    These are just a few of the words I either try to live by or words that simply add humor to an otherwise tragic world. You decide which is which. If you want to know why I write and what I believe, this is a good place to start your research.
    This has become a long, long file (over 202kb and growing). It may be easier to just download it or save as a text file or whatever and read at your pleasure.
    It also has many duplications. I suppose that was caused by finding the same words in different places and discovering their truth anew each time.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin

"In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors... The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government.... Paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."
Justice Hugo Black (1971)
The Pentagon Papers Case

The Christian god can easily be pictured as virtually the same god as the many ancient gods of past civilizations. The Christian god is a three headed monster; cruel, vengeful and capricious. If one wishes to know more of this raging, three headed beast-like god, one only needs to look at the caliber of people who say they serve him. They are always of two classes; fools and hypocrites. To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson

I have examined all the known superstitions of the Word, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the world ... The clergy converted the simple teachings of Jesus into an engine for enslaving mankind ... to filch wealth and power to themselves. [They], in fact, constitute the real Anti-Christ.
Thomas Jefferson

Accustom a people to believe that priests and clergy can forgive sins ... and you will have sins in abundance. I would not dare to dishonor my Creator's name by [attaching] it to this filthy book [the Bible].
Thomas Paine

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ... We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
Edward Bernays, considered to be the father of PR

Bush, like Moses, is a leadership genius.
Mindless right wing bozos Carolyn B. Thompson & James B. Ware in "The Leadership of George W. Bush"

A hillbilly with a permanent hard-on, an upper-class bureaucrat-twit, an actor-imbecile, a born-again Christian peanut farmer, an unelected college football lineman, a paranoid moral dwarf, a vulgar cowboy criminal, and mediocre playboy sex fiend.
Comedian George Carlin's description of the last eight Presidents prior to the little moron's theft of that office.

Preachers are not called upon to be politicians, but soul winners. Nowhere are we commissioned to reform externals.
Rev. Jerry Falwell, speaking in 1965 against the involvement of preachers in politics, quoted March 10, 2005 in the online magazine Salon. In the 1960s, the Salon writer notes, religious progressives were strongly identified with the labor, civil rights and antiwar movements. Falwell, of course, no longer practices what he once preached.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/10/religious_left/

Remember: it is not given to man to take his goods with him. No one goes away and then comes back.
The Song of the Harper - Ancient Egyptian quotation found in the tomb of King Inyotef - 2650-2600 BCE

He who knows others is wise;
He who knows himself is enlightened.
Lao-Tzu - The Way of the Tao

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop circa 550 BCE

Avoid what is evil; do what is good; purify the mind - this is the teaching of the Awakened One.
The Pali Canon - The sacred scriptures of the Theravada Buddhists

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.
Sophocles - Oedipipus Rex

There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
Hippocrates - Law, Bk. 1

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.
Aristophanes - Knights 424 BCE

This is what extremely grieves us, that a man who never fought should contrive our fees to pilfer, one who for his native land never to this day had oar, or lance, or blister in his hand.
Aristophanes - Wasps, 422 BCE

Under every stone lurks a politician.
Aristophanes - Thesmophoriazusae, 410 BCE

Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another.
Plato - The Republic, Bk. 1

Oligarchy: A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.
Plato - The Republic, Bk VIII

The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness ... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.
Plato - The Republic, Bk. VIII

Those who seek to satisfy the mind of man by hampering it with ceremonies and music and affecting charity and devotion have lost their original nature.
Chuang-tzu - Joined Toes

Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.
Bion - From PLUTARCH, Water and Land Animals

While there's life, there's hope.
Publius Terentius Afer - Heauton Timoroumenos

He is wise who tries everything before arms.
Publius Terentius Afer - Eunuchus (Prologue)

The people's good is the highest law.
Marcus Tullius Cicero - De Amitica, XI

Such evil deed could religions prompt.
Lucetrius - On the Nature of Things, Invocation

It is only the ignorant who despise education.
Publilius Syrus - Maxim 571

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Publilius Syrus - Maxim 1070

What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole of the Torah. The rest is commentary.
Hillel - From Talmud (complied 6th century) Shabbath

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca - Epistles

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?
Lucius Annaeus Seneca - Epistles

Everyone ought to worship God according to his own inclinations, and not be constrained by force.
Flavius Josephus - Life

Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world.
Talmud - 6th century A.D.

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellowman, either by a considerable gift, or a sum of money, or teaching him a trade, or by putting him in the way of business, so that he may earn an honest livelihood, and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is he highest step and the summit of charity's golden ladder.
Moses ben Maimon - Charity's Eight Degrees

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
Leonardo Da Vinci - The Notebooks

In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
Desiderius Erasmus - Adagia c. 1500

Here I stand. I can do no other. Amen.
Martin Luther - Speech at the Diet of Worms April 18, 1521

In charity there is no excess.
Francis Bacon - Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature

All we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.
William Harvey - dedication to Dr. Argent and Other Learned Physicians

According to our chronology, [the creation of the world] fell upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty third day of October in the year of the Julian calendar, 710 [4004 BC].
James Ussher - The Annals of the World, 1658

Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess.
Rene' Descartes - Le Discours de la Me'thode, 1637

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton - Areopagitica, 1644

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Sir Isaac Newton - Letter to Robert Hooke, Feb. 5, 1675 or 1676

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton - From Brewster, Memoirs of Newton, 1885

Any government is free to the people under it where the law rules and the people are a party to the laws.
William Penn - Frame of Government, 1682

It is a reproach to religion and to government to suffer so much poverty and excess.
William Penn - Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693

