Man: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

-- Elbert Hubbard

---

The impossible is often the untried.

-- Jim Goodwin

---

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.

-- James Michener

---

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

-- Mary Ellen Kelly

---

Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.

-- Eudora Welty

---

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.

-- Jean Paul Richter

---

The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.

-- Bertrand Russell

---

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

-- Anna Freud

---

Love: something they say is blind; it's marriage which is the real eye opener.

-- anon.

---

Love: an emotion which, even if unreturned, has its rainbow.

-- anon.

---

Love: the only game that two can play and both win

-- anon.

---

Love: the last and most serious of the childhood diseases.

-- anon.

---

Love consists of happiness, given back and forth.

-- anon.

---

Love: a situation which happens when you think almost as much of another as you do of yourself.

-- anon.

---

Love: the only virtue that can be divided endlessly and still not be diminished.

-- anon.

---

If you don't control your mind, someone else will.

-- John Allston

---

Don't rent space to anyone in your head.

-- Anon.

---

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

-- Wilson Mizner

---

You've got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.

-- Irish Proverb

---

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

-- Brendan Francis

---

Anything I've ever done that ultimately was worthwhile... initially scared me to death.

-- Betty Bender

---

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it ... makes him landlord to a ghost.

-- Lloyd Douglas

---

Kill the snake of doubt in your soul, crush the worms of fear in your heart, and mountains will move out of your way.

-- Kate Seredy

---

If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.

-- Mary Engelbreit

---

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.

-- Ruth E. Renkl

---

Life is a battle in which we fall from wounds we receive in running away.

-- William L. Sullivan

---

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

-- Albert Einstein

---

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world ­- that I am able to change it in positive ways.

-- Maxine Hong Kingston

---

Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you.

-- Frank Tyger

---

What we think, we become.

-- Buddha

---

Sacher's Observation: Some people grow with responsibility -- others merely swell.

---

Experience is not what happens to you, it is what you do with what happens to you.

-- Aldous Huxley

---

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.

-- Mahatma Ghandi

---

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

-- Balzac

---

When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking questions, always new questions, then it is time to die.

-- Lillian Smith

---

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving -- by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

-- Aldous Huxley

---

Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.

-- Ovid

---

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

-- Bill Cosby

---

A mistake is evidence that someone tried to do something.

-- Anon.

---

They can because they think they can.

-- Virgil

---

Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.

-- Theodore N. Vail

---

I tried to treat them like me, and some of them weren't.

-- Bill Russell (basketball coach, on his players)

---

Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.

-- Robert H. Jackson

---

Without trust, words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.

-- John Harold

---

Acceptance of what happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.

-- William James

---

Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.

-- Anon.

---

Doubt indulged soon becomes doubt realized.

-- Francis R. Havergal

---

Don't let other people tell you what you want.

-- Pat Riley

---

We are what we believe we are.

-- Benjamin N. Cardozo

---

Blessed are they that have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

-- James Russell Lowell

---

Sharing what you have is more important than what you have.

-- Albert M. Wells, Jr.

---

I don't believe in pessimism.

-- Clint Eastwood

---

Virtue is its own punishment.

-- Denniston

---

Righteous people terrify me... virtue is its own punishment.

-- Aneurin Bevan

---

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

-- Helen Keller

---

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right.

-- Mary Kay Ash

---

You grow up the day you have your first real laugh ­- at yourself.

-- Ethel Barrymore

---

You win the victory when you yield to friends.

-- Sophocles

---

Happy people plan actions, they don't plan results.

-- Dennis Wholey

---

All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them.

-- William F. Halsey

---

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.

-- Sydney Smith

---

If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life.

-- Albert Schweitzer

---

Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.

-- William Shakespeare, "The Rape of Lucrece"

---

It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs.

-- Oxford University Press, Edpress News

---

I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.

-- Louisa May Alcott

---

Act ­- act in the living present!

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

---

Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow.

-- Anon.

---

Whatever you do, don't give up. Because all you can do once you've given up is bitch. I've known some great bitchers in my time. With some it's a passion, with others an art.

-- Molly Ivins

---

The secret of a leader lies in the tests he has faced over the whole course of his life and the habit of action he develops in meeting those tests.

-- Gail Sheehy

---

The truth is more important than the facts.

-- Frank Lloyd Wright

---

Ten persons who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

-- Napoleon I

---

I want to do it because I want to do it.

-- Amelia Earhart

---

In not making the decision, you've made one. Not doing something is the same as doing it.

-- Ivan Bloch

---

To behave with dignity is nothing less than to allow others freely to be themselves.

-- Sol Chaneles

---

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.

-- Henry Ford

---

I am not a politician and my other habits are also good.

-- A. Ward

---

I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness for your sins from God, but not from the Minister of Justice. There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

-- Pierre Elliott Trudeau

---

Come the Revolution things will be different. Not better, just different.

-- Ronald M. Novinson

---

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.

-- Martin Luther King

---

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

-- Joseph Campbell

---

Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.

-- Henry Adams, historian

---

One may be in as just possession of truths as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender.

-- Sir Thomas Browne

---

Strangers -- they're exciting, their mystery never ends
But there's nothing like looking at your own history
in the faces of your friends.

-- Ani DiFranco

---

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.

-- Voltaire

---

Everything's in the mind. That's where it all starts. Knowing what you want is the first step toward getting it.

-- Mae West

---

Difficulties exist to be surmounted.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

---

Luck is largely a matter of paying attention.

-- Susan M. Dodd

---

Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.

-- Hugh Prather

---

There's no labor a man can do that's undignified, if he does it right.

-- Bill Cosby

---

No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.

-- Turkish proverb

---

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

I have lived my life according to this principle: If I'm afraid of it, then I must do it.

-- Erica Jong

---

When thinking won't cure fear, action will.

-- W. Clement Stone

---

You can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips.

-- Oliver Goldsmith

---

Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

-- Goethe

---

I'm not happy. I'm cheerful. There's a difference. A happy woman has no cares at all. A cheerful woman has cares but has learned how to deal with them.

-- Beverly Sills

---

Use what talents you have; the woods would have little music if no birds sang their song except those who sang best.

-- Reverend Oliver G. Wilson

---

Yes, we did produce a near perfect Republic. But will they keep it, or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.

-- Thomas Jefferson

---

Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.

-- Josef Stalin [note! This may be misquoted]

---

As you grow older, you'll find the only things you regret are the things you didn't do.

-- Zachary Scott

---

Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as true strength.

-- Ralph Sockman

---

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

-- Max DuPree

---

To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it, life will be valueless.

-- Marsha Sinetar

---

Fear nothing, for every renewed effort raises all former failures into lessons, all sins into experiences.

