"Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer."
- Robert Graves
"Compassion is more important than intellect in calling forth the love that the work of peace needs, and intuition can often be a far more powerful searchlight than cold reason."
- Betty Williams
"We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups."
- Deborah Tannen
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs."
- Leo Tolstoy
"The major block to compassion is the judgment in our minds. Judgment is the mind's primary tool of separation."
- Diane Berke
"An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so."
- Gandhi
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it."
- Tarfon
"The horrors which we have seen, and the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable people are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile people."
- George Bernanos
"Fear is a disease that eats away at logic and makes man inhuman."
- Marian Anderson
"Integrity simply means a willingness not to violate one's identity."
- Erich Fromm
"It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years - we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on."
- Sharon Salzberg
"The horrors which we have seen, and the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, insubordinate, untamable people are increasing in number throughout the world, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile people."
- George Bernanos
"The most powerful moral influence is example."
- Huston Smith
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
- Louis D. Brandeis
"Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth."
- Pema Chodron
"This is slavery, not to speak one's thought."
- Euripides
"We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response."
- Sam Nunn
"To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality."
- John Locke
"The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem."
- Theodore Rubin
"If you're not confused, you're not paying attention."
- Tom Peters
"A man must consider what a rich realm he abdicates when he becomes a conformist."
- Pubilius Syrus
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Martin Luther King Jr.
"Success is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal."
- Earl Nightingale
"Political correctness is tyranny with manners"
- Charton Heston
"Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others."
- Jack Kornfield
"The art of listening needs its highest development in listening to oneself; our most important task is to develop an ear that can really hear what we're saying."
- Sydney J. Harris
"Privilege is the greatest enemy of right."
- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
"To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground."
- Stephen Covey
"For one who is indifferent, life itself is a prison. Any sense of community is external or, even worse, nonexistent. Thus, indifference means solitude. Those who are indifferent do not see others. They feel nothing for others and are unconcerned with what might happen to them. They are surrounded by a great emptiness. Filled by it, in fact. They are devoid of all hope as well as imagination. In other words, devoid of any future."
- Elie Wiesel
"Action has meaning only in relationship and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
"Everything we do is in service of our needs. When this one concept is applied to our view of others, we'll see that we have no real enemies, that what others do to us is the best possible thing they know to do to get their needs met."
- Marshall Rosenberg
"It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life."
- Christopher Lasch
"We are called to be strong companions and clear mirrors to one another, to seek those who reflect with compassion and a keen eye how we are doing, whether we seem centered or off course ... we need the nourishing company of others to create the circle needed for growth, freedom and healing."
- Wayne Muller
"Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. When people really listen to each other in a quiet, fascinated attention, the creative fountain inside each of us begins to spring and cast up new thoughts and unexpected wisdom."
- Brenda Ueland
"Security is an attempt to try to make the universe static so that we feel safe."
- Anne Wilson Schaef
"We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in the derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves."
- Marshall Rosenberg
"Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."
- Oscar Wilde
"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, not to anticipate the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly."
- Buddha
"Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end."
- Henry David Thoreau
"When you personalize your life, when you make your life a place where you can be yourself, when you do things the way you want to do them, your life feels like your home. And that is a tremendous source of emotional energy."
- Mira Kirshenbaum
"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."
- Maya Angelou
"I am not and never will be perfect. I am not always as honest, respectful, responsible, fair or as kind as I should be. All I can do is what I should do: strive every day, with every decision to be the best person I can be. I don't expect to be perfect but I know I can be better."
- Michael Josephson
"Compassion is not sentiment but is making justice and doing works of mercy. Compassion is not a moral commandment but a flow and overflow of the fullest human and divine energies."
- Matthew Fox
"We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition."
- William James
"All you need is deep within you waiting to unfold and reveal itself. All you have to do is be still and take time to seek for what is within and you will surely find it."
- Eileen Caddy
"The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions."
- Frank Zappa
"It's fairly obvious, since Richard Nixon, that there is no such thing as a fair deal for any voter in the United States - You're just not gonna get it. It's a joke - the people that you vote for, they're the next best thing to criminals. But of course they have money for advertising campaigns that make them look a little bit better than they actually are."
- Frank Zappa
"Never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others."
- Pema Chodron
"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense."
- Robert G. Ingersoll
"When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result."
- Byron Katie
"Schools train people to be ignorant - with style. They give you the equipment you need to be a functional ignoramus. American schools do not equip you to deal with things like logic; they don't give you the criteria by which to judge between good and bad in any medium or format, and they prepare you to be a useable victim for a Military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job, and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're gonna be alright. But if you go beyond that, you're gonna have these grave doubts that give you stomach problems, headaches, and make you want to go out and do something else. So I believe that schools, mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up."