It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.
Francois Marie Arouet (Voltaire), Zadig Ch. 6, 1747

Whatever you do, crush the infamous thing [superstition], and love those who love you.
Voltaire, Letter to d'Alembert, 1762

We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongue, at our peril, risk, and hazard.
Voltaire, Liberty of the Press

Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739

Opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a-quarreling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.
David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, 1757

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, "This is mine," and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, 1754

Good laws lead to the making of better one; bad ones bring about worse.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?
Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile;, or, On Education, 1762

Let us contemplate our fore fathers, and posterity, and resolve to maintain the rights bequeathed to us by the former, for the sake of the latter. The necessity of the times, more than ever, calls for our utmost circumspection, deliberation, fortitude and perseverance. Let us remember that "if we suffer tamely a lawless attack upon our liberty, we encourage it, and involve others in our doom." It is a very serious consideration ... that millions yet unborn may be the miserable sharers of the event.
Samuel Adams, Speech, 1771

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Ch. 10, 1776

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Ch. 8, 1776

Government is, or ought to be instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people, nation, or community; of all the various modes and forms of government, that is best which is capable of producing the greatest degree of happiness and safety, and is most effectually secured against the danger of maladministration.
George Mason, Virginia Bill of Rights, Article 3, June 12, 1776

The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
George Mason, Virginia Bill of Rights, Article 12, June 12, 1776

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation with America, The Thirteen Resolutions, 1775

It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.
Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation with America, The Thirteen Resolutions, 1775

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke, Speech at County Meeting of Buckinghamshire, 1784

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, no.1 1777

My country is the world and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, Ch. 5, 1791

I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy.
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, pt. 1, 1793

Is uniformity [or opinion] attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, 1787

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt, Speech in the House of Commons, 1783

Let the revolting distinction of rich and poor disappear once and for all, the distinction of great and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed. Let there be no other difference between human beings than those of age and sex. Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be one education for all, one food for all.
Francois Noel Babeuf

To furnish the means of acquiring knowledge is ... the greatest benefit that can be conferred upon mankind. It prolongs life itself and enlarges the sphere of existence.
John Quincy Adams, Report on the establishment of the Smithsonian Institute, circa 1846

[Black Hawk] has done nothing for which an Indian ought to be ashamed. He has fought for his countrymen, the squaws and papooses, against white men, who came year after year, to cheat them and take away their lands. You know the cause of our making war. It is known to all white men. They ought to be ashamed of it.
Black Hawk, upon his surrender, 1832

Every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add ... artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society - the farmers, mechanics, and laborers - who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors for themselves, have aright to complain of the injustice of their government.
Andrew Jackson, Veto of the Bank Bill, 1832

These lands are ours. No one has a right to remove us, because we were the first owners. The Great Spirit above has appointed this place for us, on which to light our fires, and here we will remain. As to boundaries, the Great Spirit knows no boundaries, nor will his red children acknowledge any.
Tecumseh, Chief of the Shawnee, to Joseph Barron, messenger of President James Madison

What experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History, 1832

Labor, like all other things which are purchased and sold, and which may be increased or diminished in quantity, has its natural and its market price. The natural price of labors is that price which is necessary to enable the laborers, one with another, to subsist and perpetrate their race, without either increase or diminution.
David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, Ch. 5, 1817

A decent and manly examination of the acts of government should be not only tolerated, but encouraged.
President William Henry Harrison, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1841

Government is a trust and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.
Henry Clay, Speech, 1829

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
Henry Clay, Speech in the U.S. Senate, 1834

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
Henry Peter Brougham

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
William Hazlitt, Political Essays, The Times Newspaper

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.
William Ellery Channing, Spiritual Freedom

The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or party.
John Caldwell Calhoun, Speech, 1835

A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surpluses in the banks.
John Caldwell Calhoun, Speech, 1836

Labor in this country is independent and proud. It has not to ask the patronage of capital, but capital solicits the aid of labor.
Daniel Webster, Speech, 1820

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann, Commencement Address, Antioch College, 1859

Had I interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends ... every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.
John Brown, Last speech to the court, 1859

I repeat ... that all power is a trust; that we are accountable for its exercise; that, from the people, and for the people, all springs, and all must exist.
Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey, Ch. 7, 1826

I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that He was indifferent.
George Sand, Impressions et Souvenirs, 1896

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, pt. 1, ch. 3, 1835

As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.
Charles Darwin, 1887

Politicians [are] a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who, to say the most of them, taken as a mass, at least one long step from honest men. I say this with the greater freedom because, being a politician, none can regard it as personal.
Abraham Lincoln, Speech, 1837

I share no man's opinions; I have my own.
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: "Great God, grant that twice be not four."
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev

No graven image may be
Worshipped, except the currency.
Arthur Hugh Clough, The Latest Decalogue, 1862

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.
John Ruskin, Unto This Last, 1862

Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.
John Ruskin, The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.
John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, 1876

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.
Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1st edition of Leaves of Grass, 1855

War is at best barbarism ... Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell.
William Tecumseh Sherman, Graduation address at Michigan Military Academy, 1879

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.
John Tyndall

Oh Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if I have a soul.
Ernest Renan, Prie're d'un Sceptique

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside Hercules.
Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwiniana, The Origin of the Species, 1860

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Henry Huxley, On Elemental Instruction in Physiology, 1877

The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.
Charles Eliot Norton, True Patriotism, 1898

Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.
Carl Schurz, Address, Anti-Imperialistic Conference, Chicago, 1899

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.
Mother Jones [Mary Harris Jones], Autobiography, 1925