-- Katherine Tingley

---

He was the spirit of wit
and had such an art in guilding his failures,
that it was hard not to love his faults.

-- Nathaniel Lee, "The Princess of Cleaves," elegizing Rochester

---

If you do not think about the future, you cannot have one.

-- John Galsworthy

---

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

-- Edmund Burke

---

Actually, marriage and crucifixion have a lot in common.

-- Anon.

---

Marley was a Rasta; Moses was a Jew;
Jesus was an outlaw, just like me & you.
Let love be our religion; until this life is through,
The next best thing to heaven is a sinful life with you.

-- T3

---

You will be called upon to account for all the permitted pleasures in life you did not enjoy while on earth.

-- the Torah

---

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

-- Richard P. Feynman

---

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in one pretty and well preserved piece, but to skid broadside, thoroughly used up, worn out and defiantly shouting "Geronimo!"

-- Anonymous

---

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.

-- Albert Einstein

---

You can't expect a boy to be vicious 'til he's been to a good school.

-- H.H. Munro

---

We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to know what we do not know.

-- Plato

---

Collie, talking to you can be like coping with a herd of curious ferrets, conversationally. You're all over a conversation, probing, looking in all the pockets for the good nibbly treats.

-- Lou Erickson

---

To feel, to touch your hand of love,
that hand full of sweet, proud sensibilities...
that hand polished and soft with love,
is a happiness as great
as your caress of honey and fire.

-- Honore de Balzac

---

It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

-- Rear Admiral Dr. "Amazing" Grace Murray Hopper

---

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough For Love"

---

Faith in God necessarily implies a lack of faith in humanity.

-- Barbara G. Walker, 1993, "Women Without Superstition"

---

One might be asked 'How can you prove that a god does not exist?' One can only reply that it is scarcely necessary to disprove what has never been proved.

-- David A. Spitz

---

Each epoch has found in the Gospels what it sought to find there, and has overlooked what it wished to overlook.

-- Ludwig von Mises

---

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing, all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.

-- Gene Roddenberry

---

The best index to people's character is (a) how they treat people who can't do them any good, and (b) how they treat people who can't fight back.

-- Abigail Van Buren

---

If the belief in god were natural, there would be no need to teach it. Children would possess it as well as adults, the layman as the priest, the heathen as much as the missionary.

We don't have to teach the general elements of human nature; the five senses, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. They are universal; so would religion be were it natural, but it is not.

On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so.

Even as it is, they are great sceptics, until made sensible of the potent weapon by which religion has ever been propagated, namely, fear -- fear of the lash of public opinion here, and of jealous, vindictive God hereafter.

No; there is no religion in human nature, nor human nature in religion. It is purely artificial, the result of education, while Atheism is natural, and, were the human mind not perverted and bewildered by the mysteries and follies of superstition, would be universal.

-- Ernestine L. Rose, "A Defence of Atheism" 1878, Women Without Superstition

---

Marriage Ceremony: An incredible metaphysical sham of watching God and the law being dragged into the affairs of your family.

-- O. C. Ogilvie

---

Question: Do you trust the government?
Answer: Does the government have guns?

-- Survey respondent

---

Liberalizing concealed carry laws won't lead to a return to the Wild West -- though it wouldn't be bad if it did. ... in 19th Century cattle towns, homicide was confined to transient males who shot each other in saloon disturbances. The per capital robbery rate was 7% of modern New York City's. The burglary rate was 1%. Rape was unknown.

-- David Kopel, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, February 28, 1994 in "Have Gun, Will Eat Out"

---

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

-- W. Somerset Maugham

---

[On ancient Athens]: In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all -- security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.

-- Edward Gibbon

---

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.

-- Thomas B. Reed (1886)

---

If laws worked, there would be no crime.

-- Claire Wolfe

---

There are just two rules of governance in a free society: Mind your own business. Keep your hands to yourself.

-- P.J. O'Rourke (1993)

---

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

-- Herbert Spencer (1891)

---

Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.

-- Mahatma Gandhi, "Gandhi, An Autobiography"

---

Why is intimacy so much more frightening than loneliness?

-- R. S. Pylman

---

The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Not Hercules could have knock'd out his brains, for he had none.

-- Shakespeare

---

Liberty is always dangerous, but it is the safest thing we have.

-- Harry Emerson Fosdick

---

At first sight, the idea of any rules or principles being superimposed on the creative mind seems more likely to hinder than to help, but this is quite untrue in practice. Disciplined thinking focuses inspiration rather than blinkers it.

-- G.L. Glegg, "The Design of Design"

---

All might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they should.

-- Samuel Adams

---

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

-- Mark Twain

---

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

-- Aesop

---

The problem with gun-control laws is that they only work on already law-abiding citizens. Although I don't own guns, I respect those who do. And I venerate the armed woman as a transcendent symbol of independent female power -- from ancient goddesses like the Venus Armata or the knife-wielding Hindu Kali to the pistol-packing babes of "Charlie's Angels."

-- Camille Paglia

---

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

-- Philip K. Dick

---

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.

-- anon.

---

You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having both at once.

-- Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988) as Lazarus Long

---

As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.

-- Tench Coxe (1755-1824), writing as "A Pennsylvanian," in "Remarks On The First Part Of The Amendments To The Federal Constitution," in the "Philadelphia Federal Gazette," June 18, 1789, p.2 col.1

---

For my part I think it a less evil that some criminals should escape than the government should play an ignoble part.

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Olmstead v. United States (1928)

---

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

-- Albert Einstein

---

When we too are armed and trained, we can convince men that we have hands, feet, and a heart like yours; and although we may be delicate and soft, some men who are delicate are also strong; and others, coarse and harsh, are cowards. Women have not yet realized this, for if they should decide to do so, they would be able to fight you until death; and to prove that I speak the truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to act, setting an example for them to follow.

-- Veronica Franco

---

The better the state is established, the fainter is humanity.
To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

-- Nietzsche

---

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

Those who have had no share in the good fortunes of the mighty
Often have a share in their misfortunes.

-- Bertolt Brecht, "The Caucasian Chalk Circle"

---

The people never give up their liberties except under some delusion.

-- Edmund Burke

---

It was the genius of the founding fathers to recognize that freedom depended on restricting the power of government to prosecute and imprison any one of us. They granted constitutional rights to people accused of crimes to ensure that prosecutions would be fair and based on facts, not biases or personal and official vendettas. The founding fathers were not "soft on crime"; having fought hard for their liberty, they were tough on government.

-- Wendy Kaminer, Public Policy Fellow at Radcliffe College

---

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.