- Frank Zappa
"There is an endless net of threads throughout the universe... At every crossing of the threads there is an individual. And every individual is a crystal bead. And every crystal bead reflects Not only the light from every other crystal in the net But also every other reflection Throughout the entire universe."
- Anne Adams
"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement."
- Golda Meir
"Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation."
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads."
- Charles de Gaulle
"Western society has accepted as unquestionable a technological imperative that is quite as arbitrary as the most primitive taboo: not merely the duty to foster invention and constantly to create technological novelties, but equally the duty to surrender to these novelties unconditionally, just because they are offered, without respect to their human consequences."
- Lewis Mumford
"The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire."
- Marshall Ferdinand Foch
"The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it."
- Francis Bacon
"All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the pathetic fallacy."
- John Ruskin
"An ideal is a port toward which we resolve to steer. We may not reach it. The mere fact that our goal is definitely located does not suffice to conduct us thither. But surely we shall thus stand a better chance of making port in the end than if we drift about aimlessly the sport of winds and tides without having decided in our own minds in what direction we ought to bend our course."
- Felix Adler
"Free thinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, priviledges or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking; where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless." - Leo Tolstoy
"Life is the sum of all your choices."
- Albert Camus
"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."
- Stephen Butler Leacock
"What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now."
- Author Unknown
"No one is free when others are oppressed."
- Author Unknown
"The human race is governed by its imagination."
- Napoleon
"The greatest wealth is health."
- Virgil
"Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets."
- Baltasar Gracián
"Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul."
- Samuel Ullman
"When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die."
- Jean-Paul Sartre
"Fall seven times, stand up eight."
- Japanese Proverb
"People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross."
- proverb
"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."
- Jeanette Rankin
"War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel."
- Mark Twain
"The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."
- Omar Bradley
"If we do not end war, war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything."
- H.G. Wells
"Many of our fears are tissue-paper-thin, and a single courageous step would carry us clear through them."
- Brendan Francis
"Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf."
- Native American Proverb
"Be careful of your thoughts, they may become words at any moment."
- Iara Gassen
"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
- John Gardner
"Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him."
- Aldous Huxley
"Diplomacy is the art of letting someone else have your way."
- Daniele Vare
"Our thoughts are unseen hands shaping the people we meet. Whatever we truly think them to be, that's what they'll become for us."
- Richard Cowper
"Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat."
- Henry Emerson Fosdick
"It is never too late to be who you might have been."
- George Eliot
"The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face."
- Jim Bishop
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Attributed to Howard Thurman
"Stress is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness."
- Richard Carlson
"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."
- Attributed to Carl Bard
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible."
- M.C. Escher
"There are no facts, only interpretations."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Listening to both sides of a story will convince you that there is more to a story than both sides."
- Frank Tyger
"There is an objective reality out there, but we view it through the spectacles of our beliefs, attitudes, and values."
- David G. Myers
"The first duty of a man is to think for himself."
- José Martín
"If I have to beat you up to keep you safe, that’s just what I’ll do. It’s this kind of regard for others that makes me believe I’d be a good politician."
- Jarod Kintz
"If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet."
- Keith Richards
"All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are."
- H.L. Mencken
"The greatest and most powerful revolutions often start very quietly, hidden in the shadows. Remember that."
- Richelle Mead
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies."
- Groucho Marx
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
- Douglas Adams
"Reader, suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress... but I repeat myself."
- Mark Twain
"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
- Dresden James
"Affluence creates poverty."
- Marshall McLuhan
"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever."
- Clarence Darrow
"One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that 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
"Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment."
- Seneca
"Everyone is the age of their heart."
- Guatemalan Proverb
"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men."
- Herman Melville
"Truth is rarely writ in ink; it lives in nature."
- Martin H. Fischer
"You have the Answer. Just get quiet enough to hear it."
- Pat Obuchowski
"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
- John Allston
"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
- Max Stirner
"Although the legal and ethical definitions of right are the antithesis of each other, most writers use them as synonyms. They confuse power with goodness, and mistake law for justice."
- Charles T. Sprading
"Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system."
- Channing E. Phillips
"Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, misfortune - all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical. What do you do with the criminal? You send him to the penitentiary. Is he made better? Worse. The first thing you do is to try to trample out his manhood, by putting an indignity upon him. You mark him. You put him in stripes. At night you put him in darkness. His feeling for revenge grows. You make a wild beast of him, and he comes out of that place branded in body and soul, and then you won't let him reform if he wants to."