Justice is the only worship.
Love is the only priest.
Ignorance is the only slavery.
Happiness is the only good.
The time to be happy is now.
The place to be happy is here.
The way to be happy is to make others so.
Robert Green Ingersol, Creed

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, 1877

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
Samuel Butler, Sequel to "Alps and Sanctuaries

[The Bible] has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth, 1962

Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public's trust.
President Grover Cleveland, Inaugural Address, 1885

To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.
James Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 1901

The Augustinian doctrine of the damnation of unbaptized infants and the Calvanistic doctrine of reprobation ... surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan creed.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, History of European Morals, 1869

In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.
John Muir, Alaska Fragment, 1890

Most people are on the world, not in it - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.
John Muir, John of the Mountains, 1938

So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent.
Henry George, Progress and Poverty, Introduction: The Problem, 1879

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 1904

When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas - that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is only the ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, Abrahms v. United States, 1919

If there is any principle that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought - not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, United States v. Schimmer, 1928

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess SUCCESS. That - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word SUCCESS - is our national disease.
William James, 1906

There is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote and act as to bring about the very largest total universe of good which we can see.
William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life

We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902

To protect the workers in their inalienable rights to a higher and better life; to protect them, not only as equals before the law, but also in their health, their homes, their firesides, their liberties as men, as workers, and as citizens; to overcome and conquer prejudices and antagonism; to secure to them the right to life, and the opportunity to maintain that life; the right to be full sharers in the abundance which is the result of their brain and brawn, and he civilization of which they are the founders and the mainstay ... The attainment of these is the glorious mission of the trade unions.
Samuel Gompers, Speech, 1898

At bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, 1913

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis, 1933

The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty.
George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara, 1905

[The Indian] sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, since to him all days are God's.
Ohiyesa, Sante Dakota, The Soul of the Indian, 1911

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.
Theodore Roosevelt, Speech, 1903

To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.
Theodore Roosevelt, Message to Congress, 1907

The Bible is literature, not dogma
George Santayana, The Ethics of Spinoza, 1910

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana, On My Friendly Critics

The professional military mind is by necessity an inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellectual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a calling.
Herbert George Wells, The Outline of History, 1920

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
a sense of obligation."
Stephen Crane

The significance of man is that he is that part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of Man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.
Carl Lotus Becker, Progress and Power, 1935

Bang! Now the animal dead
Is dead and dumb and done.
Nevermore to peep again, creep again, leaps again,
Eat or sleep or drink again, oh what fun!
Walter de la Mare, Hi!

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World, pt. 1, 1910

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs of war.
Herbert Clark Hoover, Speech at the Republican National Convention, 1944

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.
William Somerset Maugham, Strictly Personal, ch. 31, 1941

As a beauty I'm not a great star.
There are others more handsome, by far,
But my face - I don't mind it
For I am behind it;
It's the people in front get the jar.
Anthony Henderson Euwer, Limeratomy

If Christians were Christians, there would be no anti-Semitism. Jesus was a Jew. There is nothing that the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as this awkward historical fact.
John Haynes Holmes, The Sensible Man's View of Religion, 1933

Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.
George Catlett Marshall, Address at Harvard University announcing the European Recovery Plan (Marshall Plan(, 1947

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, 1937

The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside chat, 1938

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Coco Chanel

The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
John Maynard Keyes, Essay in Persuasion, 1931

If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilian control of the military.
Harry S Truman, Memoirs, 1955

The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. we could not approve the slightest breach.
Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947

An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.
Justice Hugo Black, New York Times Company v. Sullivan, 1964

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.
Christopher Dawson, The Judgment of the Nations, 1942

All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those whom it intends to direct itself.
Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, ch. 6, 1933

The conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new the American experience. We must guard against this acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Dwight David Eisenhower, Farewell Radio and Television Address to the American People, 1961

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.
Gerald White Johnson, American Heroes and Hero-Worship, 1943

Our society must make it right and possible for old people not to fear the young or be deserted by them, for the test of a civilization is the way it cares for its helpless members.
Pearl S. Buck, My Several Worlds, 1954

Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose ... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane, Possible Worlds, 1927

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion.
Justice Robert Jackson, Dissenting opinion, Zorach v. Clauson, 1952

We live under a system by which the many are exploited by the few, and war is the ultimate sanction of that exploitation.
Harold Joseph Laski, Plan or Perish, 1945

It would be madness to let the purposes or the methods of private enterprise set the habits of the atomic age.
Harold Joseph Laski, Plan or Perish, 1945

The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in man's struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized.
Justice William Orville Douglas, An Almanac of Liberty, 1954

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great Books, 1954

The liberal, emphasizing the civil and property rights of the individual, insists that the individual must remain so supreme as to make the state his servant.
Wayne Lyman Morse, Definition of Liberalism, 1946

Science is the search for truth - it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others. We need to have the spirit of science in international affairs, to make the conduct of international affairs the effort to find the right solution, not the effort by each nation to get the better of other nations, to do harm to them when it is possible.
Linus Carl Pauling, No More War!, 1958

Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt.
Bergen Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense, 1946

Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that ... may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., New York Times v. Sullivan, 1964

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.
Edward Roscoe Murrow, Broadcast on Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1954

Unless we get off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
Edward R. Murrow, Speech at the Radio and Television News Directors Convention, 1958

While all people want and need to be liked by some of he people some of the time, it is only the modern other-directed types who make this their chief source of direction and chief area of sensitivity.
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, ch. 1, 1950

The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading; men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, ch. 1, 1950

First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mahatma Gandhi

Have confidence in the truth, although you may not be able to comprehend it, although you may suppose its sweetness to be bitter, although you may shrink from it at first. Trust in the Truth...Have faith in the Truth and live it.
Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