-- Irene Peter

---

A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.

-- anon.

---

Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.

-- anon.

---

Men aren't attracted to me by my mind. They're attracted to me by what I don't mind.

-- Gypsy Rose Lee

---

I like to wake up feeling a new man.

-- Jean Harlow

---

What's the matter, darling, don't you recognize me with my clothes on?

-- Tallulah Bankhead

---

When this judge let a rapist go because the woman had been wearing a miniskirt and so was "asking for it" I thought, ladies, what we all should do is this: next time we see an ugly guy on the street, shoot him. After all, he knew he was ugly when he left the house. He was asking for it.

-- Ellen Cleghorn, American writer and comedian

---

If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?

-- Mary Astell, English writer (1666 - 1731)

---

I am unable to learn from sacred writ when woman was deprived by God of her equality with man...

-- Sarah Moore Grimké, American reformer (1792 - 1873)

---

Poor Mary Ann! She gave the guy an inch and now he thinks he's a ruler.

-- Mae West

---

Men often believe -- or pretend -- that the "Law" is something sacred, or at least a science -- an unfounded assumption very convenient to governments.

-- unknown

---

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Oh, girls! set your affections on cats, poodles, parrots, or lap dogs; but let matrimony alone. it's the hardest way on earth of getting a living.

-- Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis Parton, 1811-72)

---

A man is like a park squirrel; if you fling your favors or your charms at his head he will never come up and eat out of your hand.

-- Helen Rowland

---

When you see what some girls marry, you realize how they must hate to work for a living.

-- Helen Rowland

---

I married beneath me; all women do.

-- Nancy Astor, English politician (1879 - 1964)

---

No, darling -- it only leads to housework.

-- graffiti

---

What, love a rake, a man of professed gallantry? impossible. -To me, a common rake is as odious, as a common prostitute is to a man of the nicest feelings. -Where can be the pride of inspiring a passion, fifty others can equally inspire? or the transport of bestowing favours, where the appetite is already cloyed by fruition of the self-same enjoyments?

-- Elizabeth Inchbald, English writer and actress (1753 - 1821)

---

The one thing about love-making that the modern man simply can't understand is that, in order to make it thrilling and interesting, he must really put a little love in it.

-- Helen Rowland, American journalist (1875 - 1950)

---

American men look at women when [they think] the women are not aware of it; Englishmen do not look at them at all; but Frenchmen look at them with such thoroughness and intensity that you half expect them to approach and ask dubiously, "Is it washable?"

-- Rhoda Broughton, English novelist; 1840-1920

---

When a man can't explain a woman's actions, the first thing he thinks about is the condition of her uterus.

-- Clare Booth Luce, American diplomat and writer, 1903-87

---

You can talk to a man about any subject. He won't understand, but you can talk to him.

-- anon.

---

...for just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper.

-- Christine De Pisan, c.1363 - c.1430

---

Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.

-- Mignon McLaughlin

---

"Are you a lesbian?"
"Are you my alternative?"

-- Florynce Kennedy, American civil rights activist and lawyer, to a male heckler

---

The state of matrimony is a dangerous disease: far better to take drink in my opinion.

-- Madame de Sevigne; 1626-96, French salonist and letter writer

---

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women. We should be armed.

-- Edna O'Brien; Irish writer, b. 1932

---

I am tired of being a free finishing school for men.

-- Suzanne Wolstenholme; 1949 - 1995, English designer

---

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

-- Robert Frost

---

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

-- Antione de Saint-Exupery

---

No woman ever falls in love with a man unless she has a better opinion of him than he deserves.

-- Ed Howe

---

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

-- Jules Renard

---

Love has the power of making you believe what you would normally treat with the deepest suspicion.

-- Marabeau

---

It would be a happier world if love were as easy to keep as it is to make.

-- unknown

---

What's done to children, they will do to society.

-- anon.

---

Never eat at a place called Mom's.
Never play cards with a man named Doc.
And never lie down with a woman who's got more troubles than you.

-- Nelson Algren, "What Every Young Man Should Know"

[another version]
Never eat at a place called Mom's.
Never play cards with a man named Doc.
And never sleep with a woman that's crazier than you.
-- net fortune cookie

---

Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.

-- Thomas Jefferson

---

A man without force is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even this it cannot do for long if the signs of power do not arise.

-- Frederick Douglass

---

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.

-- Ayn Rand

---

Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance and without any visible reason.

-- Lord Chesterfield

---

It is the business of little minds to shrink.

-- Carl Sandburg

---

Documentation is the castor oil of programming. Managers know it must be good because the programmers hate it so much.

-- unkown

---

Truth hath no confines.

-- H. Melville

---

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

-- unknown

---

An American (prior to the United States' entry into the Second World War) asked Winston Churchill why England was fighting the Nazis. Churchill answered, "If we stop, you'll find out."

---

Stamp out organized crime!! Abolish the IRS.

-- anon.

---

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

-- Noah Webster

---

The Constitution ought to secure a genuine, and guard against a select militia, ... to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.

-- Richard Henry Lee

---

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

-- General Omar N. Bradley

---

The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.

-- Lyman Bryson

---

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don't go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy.

-- Celine

---

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison.

-- Henry David Thoreau

---

"They usually travel in packs, so that's pretty unusual behavior."

-- paleontologist at the Smithsonian after an attack by an animated velociraptor skeleton

"That, and the fact that they've been dead for sixty million years!"

-- second paleontologist

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Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

-- H. L. Mencken

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Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing.

-- Gloria Steinem

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It was a supernova, in the constellation Taurus, and we know the exact date because Arabic astronomers in many countries saw it and made notes which confirmed the sightings in China. Indians in Arizona saw it and marveled. In the South Pacific natives marked the miracle. And watch as daylight comes in 1054! The new star is so bright it can be seen even against the rays of the Sun. ...

For twenty-three days, the astronomers of Cathay and Araby tell us, this supernova dominated the sky, almost as bright as the Sun, the most incandescent event in recorded history. No other nova ever came close to this one.

This great star, which must have been the most extraordinary sight in the history of the heavens during mankind's observation, was noted in China, in Arabia, in Alaska, in Arizona, and in the South Pacific, for we have their records to prove it.

But in Europe nobody saw it. From Italy to Moscow, from the Urals to Ireland, nobody saw it. At least, they made no mention of it. They lived through one of the Earth's most magnificent spectacles and nobody bothered even to note the fact in any parchment, or speculate upon it in any manuscript.

We know the event took place, for with a telescope tonight we can see the remnants of the supernova hiding in Taurus, but we have searched every library in the western world without finding a single shred of evidence that the learned people of Europe even bothered to notice what was happening about them.

