Quotes

  • "You live, you learn."
    Anonymous


    • Guides to Life

  • "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
    Albert Einstein
  • "Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom."
    Albert Einstein
  • "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."
    Albert Einstein
  • "No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes."
    Alfred North Whitehead
  • "All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."
    Anatole France
  • "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision."
    Ayn Rand
  • "It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement."
    Ayn Rand (from her novel The Fountainhead)
  • "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
    Cicero
  • "The wicked man is like a dog tied to a cart, and is compelled to go wherever it goes."
    Cleanthes
  • "Learning to exist in a world quite different from that which formed you is the condition, these days, of pursuing research you can on balance believe in and write sentences you can more or less live with."
    Clifford Geertz
  • "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."
    Clifford Geertz
  • "The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children."
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer
  • "If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate."
    Elbert Hubbard
  • "Professor Ronald Dore has powerfully criticized this tendency, particularly among developing societies, of overrating form 'paper' qualifications, and no doubt it has harmful side effects. But I wonder whether he fully appreciates the deep foots of what he castigates as the Diploma Disease. We live in a world in which we can no longer respect the informal, intimate transmission of skills, for the social structures within which such transmission could occur are dissolving. Hence the only kind of knowledge we can respect is that authenticated by reasonable impartial centres of learning, which issue certificates on the basis of honest, impartially administered examinations. Hence we are doomed to suffer the Diploma Disease."
    Ernest Gellner (from his book Nations and Nationalism)
  • "Madness in method; that is genius."
    Frank Herbert (from his novel series Dune)
  • "Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed."
    Frank Herbert (from his novel series Dune)
  • "We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."
    François de La Rochefoucauld
  • "It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence."
    Gandhi
  • "Changeless society is characterized by the absense of alternatives."
    George Soros (from his book Underwriting Democracy)
  • "The starting point in a changeless society is always the social Whole and not the individuals who constitute it. While society fully determines the existence of its members, the members have no say in the determining the nature of the society in which they live."
    George Soros (from his book Underwriting Democracy)
  • "If you can fake sincerity, you can fake pretty much anything."
    Gregory House, M.D. (at the episode 'Honeymoon' of the TV series House, M.D.)
  • "Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm."
    Harriet Beecher Stowe (from her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin)
  • "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."
    Henry David Thoreau (from his essay Civil Disobedience)
  • "Men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end."
    Jacob Viner (from his essay A Modest Proposal for some Stress on Scholarship in Graduate Training)
  • "Power is the ability to afford not to learn."
    Karl Deutsch
  • "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
    Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • "The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone."
    Milan Kundera
  • "He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How."
    Nietzsche
  • "And the first step, as you know, is always what matters most, particularly when we are dealing with those who are young and tender. That is the time when they are taking shape and when any impression we choose to make leaves a permanent mark."
    Plato (from The Republic)
  • "A belief is not merely an idea that the mind possesses. It is an idea that possesses the mind."
    Robert Oxton Bolton
  • "The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization, though then, it is true, it had for the most part no value, since the individual was scarcely in a position to defend it. The development of civilization imposes restrictions on it, and justice demands that no one shall escape those restrictions."
    Sigmund Freud (from Civilization and Its Discontents)
  • "Which is more difficult, to awaken one who sleeps or to awaken one who, awake, dreams that he is awake?"
    Søren Kierkegaard (from Fear and Trembling)
  • "What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual-conceptual experience has taught him to see."
    Thomas Kuhn (from The Structure of Social Revolutions)
  • "There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."
    Voltaire
  • "Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none."
    William Shakespeare

Turkish Proverbs

  • "Dinsizin hakkından imansız gelir."
  • "Alma mazlumun ahını, çıkar aheste aheste."
  • "Gün olur devran döner."