The most important human endeavor is striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depends on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.
Albert Einstein

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.
John Lennon

The various religions are like different roads converging on the same point. What difference does it make if we follow different routes, provided we arrive at the same destination.
Mahatma Gandhi

So I vowed to keep myself alive, but only if I would never use me again for just me - each one of us is born of two, and we really belong to each other. I vowed to do my own thinking, instead of trying to accommodate everyone else' opinion, credo's and theories. I vowed to apply my inventory of experiences to the solving of problems that affect everyone aboard planet Earth.
Buckminster Fuller

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
American poet Robert Frost

To think is easy. To act is difficult. To act as one thinks is the most difficult.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, or what he can do, nothing else.
Mahatma Gandhi

Peace is not something you wish for; It's something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.
Robert Fulghum

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.
Abraham Lincoln

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A human being is a part of the whole called 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

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.
Thomas J. Watson

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.
Hubert Horatio Humphrey

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
Noel Langley, spoken by Judy Garland, The Wizard of Oz, 1939

It's difficult to imagine that people are starving in this country because food isn't available.
Ronald Reagan, Press Conference, June 11, 1986

Make voyages! - Attempt them! - There is nothing else.
Tennessee Williams, The Rose Tattoo, Forward, The Timeless World of Play, 1950

Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1960

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad ... Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better, whereas enslavement is a certainty of the worse.
Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, 1960

We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take the idea of dying, unable to sit still.
Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel Joseph Boorstin, The Image, 1962

There is a crisis in American leadership in the middle of the twentieth century that is partly due, I think, to the declining authority of an establishment which is now based on an increasingly castelike White-Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) upper class.
Edward Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment, 1964

The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coin of the thinker at work.
Jerome Seymour Bruner, The Process of Education, 1960

Niggerization is the result of oppression - and it doesn't just apply to black people. Old people, poor people, and students can also get niggerized.
Florynce R. Kennedy, 1973

By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them.
Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite, ch. 1, 1956

A man does what he must - in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.
John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage, 1956

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, 1961

It is our task in our time and in our generation to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is our.
John F. Kennedy, Address at the National Wildlife Federation Building's dedication, 1961

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, 1962

Liberty without learning is always in peril and learning without liberty is always in vain.
John F. Kennedy, 1963

Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas.
Andrei Dmeitrievich Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, 1968

I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore.
Paddy Chayvsky, Network, 1976

That was one of the things she held against missionaries, how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.
Nadine Gordimer, Not for Publication, 1965

North American civilization is one of the ugliest to have emerged in human history, and it has engulfed the world. Asphalt and exhaust fumes clog the villages ... This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see ... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world.
Arthur Charles Erickson, Speech, 1973

When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air ... and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
Newton Norman Minow, speech as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission to National Broadcasters, 1961

If God is male, then the male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination,
Mary Daly, Beyond God the Dather, 1973

The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us ... The very development of American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962

for the urban poor the police are those who arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.
Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962

The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980

He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.
Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven, 1971

Tribalism is the strongest force at work in the world today.
Vine Victor Deloris, Jr, a Standing Rock Sioux, Custer Died for Your Sins, 1969

This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.
Vine Victor Deloris, Jr, a Standing Rock Sioux, New York Times, 1970

It is very hard to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, 1977

We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain, 1979

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen, Side Effects, 1980

I think Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.
Michael Herr, Dispatches, 1977

There was a famous story, some reporters asked a door gunner, "How can you shoot women and children?" and he answered, "It's easy, you just don't lead 'em as much."
Michael Herr, Dispatches, 1977

You're going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old boy.
Philip Joseph Caputo, A Rumor of War, 1977

If we do discover a complete [unified] theory [of the universe], it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God.
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988

None of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers.
David Allen Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, on the U.S. Budget

Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output ... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butterfly Effect - the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.
James Gleick, Chaos, 1987

This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. Its rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.
Monty Python's Flying Circus, Episode 8

I cut down trees, I skip and jump,
I like to press wild flowers.
I put on womens clothing
And hang around in bars.
Monty Python's Flying Circus, Episode 9

I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.
Anonymous

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.
The Chicago Times, 1861

It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.
Attributed to an American officer firing on Ben Tre, Vietnam, 1968

Don't hang noodles on my ears
Russian saying (and odd enough to have stuck in my head for years)

Strange is our situation here on earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose.
Albert Einstein

In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see.
Elie Wiesel

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and injustice.
Senator Robert F. Kennedy

Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles.
Helen Keller

Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It's the only thing.
Albert Schweitzer

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley

The doctrines of Jesus are simple and tend all to the happiness of man, that there is only one God and God is perfect. That God and man are one. That to love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself, is the sum of religion. These are the great points on which I endeavor to reform and live my life.
Thomas Jefferson

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.
Marian Wright Edelman

Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this.
The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations.
But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
Black Elk

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
Joan Baez

Markets make a great servant but a bad master and a worse religion. Markets produce value, but only communities and families produce values. And a society that tries to substitute markets for politics, ethics, or faith is seriously adrift.
Amory Lovins, chief executive officer and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute

"The emperor has no clothes", Senator Robert Byrd said on the Senate floor. "This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.
If you shut up the truth and bury it in the ground, it will grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

Here is a test to find out if your mission on earth is complete... If you're alive... it's not.
Richard Bach "Illusions"

The mark of your ignorance is your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach "Illusions"

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
Richard Bach "Illusions"

To live content with small means. To seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy not respectable, and wealthy not rich. To listen to stars and birds and babes and sages with an open heart. To study hard, think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions. Hurry never. In a word, to let the spiritual, the unbidden and the unconscious rise up through the common. This is my symphony.
William Henry Channing

Whether you realize it or not, there are no boundaries, but until you realize it, you cannot manifest it. The limitations that each of us has are defined in the ways we use our minds.
John Daido Loori

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
James Thurber

The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.
Albert Einstein

Religion that is pure and undefiled is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
(James 1:27).

