Quotes


  • "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
    Albert Einstein
  • "As far as our propositions are certain, they do not say anything about reality; and as far as they do say anything about reality, they are not certain."
    Albert Einstein
  • "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."
    Albert Einstein
  • "Reality is an illusion, albeit a very consistent one."
    Albert Einstein
  • "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance."
    Albert Maysles
  • "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart."
    Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • "No science can be more secure than the unconscious metaphysics which tacitly it presupposes."
    Alfred North Whitehead
  • "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
    Anaïs Nin
  • "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
  • "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
    Aristotle (except he probably never said this!)
  • "Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
    Arthur C. Clarke
  • "Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius."
    Arthur Conan Doyle (The Valley of Fear)
  • "Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see."
    Arthur Schopenhauer
  • "Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead."
    Arundhati Roy
  • "It’s naive to think that you wouldn’t have taken part in historical atrocities once considered normal if you embrace all the trendy ideas of today."
    Ayishat Akanbi
  • "One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny."
    Bertrand Russell
  • "What scoundrels we would be if we did for ourselves what we stand ready to do for Italy."
    Camillo Benso
  • "If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
    Cicero
  • "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
  • "I would rather discover one causal law than be King of Persia."
    Democritus
  • "If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate."
    Elbert Hubbard
  • "The most tragic form of loss is the loss of the capacity to imagine that things could be different."
    Ernst Bloch (The Principle of Hope)
  • "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 (Nations and Nationalism)
  • "Madness in method; that is genius."
    Frank Herbert (Dune)
  • "Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed."
    Frank Herbert (Dune)
  • "We are so accustomed to disguising ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves."
    François de La Rochefoucauld
  • "When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?"
    George Bernard Shaw
  • “Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it...."
    George Bernard Shaw
  • "There are other people who are primarily interested in doing something. I am not. I can very well live without doing anything. But I cannot live without at least trying to understand whatever happens."
    Hannah Arendt
  • "Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good not to do harm."
    Harriet Beecher Stowe (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 (Civil Disobedience)
  • "Men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end."
    Jacob Viner (A Modest Proposal for some Stress on Scholarship in Graduate Training)
  • "Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher."
    Japanese Proverb
  • "Power is the ability to afford not to learn."
    Karl Deutsch
  • "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
    Mark Twain
  • "People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
    Maya Angelou
  • "The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone."
    Milan Kundera
  • "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 (The Republic)
  • “I would rather have questions that cannot be answered than answers that cannot be questioned."
    Richard Feynman
  • "Societies are known by their victims."
    Richard T. Drinnon
  • "A belief is not merely an idea that the mind possesses. It is an idea that possesses the mind."
    Robert Oxton Bolton
  • "A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence."
    Rollo May
  • "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."
    Salvor Hardin (Foundation series, Isaac Asimov)
  • "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 (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 (Fear and Trembling)
  • "It's too easy to turn a blind eye to the suffering of a people you don't know."
    Star Trek: Insurrection
  • "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 (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
  • "You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
    Timothy Leary
  • "The universe is an intelligence test."
    Timothy Leary
  • "Current psychological priesthoods ignore the fact that the profession of psychology was originated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist who recognized that the key to understanding human nature was the relationship between external stimuli and the brain."
    Timothy Leary
  • "Stronger than a thousand armies is an idea whose time has come."
    Victor Hugo
  • "Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time."
    Viktor E. Frankl
  • "The mediocre teacher tells, the good teacher explains, the superior teacher demonstrates, the great teacher inspires."
    William Arthur Ward
  • "Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer."
    William S. Burroughs
  • "Love all. Trust a few. Do wrong to none."
    William Shakespeare