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.

-- James Michener, "Space"

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Tell me whom you love, and I will tell you who you are.

-- Houssaye

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Appreciation is a wonderful thing; it makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

-- Voltaire

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A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures on armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain.

-- Anatole France

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Maybe Computer Science should be in the College of Theology.

-- R. S. Barton

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Eventually the revolutionaries become the established culture, and then what will they do?

-- Linus Torvalds

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Who controls the past controls the future; Who controls the present controls the past.

-- George Orwell, 1984

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Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

-- George Orwell

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A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.

For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero 42 B.C.

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The introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state, for styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions. ... The new style, gradually gaining a lodgement, quietly insinuates itself into manners and customs, and from it ... goes on to attack laws and constitutions, displaying the utmost impudence, until it ends by overturning everything.

-- Plato, "Republic", 370 B.C.

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Freedom is still the most radical idea of all.

-- Nathaniel Branden

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It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the emnity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.

-- Niccolo Machiavelli, 1513

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My experience tells me that, instead of bothering about how the whole world may live in the right manner, we should think how we ourselves may do so. We do not even know whether the world lives in the right manner or in a wrong manner. If, however, we live in the right manner, we shall feel that others also do the same, or shall discover a way of persuading them to do so.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

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Non co-operation with evil is as much a duty as co-operation with good.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

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Real Swaraj will come, not by the acquisition of authority by a few, but by the acquisition of the capacity by all to resist authority when it is abused.

-- Mahatma Gandhi

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Dull women have immaculate homes.

-- anon.

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What's right isn't always popular, and what's popular isn't always right.

-- anon.

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"Creation science" has not entered the curriculum for a reason so simple and so basic that we often forget to mention it: because it is false, and because good teachers understand exactly why it is false.

What could be more destructive of that most fragile yet most precious commodity in our entire intellectual heritage -- good teaching -- than a bill forcing honorable teachers to sully their sacred trust by granting equal treatment to a doctrine not only known to be false, but calculated to undermine any general understanding of science as an enterprise?

-- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Skeptical Inquirer", Vol. 12, page 186

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To model our political system upon speculations of lasting tranquility, is to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.

-- Alexander Hamilton

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A novice asked the master: "I have a program that sometimes runs and sometimes aborts. I have followed the rules of programming, yet I am totally baffled. What is the reason for this?"

The master replied: "You are confused because you do not understand the Tao. Only a fool expects rational behavior from his fellow humans. Why do you expect it from a machine that humans have constructed? Computers simulate determinism; only the Tao is perfect. The rules of programming are transitory; only the Tao is eternal. Therefore you must contemplate the Tao before you receive enlightenment."

"But how will I know when I have received enlightenment?" asked the novice.

"Your program will then run correctly," replied the master.

-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

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What we see depends on mainly what we look for.

-- John Lubbock

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There is no evidence in the Bible that, when Cain killed Abel with a rock, God even considered banning rocks.

-- Massad Ayoob

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Courage: doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.

-- Eddie Rickenbacker

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The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

-- Albert Einstein

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A ship is safe in the harbor, but that is not why ships are built.

-- anon.

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Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't.

-- Erica Jong

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I play myself in 'Austin Powers.' I starred in '200 Cigarettes' -- where I played myself. Then I star in a French film called 'Unleaded.' And guess who I play. I'm being typecast as myself. Will someone please cast me as an axe murderer?

-- Elvis Costello on his desire to broaden his acting repertoire

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Anything you say will be misquoted, then used against you.

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The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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Never mind what others didn't do. It's what you do that counts.

-- anon.

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Other people's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.

-- Les Brown

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Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant and a terrible master.

-- George Washington

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Revolution is the hope of the hopeless.

-- Grafitti

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The care of every man's soul belongs to himself. But what if he neglect the care of it? Well, what if he neglect the care of his health or his estate, which would more nearly relate to the state. Will the magistrate make a law that he not be poor or sick? Laws provide against injury from others; but not from ourselves. God himself will not save men against their wills.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

-- Abraham Lincoln

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Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

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At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.

-- Buzz Aldrin, astronaut

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Creativity in living is not without its attendant difficulties, for peculiarity breeds contempt. And the unfortunate thing about being ahead of your time when people finally realize you were right, they'll say it was obvious all along.

-- Alan Ashley-Pitt

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A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink of it deeply, or taste it not, for shallow thoughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking deeply sobers us again.

-- Alexander Pope

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Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.

-- William Blake

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As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.

-- William Blake

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Still -- in a way -- nobody sees a flower -- really -- it is so small -- we haven't time -- and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

-- Georgia O'Keefe

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Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

-- Bertrand Russell

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Orthodoxy is a response to a religion's loss of piety. Fundamentalism is a religion's response to a loss of power.

-- from GrotonWitch's Grimoire

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Courtesy is owed, respect is earned, love is given.

-- unknown

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He who hesitates is last.

-- Mae West

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[an admirer] "Oh, Miss West, I've heard so much about you."
[M. West] "Yeah, honey, but you can't prove a thing."

-- Mae West

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I'm single because I was born that way.

-- Mae West

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A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.

-- Mae West

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Marriage is a great institution. No family should be without it.

-- Mae West

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Some men are all right in their place -- if they only knew the right places!

-- Mae West

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Cultivate your curves -- they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided.

-- Mae West

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Love isn't an emotion or an instinct -- it's an art.

-- Mae West

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I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it.

-- Mae West

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Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.

-- Mae West

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Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

-- Mae West (1892 - 1980)

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Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

-- Frederick Douglas

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Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies.

-- Groucho Marx

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And we should -- then every community in the country could then start doing major weapon sweeps and then destroying the weapons, not selling them.

-- Former President Bill Clinton

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We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans to own firearms...

-- Former President Bill Clinton, press conference in Piscataway, NJ, March 1, 1993

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The price of liberty is, always has been, and always will be blood: The person who is not willing to die for his liberty has already lost it to the first scoundrel who is willing to risk dying to violate that person's liberty! Are you free?

-- Andrew Ford, Usenet

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Without either the first or second amendment, we would have no liberty; the first allows us to find out what's happening, the second allows us to do something about it! The second will be taken away first, followed by the first and then the rest of our freedoms.

-- Andrew Ford, Usenet

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Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA -- ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State.

-- Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945)

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Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

-- William Pitt (Earl of Chatham), speech in the House of Lords, November 18, 1783

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Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.

-- Daniel Webster? (1782-1852)

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Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.

-- St. Augustine (354-430)

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...quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est
(...a sword never kills anybody; it's a tool in the killer's hand).