If you do business with a Christian, Get-It-In-Writing, because he has god on his side to help him fuck you over.
William Burrows

Oh Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;
help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead;
help us to drown the thunder of guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;
help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire;
...help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land
.... We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love.
Mark Twain

In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God's omnipotence, his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every Christian prayer.
George Santayana (1863-1952) U.S. philosopher, writer, professor]

Wealth should be seen less for its own qualities than for the human misery it stands for. The large rooms of which you are so proud are in fact your shame. They are big enough to hold parties, and also big enough to shut out the voice of the poor. The poor man cries before your house, and you pay no attention. There is your brother, naked, crying, and you stand there in a dilemma over a choice of carpets.
St Ambrose of Milan

I'm startled or taken aback when people walk up to me and tell me they are Christians. My first response is the question 'Already?' It seems to me a lifelong endeavor to try to live the life of a Christian.
Maya Angelou

Puritans should remember it is possible to be a non-smoking, teetotal vegetarian, and still be Adolf Hitler.
Karl Barth

My younger brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it may seem absurd, but it is right nonetheless, for everything, like the ocean, flows and comes into contact with everything else: touch it in one place and it reverberates at the other end of the world.
Dostoyevsky

Some think that the Old Testament is stricter than the New, but they are fooling themselves. The old law did not punish the desire to hold onto wealth: it punished theft. But now the rich man is not condemned because he has taken the property of others: rather, he is condemned for not giving his own property away.
St Gregory the Great

Most people are resistant to thinking about God, and especially death. They behave as if it's the one thing that will never happen, when it's the only thing that's guaranteed. Everyone should think about death. It makes life more precious.
Kirk Douglas

If 19,000 children a year were dying in New York or Washington or London, you'd call it a holocaust, but because it's in Chad and Tanzania and Mozambique you don't even call it a crisis.
Bono

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius

If money be not thy servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
Francis Bacon

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in the same room as a mosquito.
Dalai Lama

By doubting we come to inquire, and by inquiring we reach the truth.
Peter Abelard

Everything you've learned in school as ‘obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
R. Buckminster Fuller

In a democracy, instead of truth being the first casualty in war, it should be the first cause of war.
Max Cleland 2003

Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes.
Galileo: No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.
Bertolt Brecht - Life of Galileo

Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection: one may well burst out into laughter.
Long Chen Pa - 14th-century Tibetan Dzogchen master

There may be no rules in Zen, but laughter is almost mandatory: It celebrates the wit that accepts the human condition in all its magnificent silliness, and uses humor knowing it to be the deadliest of weapons against pomposity and self-righteousness.
The clown is a sage; he is wisdom dressed up in a laugh.
ZEN AND HORSE, Ingrid Soren

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we shape the world.
Buddha - the Dhammapada

They (Republicans) have had control for 10 years, they've gotten arrogant, they demean the institution, they demean democracy by virtue of the heavy-handed way they run the House, minority rights are downtrodden, and it's time, Mr. and Mrs. America, to make a change.
Former GOP Leader Dick Armey, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, 7/22/03.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
Jeannette Rankin (1880 - 1973)

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against its government.
Edward Abbey, naturalist and author

Commentary and reporting on the criminal justice system, is at the core of First Amendment values.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.

...and behind the diplomats, dimly heard in the official documents, stand vast forces of national greed & hatred -- atavistic instincts, harmful to mankind at its present level, but transmitted from savage & half-animal ancestors, concentrated & directed by Governments & the Press, fostered by the upper class as a distraction from social discontent, artificially nourished by the sinister influence of the makers of armaments, encouraged by a whole foul literature of "glory", & by every text-book of history with which the minds of children are polluted.
Bertrand Russell, from a letter to "The Nation", 12 August 1914

To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
Theodore Roosevelt

I see in the near future a crisis approaching. It unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes.
I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me & the financial institutions at the rear; the latter is my greatest foe. Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.
President Abraham Lincoln, Nov 21, 1864 (letter to Col. William F. Elkins)

Patriotism means being loyal to your country all the time and to its government when it deserves it.
Mark Twain

    The loud little handful -- as usual -- will shout for the war. The pulpit will -- warily and cautiously -- object ... at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it."
    Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will out-shout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
    Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men ...
    Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of gross self-deception.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), "The Mysterious Stranger" 1910

The American people believe that we ought to control our government. On the other hand, we've seen government more and more controlling us. America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense . . .human rights invented America
James Earl Carter, 39th President of the US (1977-1981)

He who 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

Every gun that is fired, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

We must complain. Yes, plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong -- this is the ancient, unerring way to liberty and we must follow it.
W. E. B. Dubois

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. They want the rain without the awful roar of the thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Without struggle, there is no progress. This struggle might be a moral one. It might be a physical one. It might be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will. People may not get all that they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all that they get.
Frederick Douglass, 1857

It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
U. S. Supreme Court

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

When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.
Representative Abraham Lincoln

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
General Douglas MacArthur

We are at the gravest of moments. Members of Congress must not simply walk away from their Constitutional responsibilities. We are the directly elected representatives of the American people, and the American people expect us to carry out our duty, not simply hand it off to this or any other president. To do so would be to fail the people we represent and to fall woefully short of our sworn oath to support and defend the Constitution. We may not always be able to avoid war, particularly if it is thrust upon us, but Congress must not attempt to give away the authority to determine when war is to be declared. We must not allow any president to unleash the dogs of war at his own discretion and for an unlimited period of time. Yet that is what we are being asked to do. The judgment of history will not be kind to us if we take this step.
Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd - 2002

Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.
James Madison, 1793

If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, it will protect all of you.
Larry Flint

My greatest complaint against democratic government as organized in the United States," de Tocqueville writes in Democracy In America, ". . . is not the extreme freedom reigning there but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny."
(Quotation from Mayer transl.)

Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.
George Gordon Noel Byron (1788-1824), Lord Byron--English romantic poet

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt

Loyalty…is the realization that America was born of revolt, flourished in dissent, became great through experimentation. Our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past…while we silence the rebels of the present.
Henry Steele Commanger

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be . . . The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.
Thomas Jefferson

John Adams was responsible for signing and enforcing what was the most repressive law for free speech and the press in our history. Jefferson understood the nature of the Sedition Act. It was, he wrote, the product of a "reign of witches" and was "an experiment on the American mind to see how far it will bear an avowed violation of the Constitution. When Jefferson became president in 1801, he pardoned all those convicted under the law. When Federalist newspapers made him the subject of fierce attacks, he took no legal action. A visiting Prussian minister found a copy of one such newspaper in a room outside Jefferson's office and was astonished that Jefferson had not suppressed it.
"Put that paper in your pocket, Baron", Jefferson told him, "and should you ever hear the reality of our liberty, our freedom of the press questioned, show them this paper and tell them where you found it."

In Germany they first came for the Communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Reverend Martin Niemöller, pastor -- German Confessing Church - who spent seven years in a concentration camp:

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)

Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
William Butler Yeats, poet, dramatist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1865-1939)

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the rights of the people by the gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)

The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal.
Dr. Karl Menninger, "The Human Mind", 1930

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens.
Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author. (1743-1826)

So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.
Immanuel Kant, philosopher (1724-1804)

The heights by great men reached and kept /
Were not attained by sudden flight, /
But they, while their companions slept, /
Were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet (1807-1882)

...The United States military does not belong to the president; it belongs to the American people. Our support for its commitment to combat is crucial for its success. That support cannot be granted in the dark and without a candid statement by the commander in chief regarding the probable costs in human lives and national treasure of its commitment. ...
Gary Hart to the Council on Foreign Relations, January 21, 2003

The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. The nation, prompted by ill will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy.
George Washington, 1796

A good end cannot sanctify evil means, nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it. We are too ready to retaliate, rather than forgive. And yet, we could hurt no man that we believe loves us. Let us then try what Love will do, for if men did once see we love them, we should soon find they would not harm us. Force may subdue, but Love gains; and he that forgives first, wins the laurel.
William Penn, 1693

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.
Tacitus

The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.
George Washington

I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of men.
Thomas Jefferson

Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.
Thomas Jefferson

...the purest system of morals ever before preached to man [nascent Christianity] has been adulterated and sophisticated by artificial constructions [Old Testament moralities] into a mere contrivance to filch wealth and power ... and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, so as to constitute the real Antichrist.
Thomas Jefferson

We here in America, hold in our hands the hopes of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.
Theodore Roosevelt

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
Abraham Lincoln

The effectiveness of the truly national leader consists in preventing his people from dividing their attention, and keeping it fixed on a common enemy.
Adolph Hitler.

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Benito Mussolini.

The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.
Dr. Joseph Mengele

I'm not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn't figure out what sort of song I would write. That's the problem: I don't want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them.
Tom Lehrer

How do we know Saddam has biological weapons? We have the receipts.
David Letterman

If you can't believe what you read in comic books, what can you believe?
Bullwinkle J. Moose

Sometimes I think we are alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.
Arthur C. Clarke

The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us.
Calvin & Hobbes

In the words of the immortal Thomas Jefferson himself, "If I ever had an illegitimate son who was a fat, draft-dodging fuckwit, I'd christen him Rush."
Paul Barnett

Extending the war into Iraq would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Exceeding the U.N.'s mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
From "Why We Didn't Remove Saddam" by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time Magazine, 1998

War conceals the failures of the administration at home, and the American economy is faltering. More and more people are losing their jobs. Middle-class people have lost a lot of their savings because of what has happened in the stock market. There's no money in the administration's budget for education or health care. All sorts of services are being cut. There's no better way to make people forget about this than to get us into a war. Then war swallows up everybody's attention.
Howard Zinn, Feb 6, 2003 interview

Whether the mask is labeled Fascism, Democracy, or Dictatorship of the Proletariat, our great adversary remains the Apparatus-the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier or the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers' enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves. No matter what the circumstances, the worst betrayal will always be to subordinate ourselves to this Apparatus, and to trample underfoot, in its service, all human values in ourselves and in others.
French worker-philosopher Simone Weil

The wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion-dollar aircraft carriers. . . The fear and anger of the majority [turned] toward a class of criminals bred - by economic inequality - faster than they can be put away, deflecting attention away from the huge theft of natural resources carried out within the law by men in executive offices.
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the U.S.

Let us be utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that "realism" so useful to the Establishment in discouraging action.
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the U.S.