- Robert Ingersoll
"Knowledge is haunted by the ghost of past opinion."
- Author Unknown
"A lawyer is a man who rescues your estate from your enemies and keeps it for himself."
- Lord Brougham
"The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation."
- Emma Goldman
"As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime."
- Oscar Wilde
"Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny."
- Edmond Bourke
"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation."
- Howard Scott
"Having your fate rest in the hands of a jury is the same as entrusting yourself to surgery with a mentally retarded doctor."
- Bill Messing
"A useless life is an early death."
- Johann von Goethe
"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other."
- Ann Landers
"Do not repeat anything you will not sign your name to."
- Author Unknown
"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 democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."
- Aldous Huxley
"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."
- Ellen Goodman
"The only people with whom you should try to get even are those who have helped you."
- John E. Southard
"Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do."
- Benjamin Spock
"History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment."
- Lemuel K. Washburn
"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Saints are sinners who kept on going."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
"The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"Racial superiority is a mere pigment of the imagination."
- Author Unknown
"In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening."
- Aaron Howard
"However mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts."
- Henry David Thoreau
"As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, "What are we to do?"... The only possible answer is "Look for a cure". Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don't believe you are sick, there can be no cure."
- Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov
"A man might pass for insane who should see things as they are."
- William Ellery Channing
"I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book."
- Groucho Marx
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others, by their acts."
- Harold Nicolson
"History never looks like history when you are living through it."
- John W. Gardner
"What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public"
- Vilhjalmur Stefansson
"Guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression."
- Gerard K. O'Neill
"Advertisers constantly invent cures to which there is no disease."
- Anonymous
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
- Richard Dawkins
"It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man."
- David Harris
"A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question."
- Grace Hopper
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
- H.G. Wells
"We question all our beliefs, except for the ones we really believe, and those we never think to question." - Orson Scott Card
"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."
- Albert Camus
"If you've come here to help me, you're wasting your time. But if you've come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."
- Australian Aboriginal Elder Lilla Watson
"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it."
- George Orwell
"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one."
- Elbert Hubbard
"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."
- H.L. Mencken
"In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The best way out of a problem is through it."
- Author Unknown
"When deeds speak, words are nothing."
- African Proverb
"All know the way; few actually walk it."
- Bodhidharma
"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on man unless they act."
- G.K. Chesterton
"Those who are quite satisfied sit still and do nothing; those who are not quite satisfied are the sole benefactors of the world."
- Walter Landor
"The truth is the only thing worth having, and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed, facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do."
- E.V. Lucas
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."
- Thomas Paine
"Each forward step we take we leave some phantom of ourselves behind."
- John Lancaster Spalding
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both."
- James Madison
"Whatever difficulty you face, there are time-tried ways you can listen your way through. Because listening is the doorway to everything that matters. It enlivens the heart the way breathing enlivens the lungs. We listen to awaken our heart. We do this to stay vital and alive."
- Mark Nepo
"In union there is strength."
- Aesop
"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
- Ansel Adams
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful."
- Seneca the Younger
"The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred."
- Aldous Huxley
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people?"
- Anonymous
"We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today."
- Stacia Tauscher
"A man searching for enlightenment is like a man sitting on an Ass in search of an Ass "
- Thomas Merton
"Imagination and fiction make up more than three-quarters of our real life."
- Simone Weil
"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
- John Stuart Mill
"Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them."
- Mark Twain
"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
- Henry Steele Commager
"A little learning is a dangerous thing, but a lot of ignorance is just as bad."
- Bob Edwards
"There are at least two kinds of cowards. One kind always lives with himself, afraid to face the world. The other kind lives with the world, afraid to face himself."
- Roscoe Snowden
"The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity."
- Alan Gregg
"To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee."
- William H. Walton
"People who are brutally honest often get more satisfaction out of the brutality than out of the honesty."
- Richard J. Needham
"History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment."
- Lemuel K. Washburn
"If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all thinking, damages his personality and makes him a landlord to a ghost."
- Lloyd Douglas
"Every civilization is, among other things, an arrangement for domesticating the passions and setting them to do useful work."
- Aldous Huxley
"Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds."
- John Perry Barlow
"Begin each day as if it were on purpose."
- Anonymous
"Men fight for freedom, then they begin to accumulate laws to take it away from themselves."
- Anonymous
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."