-- (Lucius Annaeus) Seneca "the Younger" (ca. 4 BC-65 AD), "Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales" [Letters to Lucilius on Morals], Letter 87, c.63-65 AD

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Those who have the command of the arms in a country are masters of the state, and have it in their power to make what revolutions they please. [Thus,] there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.

-- Aristotle, quoted by John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Walter Moyle (1672-1721), "An Argument, shewing; that a standing Army is Inconsistent with a Free Government and Absolutely Destructive to the Constitution of the English Monarchy," (London, 1697)

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Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the governor, November 11, 1755 (later, motto of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, c. 1759)

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False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction.

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with ease and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty -- so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator -- and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the guilty alone ought to suffer?

Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.

-- Cesare [Bonesana, Marchese di] Beccaria (1735-1794), "Dei delitti e delle pene" (On Crimes And Punishments), ch.38, 1764
(Translation as quoted by Thomas Jefferson in his Commonplace Book; Beccaria was an Italian nobleman, criminologist, and penal reformer)

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No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.

-- Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716), quoted by James Burgh (1714-1775), in "Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses," (London, 1774-1775)

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Is it possible... that an army could be raised for the purpose of enslaving themselves and their brethren? or, if raised, whether they could subdue a Nation of freemen, who know how to prize liberty, and who have arms in their hands?

-- Rep. Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813), in the Massachusetts Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, January 24, 1788, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.2 p.97 (Philadelphia, 1836)

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The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistable. Who are the militia? [A]re they not ourselves[?] Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom[?] Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American... [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.

-- Tench Coxe (1755-1824), writing as "A Pennsylvanian," in "Pennsylvania Gazette," February 20, 1788
[see "A Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution" (Kamiski and Saladino, eds., 1981) p.1778-1780]

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Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.

-- Patrick Henry (1736-1799), in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 5, 1788, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.45 (Philadelphia, 1836)

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I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.

-- James Madison (1751-1836), June 6, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.87 (Philadelphia, 1836)

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Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defence? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defence be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?

-- Patrick Henry (1736-1799), June 9, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.168 (Philadelphia, 1836)

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To disarm the people... was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.

-- George Mason (1725-1792), June 14, 1788, in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.380 (Philadelphia, 1836)
[referring to the British plan "of enslaving America"]

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The great object is, that every man be armed. ... Every one who is able may have a gun.

-- Patrick Henry (1736-1799), in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 14, 1788, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.386 (Philadelphia, 1836)

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Whenever, therefore, the profession of arms becomes a distinct order in the state... the end of the social compact is defeated... No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty without uniting the characters of the citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the state... Such are a well regulated militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen and husbandman, who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen.

-- "M.T. Cicero," in Charleston "State Gazette," September 8, 1788

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The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.

-- James Madison (1751-1836), I Annals of Congress 434, June 8, 1789 [The Second Amendment as originally proposed in Congress shows the right intended to be protected was an individual one]

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As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.

-- Tench Coxe (1755-1824), writing as "A Pennsylvanian," in "Remarks On The First Part Of The Amendments To The Federal Constitution," in the "Philadelphia Federal Gazette," June 18, 1789, p.2 col.1 [Coxe is referring to the proposed amendment which became the Second Amendment]

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The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them.

-- Zachariah Johnson (???? - ????), in the Virginia Convention on the ratification of the Constitution, June 25, 1788, in "Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution," Jonathan Elliot, ed., v.3 p.646 (Philadelphia, 1836)

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That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United states who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms...

-- Samuel Adams (1722-1803), in "Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," pp.86-87, (Pierce & Hale, Boston, 1850), also in Philadelphia "Independent Gazetteer," August 20, 1789

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The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States... Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America.

-- Gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789, p.211, col.2

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He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

-- Thomas Paine (1737-1809), conclusion, "Dissertation on First Principles of Government," (Paris, July [4?,] 1795)
[Paine is speaking from experience, as the French Revolution descended into The Terror following the beheading of Louis XVI, who "Citoyen" Paine tried to have the National Assembly spare, despite his own hatred for kings. Paine himself later spent months in prison, awaiting the guillotine. Unlike Louis and his queen Marie Antoinette, Paine was eventually released]

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Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having the right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpiarage of an impartial third [party]. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions; and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right.

-- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), letter to Francis W. Gilmer, June 7, 1816

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Tho[ugh] aware of the danger of universal suffrage in a future state of Society such as the present state in Europe: he [Madison] would have extended it so far as to secure in every event and change in the state of Society a majority of people on the side of power. A Government resting on a minority, is an aristocracy not a Republic, and could not be safe with a numerical [and] physical force against it, without a standing Army, and enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.

-- James Madison (1751-1836)
From an autobiographical sketch, ca. 1831-1836, published as "James Madison's Autobiography," in "William and Mary Quarterly," 3rd series, vol. 2, p. 208, (1945)
[Madison, who modeled his draft for the proposed amendment we know today as the Second Amendment on the similar arms-right provision in Virginia's constitution (see Jefferson's proposed wording above), here underlines the importance of the freedom of the press and of privately held arms in preventing the establishment of tyranny. Compare also fellow Virginian Richard Henry Lee's statement above about the anti-republican (i.e. elitist or aristocratic) principle which underlies the establishment of a "select militia." See also Joel Barlow, above, for a discussion of how having an armed class and a disarmed class is anti-democratic, and denies the equality of citizens. From this quote, the original intent of the Second Amendment is clear]

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God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.

-- Daniel Webster (1782-1852), speech, June 3, 1834

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The people of these United States are the rightful masters of both Congresses and courts -- not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert that constitution.

-- Abraham Lincoln (1809-assassinated 1865), speech in Cincinatti, OH, September 17, 1859

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I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.

-- Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906), speech in San Franscisco, July 1871

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The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.

-- Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), April 11, 1942, quoted in "Hitler's Tischegesprache Im Fuhrerhauptquartier 1941-1942," (Hitler's Table-Talk at the Fuhrer's Headquarters 1941-1942), Dr. Henry Picker, ed. (Athenaum-Verlag, Bonn, 1951)

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The tank, the B-52, the fighter-bomber, the state controlled police and the military are the weapons of dictatorship. The rifle is the weapon of democracy. Not for nothing was the revolver called an 'equalizer.' "Egalite" implies "liberte." And always will. Let us hope our weapons are never needed -- but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny.

If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government -- and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.

-- Edward Abbey (1927-1989), "Abbey's Road," p.39 (Plume, 1979)
[A restatement of "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns" by the writer whose 1968 novel "The Monkey-Wrench Gang" inspired the radical green movement Earth First!]

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... a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen...