It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that He need not exist in order to save us.
Peter De Vries

Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.
Montaigne

Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
Friedrich Nietzsche

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

Moral courage - not afraid to say or do what you believe to be right.
Bernard Law Montgomery

Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.
Aldous Huxley

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. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people mean to be their own government must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
James Madison

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Despots] ultimately make war on other states as a means of diverting attention from internal conditions, and allowing discontent to explode outward.
B. H. Liddell Hart

The devil is always that particular thing, institution, or party which restrains the free action of the soul and confines it to a prescribed formula, whether of religion, political, or morals, or whatever would subject the soul to any law or authority distinguishable from itself.
Orestes A. Brownson

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.
Robert H. Jackson

No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for sources of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
P. J. O'Rourke

Once a doctrine, however irrational, has gained power in a society, millions of people will believe in it rather than feel ostracized and isolated.
Erich Fromm

A modern dictator with the resources of science at his disposal can easily lead the public on from day to day, destroying all persistency of thought and aim, so that memory is blurred by the multiplicity of daily news and judgment baffled by its perversion.
Winston Churchill

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
John Stuart Mill

We are far more concerned about the desecration of the flag than we are about the desecration of our land.
Wendell Berry

Men measure their esteem of each other by what each has, not by what each is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

In general, executives feel about [government] regulation the way children feel about rules that limit their consumption of ice cream.
Peter Baida

    In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms/
    The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.
    The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world.
    The third is freedom from want - which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.
    The fourth is freedom from fear - which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.
    That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

    True individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. "Necessitous men are not free men." People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
    In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all - regardless of station, race or creed.
    Among these are:
    The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
    The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Faith without reason is superstition: Reason without faith leads to cynicism.
Anonymous

Those who prize freedom only for the material benefits it offers have never kept it for long.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be for religion - except for the sect that can win political power.
Robert H. Jackson

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, ... They valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that without free speech and assembly discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom in an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty; and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American Government.
Louis D. Brandeis

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech.
Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights, First Amendment

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

To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
John Stuart Mill

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.
John Milton

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Voltaire

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press.
Constitution of the United States, Bill of Rights, First Amendment

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.
Thomas Jefferson

A press monopoly is incompatible with a free press; and one can proceed with this principle: if there is a monopoly of the means of communications - of radio, television, magazines, books, public meetings - it follows that this society is by definition and in fact deprived of freedom.
Walter Lippman

The rock-bottom foundation of a free press is the integrity of the people who run it.
Adlai E. Stevenson

If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought - not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
Robert M. Pirsig

The best safeguard against fascism is to establish social justice to the maximum extent possible.
Arnold J. Toynbee

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reason as fear.
Edmund Burke

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think he's evil. But the worst thing that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen

How many persons who shudder at the sound of this word ["Pantheism"] can tell the difference between that doctrine and their own professed belief in the omnipresence of the Deity?
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

I'll be damned if I want most folk out there to do unto me what they do unto themselves.
Toni Cade Bambara

The meaning of good and bad ... is simply helping or hurting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
Thomas Jefferson

It is the supreme test of a system of government whether its machinery is adequate for repressing the selfish undertakings of cliques formed on special interests and saving the public from raids of plunderers.
William Graham Sumner

Many people consider the things which government does for them to be social progress, but they consider the things government does for others as socialism.
Earl Warren

Unless you hate your father and mother and wife and brothers and sisters and, yes, even your own life, you can't be my disciple.
Jesus Christ, if St. Luke is to be believed (Luke 14:26)

Some think, perhaps, that it is peace which I have come to cast upon the world. They do not know that it is dissension which I have come to cast upon the world.
Jesus of Nazareth

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.
Jesus of Nazareth

Sell whatever thou hath, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, take up the cross, and follow me.
Jesus of Nazareth

"When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it... always."
Mahatma Gandhi

Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.
Lenny Bruce

We must not judge God from this world. It's just a study that didn't come off. It's only a master who could make such a blunder.
Vincent Van Gogh

The good Lord never gives you more than you can handle. Unless you die of something.
Guindon cartoon caption

You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
Thomas Pynchon

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
Rumi

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.
Bertrand Russell

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Herb Caen

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

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
Unknown

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Florynce Kennedy

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
Samuel Butler

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.
James Thurber

Alexander III of Macedonia is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time.
Will Cuppy

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell

Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler

I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.
A. J. Liebling

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
Hunter S. Thompson

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
Thomas Jefferson

Nixon is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar...He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides.
Harry S Truman

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.
Ralph Nader

Well, I would - if they realized that we - again if - if we led them back to that stalemate only because that our retaliatory power, our seconds, or strike at them after our first strike, would be so destructive that they couldn't afford it, that would hold them off.
Ronald Reagan when asked if nuclear war could be limited to tactical weapons

The thought of being President frightens me and I do not think I want the job.
Ronald Reagan - 1973

You've got to be careful quoting Ronald Reagan, because when you quote him accurately it's called mudslinging.
Walter Mondale

Ronald Reagan is the first president to be accompanied by a Silly Statement Repair Team.
Mark Russell

I believe that people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.
Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan has agreed to be the first artificial heart donor.
Andrea C. Michaels

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.
Robert Orben

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for any public office.
H. L. Mencken

It is better to be a mouse in a cat's mouth than a man in a lawyer's hands.
Spanish Proverb

Whatever their other contributions to our society, lawyers could be an important source of protein.
Cartoon Caption

We all have the strength to endure the misfortune of others.
La Rochefoucauld

We don't know a millionth of one percent about anything.
Thomas Alva Edison

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other two percent that get all the publicity. But then - we elected them.
Lily Tomlin

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But then I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
Ogden Nash

A billion here, a billion there - pretty soon it adds up to real money.
Senator Everett Dirksen

Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people and kill them.
Unknown

It is more profitable for your congressman to support the tobacco industry than your life.
Jackie Mason

If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

The United States is like the guy at the party who gives cocaine to everybody and still nobody likes him.
Jim Samuels

I think it would be a good idea.
Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization.