- James Madison, speech, Virginia Convention, 1788
"A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent."
- William Blake
"One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared."
- Buddha
"History is a vast early warning system."
- Norman Cousins
"In about the same degree as you are helpful, you will be happy."
- Karl Reiland
"I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again."
- William Penn
"Even if it's a little thing, do something for those who have need of a man's help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it. For, remember, you don't live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here too."
- Albert Schweitzer
"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little."
- Edmund Burke
"Nobody can do everything, but everyone can do something."
- Anonymous
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
- Desmond Tutu
"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
"The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be."
- Oscar Wilde
"We are free, truly free, when we don't need to rent our arms to anybody in order to be able to lift a piece of bread to our mouths."
- Ricardo Flores Magon
"Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it forgoes revenge, and dares forgive an injury."
- E.H. Chapin
"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
- John Gardner
"Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions."
- Anonymous
"Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit."
- Eli Khamarov
"Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity."
- Aldous Huxley
"The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't."
- Henry Ward Beecher
"No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys."
- Doug Horton
"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be."
- Jane Austen
"Few people have the imagination for reality."
- Johann von Goethe
"History is the sum total of the things that could have been avoided."
- Konrad Adenauer
"Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians."
- Franklin P. Jones
"You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give."
- Kahlil Gibran
"All the ancient histories are just fables that have been agreed upon"
- Voltaire
"People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."
- James Baldwin
"Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters."
- African Proverb
"Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity." - Aldous Huxley
"Adversity is the first path to truth."
- Lord Byron
"Frugality is one of the most beautiful and joyful words in the English language, and yet one that we are culturally cut off from understanding and enjoying. The consumption society has made us feel that happiness lies in having things, and has failed to teach us the happiness of not having things."
- Elise Boulding
"Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it."
- Buddha
"All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field."
- Albert Einstein
"Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason."
- José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
"A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past."
- Eric Hoffer
"If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history."
- Pierre Bayle
"My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants."
- J. Brotherton
"People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."
- Plato
"Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body."
- Cicero
"If you don't decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing."
- Robert Brault
"Our affluent society contains those of talent and insight who are driven to prefer poverty, to choose it, rather than submit to the desolation of an empty abundance."
- Michael Harrington
"Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve what is good and lasting."
- Johann von Goethe
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
- Attributed to Howard Thurman
"What you need to know about the past is that no matter what has happened, it has all worked together to bring you to this very moment. And this is the moment you can choose to make everything new. Right now."
- Anonymous
"Few rich men own their property; the property owns them."
- Robert Ingersoll
"Stubbornly persist, and you will find that the limits of your stubbornness go well beyond the stubbornness of your limits."
- Robert Brault
"Sickness is the vengeance of nature for the violation of her laws."
- Charles Simmons
"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."
- George Jean Nathan
"The ultimate folly is to think that something crucial to your welfare is being taken care of for you."
- Robert Brault
"Small is the number of people who see with their eyes and think with their minds."
- Albert Einstein
"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
- Pablo Picasso
"Nobody trips over mountains. It is the small pebble that causes you to stumble. Pass all the pebbles in your path and you will find you have crossed the mountain."
- Anonymous
"When you blame others, you give up your power to change."
- Anonymous
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful." - Seneca the Younger
"Responsibility: A detachable burden easily shifted to the shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbor. In the days of astrology it was customary to unload it upon a star."
- Ambrose Bierce
"Laundry is the only thing that should be separated by color."
- Anonymous
"Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else."
- Ivern Ball
"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."
- George Bernard Shaw
"What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly - that is the first law of nature."
- Voltaire
"Do not take anything for granted - not one smile or one person or one rainbow or one breath, or one night in your cozy bed."
- Terri Guillemets
"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be."
- Paul Valery
"Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom."
- Merry Browne
"There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock."
- Anonymous
"We create an environment where it is alright to hate, to steal, to cheat, and to lie if we dress it up with symbols of respectability, dignity and love."
- Whitney Moore, Jr.
"The first gold star a child gets in school for the mere performance of a needful task is its first lesson in graft."
- Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, 1942
"It's a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man."
- David Harris
"Like it or not, everything is changing. The result will be the most wonderful experience in the history of man or the most horrible enslavement that you can imagine. Be active or abdicate. The future is in your hands."
- William Cooper
"The world has achieved brilliance without conscience."
- Omar Bradley
"I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance."
- Reuben Blades
"Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
- Gertrude Stein
"Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth."