-- Warren v. District of Columbia, 444 A.2d 1 (D.C. App.181)

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Handguns are a public-health problem.

-- Josh Sugarmann, spokesman for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, in a debate on the Morton Downey, Jr. show, 1988

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To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun. It's racism in its worst form.

-- Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), in the "Washington Post," September 5, 1988

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[Assault weapons'] menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons -- anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun -- can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

-- Josh Sugarmann, executive director of New Right Watch and spokesman for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, "Assault Weapons and Accessories in America," policy report of New Right Watch and the Education Fund to End Handgun Violence, September 1988

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I don't like the idea that the police department seems bent on keeping a pool of unarmed victims available for the predations of the criminal class.

-- David Mohler, orthopedic surgeon, on being denied a permit to carry a handgun by the New York City police, "Manahattan, Inc." magazine, April, 1989

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Much of the contemporary crime that concerns Americans is in poor black neighborhoods and a case can be made that greater firearms restrictions might alleviate this tragedy. But another, perhaps stronger case can be made that a society with a dismal record of protecting a people has a dubious claim on the right to disarm them. Perhaps a re-examination of this history can lead us to a modern realization of what the framers of the Second Amendment understood: that it is unwise to place the means of protection totally in the hands of the state, and that self-defense is also a civil right.

-- Robert J. Cottroll and Raymond T. Diamond, "The Second Amendment: Towards an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration," Georgetown Law Journal, vol. 80, p. 361 (1991)

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Americans have the will to resist because you have weapons. If you don't have a gun, freedom of speech has no power.

-- Yoshimi Ishikawa, Japanese author, in the Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1992 [Ishikawa was commenting on the lack of protest with which Japanese tolerated governmental corruption]

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You can't get around the image of people shooting at people to protect their stores and it working. This is damaging to the [gun control] movement.

-- Josh Sugarmann, executive director of the Violence Policy Center, a "gun control" lobbying group in Washington, D.C., in The Washington Post, May 18, 1993 [Sugarmann is referring to the Korean shopkeepers who guarded their property with "assault weapons" during the L.A. riots]

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[T]he Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock? Peace Corps volunteers? Or maybe the people in Texas were attacked because of child abuse. But, if child abuse was the issue, why didn't Janet Reno tear-gas Woody Allen?

-- P.J. O'Rourke, "The Liberty Manifesto," speech at the Cato Institute, May 6, 1993, quoted in "The American Spectator," July 1993

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You know, if government were a product, selling it would be illegal. Government is a health hazard. Governments have killed many more people than cigarettes or unbuckled seat belts ever have.

-- P.J. O'Rourke, "The Liberty Manifesto," speech at the Cato Institute, May 6, 1993, quoted in "The American Spectator," July 1993

---

These are dangerous times. When we are afraid, we want to be protected, and since we cannot protect ourselves against such horrors as mass murder by bombers, we are tempted to run to the government, a government that is always willing to trade the promise of protection for our freedom, which left, as always, the question: How much freedom are we willing to relinquish for such a bald promise?

Already the President was calling for more power, more power for the FBI. He wanted a thousand more men. And he wanted to use the army, no less, in situations like Oklahoma City. And he wanted more power to tap our phones and to invade our privacy. He wanted express authority from Congress to infiltrate the fringe groups and, in short, to snoop and to peer and to spy on the citizenry, especially those who hold different beliefs from those that flow in the phlegmatic and murky mainstream of America.

But the question remains, will we really be safer with a thousand more, or even a hundred thousand more FBI agents armed with even greater power to more easily tap our phone that are already so easily tapped and to break into our homes that are no longer safe under the much-mangled exclusionary rule?

-- Gerry Spence, "From Freedom To Slavery," from the new introduction, (St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1995), p. xxiv

---

If one man taking one step on the moon proved mankind is capable of space exploration -- why don't thousands of women fighting in hundreds of wars over 6,000 years prove that women are capable of serving in combat?

-- gendergap.com

---

Fortune and love favor the bold.

-- Ovid

---

Put your trust in God, boys, and keep your powder dry.

-- Valentine Blacker

---

All thoughts that mould the age begin
Deep down within the primitive soul.

-- James Russell Lowel, "An Incident in a Railroad Car"

---

I am as free as Nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began...

-- John Dryden, "The Conquest of Granada" part 1, act 1

---

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by make-believe.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, "The Summing Up."

---

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

-- Albert Einstein

---

At a certain point in your life you realize you know more dead people than living.

-- Francesco Dellamorte, fr. "Cemetery Man"

---

In the heat of battle, tantric magic is fun, but highly ineffective.

-- Anonymous

---

Nothing is more embarrassing than being killed by a dead man.

-- Maitre d'Armes Adam A. Crown explaining the importance of applying opposition and distance control in rapier combat

---

Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces and ordinary speech no longer suffices.

-- Orpingalik, Netsilik Eskimo

---

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

-- Samuel Clemens

---

Do the gods put this ardor in our hearts,
Or does each man's desire become his god?

-- Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI

---

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

-- Aldous Huxley

---

There are no circumstances under which a state is justified in placing its welfare ahead of mine.

-- Robert A. Heinlein

---

Things do not change, we do.

-- Thoreau

---

I have no intention of scaring people. That's the administration's job.

-- Chris Cox

---

I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.

-- Winston Churchill

---

The thoughtless are rarely wordless...

-- Howard W. Newton

---

A flung stone has always been a fool's favorite means of putting himself on a level with the wise.

-- Edgar Pangborn

---

A woman's appetite is twice that of a man's; her sexual desire, four times; her intelligence, eight times.

-- Sanskrit proverb

---

If you hate something, the chances are you fear it... oh, don't it make you feel hard, when anger takes the wheel?

-- unknown

---

Little people have to hate, have to blame someone for their own inadequacies.

-- "Shadows Linger" by Glen Cook

---

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.

-- H.G. Wells

---

Furious activity is no substitute for understanding.

-- H.H. Williams

---

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

-- unknown

---

From youth onward, life exerts pressure on the individual. Guard your individuality lest the mind be unduly conditioned to conform.

-- unknown

---

Whoever dies with the most skills wins.

-- unknown

---

[N]othing gratifies one more than to be admired for doing what one likes.

-- Dorothy L. Sayers

---

Very dangerous things, theories.

-- Dorothy L. Sayers

---

There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure.

-- Barbara Jordan

---

We must exchange the philosophy of excuse -- what I am is beyond my control -- for the philosophy of responsibility.

-- Barbara Jordan

---

from a column on interior decoration (approximately): "Nothing adds drama to a large room so effectively as one or two undraped widows." It's hard to argue with that.