Phyllis Schlafly speaks for all American women who oppose equal rights for themselves.
Andy Rooney

How did sex come to be thought of as dirty in the first place? God must have been a Republican.
Will Durst

Patriotism is the veneration of real estate above principles.
George Jean Nathan

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
George Bernard Shaw

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
Simon Cameron

A conservative is a man who wants the rules changed so that no one can make a pile the way he did.
Gregory Nunn

Liberals feel unworthy of their possessions. Conservatives feel they deserve everything they've stolen.
Mort Sahl

A conservative doesn't want anything to happen for the first time; a liberal feels it should happen, but not now.
Mort Sahl

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Plato

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.
Edward R. Murrow

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.
Isadora Duncan

At the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don't understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.
Jane Wagner

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Florynce Kennedy

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.
Andre Gide

America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
Hunter S. Thompson

Animals have these advantages over man: they have no theologians to instruct them, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
Voltaire

America. Nowhere in the world is superiority more easily attained, or more eagerly admitted. The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mostly bogus.
H. L. Mencken

There's no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
H. L. Mencken

Perhaps the most revolting character that the United States ever produced was the Christian business man.
H. L. Mencken

In this world of sin and sorrow these is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
H. L. Mencken

Rich bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Oscar Wilde

"The Good Book" is one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.
Ashley Montagu

Scriptures, n. The sacred books of our religion, as distinguished from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Ambrose Bierce

The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.
Herb Caen

He's a born-again Christian. The trouble is, he suffered brain damage during rebirth.
Anonymous

Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws.
Karl Kraus

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

Christian, n. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Ambrose Bierce

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder's than any other agency in the world.
Richard Le Gallienne

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car.
Laurence J. Peter

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority is wrong.
Eugene V. Debs

The world has narrowed to a neighborhood before it has broadened to brotherhood.
Lyndon B. Johnson

There is no country with a military so powerful, an economy so strong, and a culture so great that it politicians cannot pull it down.
Dr. Donald Gilbert Carpenter

In every well-governed state wealth is a sacred thing; in democracies it is the only sacred thing.
Anatole France

Every politician should have a pimp for a relative so that they can have someone to admire.
Anonymous

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer

Only one indispensable massacre of Capitalists or Communists or Fascists or Christians or Heretics and there we are in the Golden Future.
Aldous Huxley

If God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent Him.
Voltaire

There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject.
George Bernard Shaw

If you talk to God you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
Thomas Szasz

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.
Thomas Paine

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.
Bertrand Russell

The absolute nature of the human being is, like war, so vile, so horrendous that any true written depiction of it would be found too horrible to endure, both for the writer as the reader.
Anonymous

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder a man he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.
Anatole France

The Jews are a frightened people. Nineteen centuries of Christian love have broken down their nerves.
Israel

Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.
Jean Rostand

The law, in its equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
Jeremy Bentham

Liberty doesn't work as well in practice as it does in speeches.
Will Rogers

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve the continuation of the species.
W. Somerset Maugham

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to a moralist - that is why they invented hell.
Bertrand Russell

The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell

"My country right or wrong" is like saying, "My mother drunk or sober".
G.K. Chesterton

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
George Bernard Shaw

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good or a bad one.
Henry Miller

Have you ever seen a politician talking to a rich person on TV?
Art Buchwald

I don't think pornography is very harmful, but it is terribly, terribly boring.
Noel Coward

Pray, n. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Stendahl

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, too intelligent.
Aldous Huxley

Since the whole affair had become one of religion, the vanquished were of course exterminated.
Voltaire

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

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift

The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H.L. Mencken

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

If you attack stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of life, and you will make small progress against it.
Samuel Marchbanks

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
H.L. Mencken

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J.B. Priestley

Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what the people want.
Clive Barnes

I have only a flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.
Denis Diderot

It is inconceivable that the whole universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

War is, at first, the hope one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off.
Karl Kraus

As long as war is looked upon as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
Oscar Wilde

The white race is the cancer of history. It is the white race and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.
Susan Sontag

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.
Bertrand Russell

This world is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.
Horace Walpole

If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

Christmas is a holiday the persecutes the lonely, the frayed and the rejected.
Jimmy Cannon

Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke

It is indispensable to have a habit of observation and reflection.
Abraham Lincoln

He knows nothing; he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no country with a military so powerful, an economy so strong, and a culture so great that its politicians cannot pull it down.
Dr. Donald Gilbert Carpenter

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority is wrong.
Eugene V. Debs

The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.
Diderot

God is ashamed when the prosperous boast of his special favor.
Rabindranath Tagore

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which he has inflected on men, He would kill Himself.
Alexander Dumas

A religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it.
Freud

All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.
V. V. Rozanov

Without goodness man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing; no better than a kind of vermin.
Sir Francis Bacon

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley

The animal needing something knows how much it needs, the man does not.
Democritus of Abdera

If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy.
Michael Frayn

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

Lawful and settled authority is seldom resisted when it is well employed.
Dr. Johnson

Lawyers are the only persons on whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
Jeremy Bentham

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinity with murderers than those who are not.
Remy De Gourmont

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them.
Emily Bronte

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
Machiavelli

Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Marcus Aurelius

One defeats the fanatic precisely by not becoming a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
George Orwell

Opinions which justify cruelty are inspired by cruel impulses.
Bertrand Russell

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heine

One cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him
Booker T. Washington

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage.
Sydney Smith

For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate error so long as reason is free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson

Some of the Best Things Anyone Ever Said