- Erwin Chargaff, Columbia Forum, Summer 1969
"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
- Chuck Palahniuk
"The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Our modern society is engaged in polishing and decorating the cage in which man is kept imprisoned. "
- Nirmalananda
"If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention."
- Anonymous
"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots."
- Erich Fromm
"Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own."
- George Christoph Lichtenberg
"Let me ask you something, what is not art?"
- Anonymous
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Never give up on yourself. Then you will never give up on others."
- Pema Chodron
"Many great ideas have been lost because the people who had them could not stand being laughed at."
- Anonymous
"In the end you regret less the things you believed that weren't true than the things that never came true because you didn't believe."
- Robert Brault
"The recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain, not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing is to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be."
- Oscar Wilde
"Instead of complaining that the rosebush is full of thorns, be happy that the thorn bush has roses."
- Proverb
"There is no coming into consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
- Carl Jung
"Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome."
- Samuel Johnson
"Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one."
- Chinese Proverb
"Don't try to be different. Just be good. To be good is different enough."
- Arthur Freed
"Preconceived notions are the locks on the door to wisdom."
- Merry Browne
"Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself."
- Samuel Butler
"Use of advanced messaging technology does not imply an endorsement of western industrial civilization." - Anonymous email sig
"Procrastination is the thief of time."
- Edward Young
"Let freedom never perish in your hands."
- Joseph Addison
"What most of us must be involved in - whether we teach or write, make films, write films, direct films, play music, act, whatever we do--has to not only make people feel good and inspired and at one with other people around them, but also has to educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world."
- Howard Zinn (Artists in Times of War and Other Essays)
"The power of a bold idea uttered publicly in defiance of dominant opinion cannot be easily measured. Those special people who speak out in such a way as to shake up not only the self-assurance of their enemies, but the complacency of their friends, are precious catalysts for change."
- Howard Zinn
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
- Albert Camus
"You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law."
- Lyn Beth Neylon
"Man - despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments - owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains."
- Anonymous
"Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings, and actions that make for peace and freedom."
- Aldous Huxley
"The difficult part in an argument is not to defend one's opinion but rather to know it."
- André Maurois
"Education makes machines which act like men and produces men who act like machines."
- Erich Fromm
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
- Carl Sagan
"Technology: the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."
- Max Frisch
"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards."
- Aldous Huxley
"To the question of your life, you are the only answer. To the problems of your life, you are the only solution."
- Jo Coudert
"A life without cause is a life without effect."
- Anonymous
"In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, then turn on other victims."
- Howard Zinn
"Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners."
- Howard Zinn
"You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him."
- Leo Aikman
"The prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers."
- William James
"Character is higher than intellect."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as Brotherhood, however much you preach, posture, or agree, unless you live it."
- Faith Baldwin
"Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement."
- Golda Meir
"The challenge remains. On the other side are formidable forces: money, political power, the major media. On our side are the people of the world and a power greater than money or weapons: the truth.
Truth has a power of its own. Art has a power of its own. That age-old lesson – that everything we do matters – is the meaning of the people’s struggle here in the United States and everywhere. A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think, when we organize with one another, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power no government can suppress. We live in a beautiful country. But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."
- Howard Zinn
"Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness."
- James Thurber
"I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us."
- Dorothy Day
"Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life."
- Rumi
"If you surrender to the wind, you can ride it."
- Toni Morrison
"Your future depends on many things, but mostly on you."
- Frank Tyger
"Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are."
- Malcolm S. Forbes
"There is no such thing in anyone's life as an unimportant day."
- Alexander Woollcott
"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.... In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness."
- Henry David Thoreau
"Under capitalism man exploits man; under socialism the reverse is true."
- Polish Proverb
"Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
- James Russell Lowell
"No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session."
- Anonymous
"When government accepts responsibility for people, then people no longer take responsibility for themselves."
- George Pataki
"Many people say that government is necessary because some men cannot be trusted to look after themselves, but anarchists say that government is harmful because no men can be trusted to look after anyone else."
- Nicolas Walter
"Governments should not possess instruments of coercion and violence denied to their citizens."
- Edgar A. Suter
"Live simply that others might simply live."
- Elizabeth Ann Seton
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."
- Tacitus
"It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it."
- A.A. Hodge
"Genius is a plodding intellect, incapable of dreaming up the obstacles that stop the rest of us."
- Robert Brault
"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."
- H.L. Mencken
"The torment of precautions often exceeds the dangers to be avoided. It is sometimes better to abandon one's self to destiny."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
"The past can't see you, but the future is listening."
- Terri Guillemets
"I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly."
- Buckminster Fuller