---

Fear not your enemies, for they can only kill you; fear not your friends because they can only betray you. Fear only the indifferent, who permit the killers and betrayers to walk safely on the Earth.

-- Edward Yashinsky

---

The surest protection against temptation is cowardice.

-- Mark Twain

---

Modern man associates himself with the ancient world, not to reflect it like a mirror, but to capture its spirit and apply it in a modern way.

-- Palladio

---

Can God deliver a religion addict?

-- Marjoe Gortner, Ex-Evangelist

---

The function of myth, of psychological allegory, is to feed a hunger, not for facts, but for meaning. We want to understand the torrent of change in which we are swimming (or drowning).

-- Lois McMaster Bujold

---

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

-- Groucho Marx

---

Quote me as saying I was misquoted.

-- Groucho Marx

---

I hope I never do anything without due thought, even if the thought sometimes has to shift its feet pretty briskly to keep up with the deed.

-- Cadfael

---

We are tireless, overflowing with misplaced optimism, and undeterred by rejection and failure. We are the marines of the writing business. We are born to kill and afraid of nothing. We crawl naked over broken glass through razor-wire fences with our heads tied in plastic bags full of cockroaches to get to our keyboards. If we find ourselves facing Windows95, we do the same again to get to a Mac. We are fearless. We are winners.

-- Derek Hall

---

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder "censorship," we call it "concern for commercial viability."

-- David Mamet

---

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.

-- Bertrand Russell, "Sceptical Essays," 1928

---

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

-- Mark Twain.

---

It did not occur to me that my being with two men continuously would interest anyone or arouse anyone's misgivings. I asked for an invitation for Heinrich too, as often as it seemed possible, when Paulus and I were invited to a social gathering. I felt the set of rules others lived by was irrelevant. My childhood attitude -- every attempt to adjust is hopeless and you might just as well follow your own attitudes -- must have carried me.

-- Hannah Tillich, "From Time to Time"

---

The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag.

-- Kin Hubbard

---

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

-- Rebecca West, 1913

---

Sexual Union is the highest form of human activity. It is the source of all religion and of all that is best and most beautiful in human culture.

-- Tachikawa Proverb

---

The woman you love, you must not possess.

-- Words of the Goddess Basholi

---

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

-- Albert Einstein

---

It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

-- C.S Lewis

---

There's a lesson that I need to remember
When everything is falling apart
In life, just like in loving
There's such a thing as trying too hard.

You've gotta sing
Like you don't need the money
Love like you'll never get hurt
You've gotta dance
Like nobody's watching
It's gotta come from the heart
If you want it to work.

-- Kathy Mattea

---

It is difficult to legislate morality in the absence of moral legislators.

-- unknown

---

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

-- unknown

---

We are a nation undeterred by reality.

-- Molly Ivins

---

[During the Monica Lewinsky impeachment trial] U.S. Representative Dick Armey, when asked if he were in the President's place, would he resign, responded: "If I were in the President's place I would not get a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'

---

A leader's role is to raise people's aspirations for what they can become and to release their energies so they will try to get there.

-- David Gerge, U.S. News & World Report

---

Oppression and harassment are a small price to pay to live in the land of the free.

-- C. Montgomery Burns, fr. "The Simpsons"

---

Y'know, Collie, the only thing between you and world domination is your dislike for underground concrete bunkers.

-- Scott A. H. Ruggels

---

This novel is not to be tossed aside, but to be hurled with great force.

-- Dorothy Parker

---

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 struggle for independence.

-- Charles Beard

---

Everybody wants to be a victim. And the paradox is that victim status accrues precisely to those who can acquire enough clout to make others afraid of them. Victimhood has become one of the fruits of power. Anyone can be an underdog; the trick is to be a registered, pedigreed underdog.

-- Joseph Belloc Sobran

---

I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.

-- William Buckley, Jr., during a debate with a liberal

---

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

-- Thomas Jefferson

---

When Thomas Henry Huxley was chided by a friend for abandoning the traditional solace of religion he replied: "Had I lived a couple of centuries earlier I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me... and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind? To which my only reply was and is -- Oh devil! truth is better than much profit."

---

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.

-- Kin Hubbard

---

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.

-- George Orwell

---

Infancy, n.: The period of our lives when, according to Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us." The world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

-- Ambrose Bierce

---

Integrity has no need for rules.

-- anon.

---

To err is human, to forgive unusual.

-- unknown

---

Men freely believe that what they wish to desire.

-- Julius Caesar

---

There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

-- Mark Twain

---

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

-- Howard Aiken

---

Don't get stuck in a closet -- wear yourself out.

-- anon.

---

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

-- G.B. Shaw

---

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

-- Charles de Gaulle

---

Above all things, reverence yourself.

-- anon.

---

If the very old will remember, the very young will listen.

-- Chief Dan George

---

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for freedom of thought -- which they seldom use.

-- Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855)

---

The best prophet of the future is the past.

-- anon.

---

If a city can sue a gun manufacturer for providing too many guns -- can a manufacturer sue a city for having too many criminals?

-- unknown

---

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

-- Isadora Duncan

---

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

-- Joseph Addison

---

In the end, it's not the words of our enemies we will remember, but the silence of our friends.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.

-- anon.

---

The savior becomes the victim.

-- anon.

---

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error...

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

Inquiry is fatal to certainty.

-- Will Durant

---

My basic principle is that you don't make decisions because they are easy; you don't make them because they are cheap; you don't make them because they're popular; you make them because they're right.

-- Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C, former president of Notre Dame

---

Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others.

-- anon.

---

Shoot for the moon... even if you miss you'll be among the stars.

-- anon.

---

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

-- Frank Outlaw

---

Action conquers fear.

-- anon.

---

Cicero's 'Six Mistakes of Man'

1. The delusion that personal gain is made by crushing others.
2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it.
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences.
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying.
6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

---

Life's most persistent and urgent question is: What are you doing for others?

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

By the time the average person finishes college he or she will have taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes and exams. The 'right answer' approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This may be fine for some mathematical problems, where there is in fact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life isn't that way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers -- all depending on what you are looking for. But when we think that there is only one right answer, we'll stop looking as soon as we find one.

-- Roger von Oech, "A Whack On the Side Of The Head"

---

Men of quality are not afraid of women for equality.

-- anon.

---

Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.

-- Christina Rossetti

---

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

-- Will Rogers

---

Hat check girl: "Goodness! What lovely diamonds!"
Mae West: "Goodness had nothin' to do with it, dearie."

-- "Night After Night", 1932

---

Democracy is a form of government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.

-- unknown

---

186,282 miles per second -- it isn't just a good idea, it's the law!

