Quotes

  • "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
  • "Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision."
    Ayn Rand
  • "When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honor or restitution has to be hidden underground."
    Ayn Rand
  • "Art is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society"s deepest philosophical values."
    Ayn Rand (from her book The Romantic Manifesto)
  • "Anyone who fights for the future, lives in it today."
    Ayn Rand (from her book The Romantic Manifesto)
  • "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
  • "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)
  • "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.
  • "Madness in method; that is genius."
    Frank Herbert (from his novel series Dune)
  • "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)
  • "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."
    Dr. Gregory House (at the episode 'Honeymoon' of the TV series House, M.D.)