-- unknown

---

Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.
Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.

-- Bertolt Brecht, "Life of Galileo"

---

O imitators, you slavish herd!

-- Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

---

She's learned to say things with her eyes that others waste time putting into words.

-- net fortune cookie

---

We promise according to our hopes, and perform according to our fears.

-- anon.

---

To downgrade the human mind is bad theology.

-- C. K. Chesterton

---

If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.

-- Max Von Sydow's character in "Hannah and Her Sisters"

---

You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

-- George Bernard Shaw, "Back to Methuselah"

---

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.

-- Euripides

---

Have no friends not equal to yourself.

-- Confucius

---

Be self-reliant and your success is assured.

-- anon.

---

I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow myself to live as I choose.

-- anon.

---

Oh this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.

-- Gaius Valerius Catullus

---

The less time planning, the more time programming.

-- unknown

---

To have died once is enough.

-- Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil)

---

It's amazing how many people you could be friends with if only they'd make the first approach.

-- unknown

---

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

-- La Rouchefoucauld

---

My, how you've changed since I've changed.

-- anon.

---

Lack of skill dictates economy of style.

-- Joey Ramone

---

I didn't know it was impossible when I did it.

-- anon.

---

War is like love, it always finds a way.

-- Bertolt Brecht, "Mother Courage"

---

All laws are simulations of reality.

-- John C. Lilly

---

Down with all categorical imperatives!

-- unknown

---

Americans' greatest fear is that America will turn out to have been a phenomenon, not a civilization.

-- Shirley Hazzard, "Transit of Venus"

---

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

-- Sean O'Casey

---

Beauty and harmony are as necessary to you as the very breath of life.

-- anon.

---

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

-- unknown

---

It doesn't much signify whom one marries for one is sure to find out next morning it was someone else.

-- Will Rogers

---

By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death.

-- Titus Lucretius Carus

---

Practice yourself what you preach.

-- Titus Maccius Plautus

---

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing they marry later; for another thing they die earlier.

-- H.L. Mencken

---

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.

-- Robert Benchley

---

Indifference will certainly be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

-- unknown

---

Equality is not when a female Einstein gets promoted to assistant professor; equality is when a female schlemiel moves ahead as fast as a male schlemiel.

-- Ewald Nyquist

---

There's a lot to be said for not saying a lot.

-- unknown

---

Knowledge without common sense is folly.

-- unknown

---

...if the church put in half the time on covetousness that it does on lust, this would be a better world.

-- Garrison Keillor, "Lake Wobegon Days"

---

Well begun is half done.

-- Aristotle

---

Who does not trust enough will not be trusted.

-- Lao Tsu

---

If a man has a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.

-- Friedrich Nietzsche

---

It is indeed desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.

-- Plutarch

---

I'm successful because I'm lucky. The harder I work, the luckier I get.

-- unknown

---

Kites rise highest against the wind -- not with it.

-- Winston Churchill

---

Nobody wants constructive criticism. It's all we can do to put up with constructive praise.

-- unknown

---

She always believed in the old adage -- leave them while you're looking good.

-- Anita Loos, "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes"

---

Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane complexities. Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science. Today all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is available to anyone.

-- Tom Weller, "Science Made Stupid"

---

Some husbands are living proof that a woman can take a joke.

-- unknown

---

Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them.

-- anon.

---

Would you care to drift aimlessly in my direction?

-- Lou Erickson

---

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

-- H.L. Mencken, "Minority Report"

---

She missed an invaluable opportunity to give him a look that you could have poured on a waffle...

-- unknown

---

The strength of the Constitution lies entirely in the determination of each citizen to defend it. Only if every single citizen feels duty bound to do his share in this defense are the constitutional rights secure.

-- Albert Einstein

---

We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones.

-- La Rouchefoucauld

---

When the going gets tough, everyone leaves.

-- Lynch

---

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

-- Seneca

---

Taxes are not levied for the benefit of the taxed.

---

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

-- Carlyle

---

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

-- Albert Einstein

---

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

-- Hannah Arendt

---

A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance.

-- Stanislaw Lem

---

A woman's best protection is a little money of her own.

-- Clare Booth Luce

---

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.

-- Will Durant

---

The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky.

-- David Gerrold

---

If you didn't have to work so hard, you'd have more time to be depressed.

-- unknown

---

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

-- H.L. Mencken

---

The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.
-- unknown

---

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

-- unknown

---

Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?

-- unknown

---

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

---

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

-- Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "Oath of Fealty"

---

No one knows what he can do till he tries.

-- Publilius Syrus

---

I judge a religion as being good or bad based on whether its adherents become better people as a result of practicing it.

-- Joe Mullally, computer salesman

---

The price of greatness is responsibility.

-- anon.

---

Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?

-- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc

---

Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards.

-- Soren F. Petersen

---

When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith

---

If you want to read about love and marriage you've got to buy two separate books.

-- Alan King

---

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.

-- Caskie Stinnett, "Out of the Red"

---

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

-- Flannery O'Connor

---

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.

---

In this world some people are going to like me and some are not. So, I may as well be me. Then I know if someone likes me, they like me.

-- unknown

---

Be cheerful while you are alive.

-- Phathotep, 24th Century B.C.

---

Love your country but never trust its government.

-- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania

---

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

---

Men take only their needs into consideration -- never their abilities.

-- Napoleon Bonaparte

---

Science and religion are in full accord but science and faith are in complete discord.

---

Those who don't know, talk. Those who don't talk, know.

---

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.

-- LaRouchefoucauld

---

What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

-- Nero Wolfe, "The League of Frightened Men"

---

America has been discovered before, but it has always been hushed up.

-- Oscar Wilde

---

There's no such thing as an original sin.

-- Elvis Costello

---

If only you had a personality instead of an attitude.

---

As to Jesus of Nazareth ... I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity.

-- Benjamin Franklin

---

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.

-- Euripides

---

Be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.

-- Homer

---

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

-- Frank Herbert, "Children of Dune"

---

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

-- George Bernard Shaw

---

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

-- Robert Louis Stephenson

---

Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach,
Or what's a heaven for?

-- Robert Browning, "Andrea del Sarto"

---

I worry about my judgment when anything I believe in or do regularly begins to be accepted by the American public.

-- George Carlin

---

To see a need and wait to be asked, is to already refuse.

-- unknown

---

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.

-- Matt Cartmill

---

History repeats itself -- the first time as a tragi-comedy, the second time as bedroom farce.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Heisenberg may have been here.

-- net fortune cookie

---

Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid it will never begin.

-- Grace Hansen

---

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.

-- George Orwell

---