Quotes
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.
I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
The truth is more important than the facts.
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
What luck for rulers that men do not think.
Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other cause for prejudice by noon.
You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
If Mr. Edison had thought more about what he was doing, he wouldn't sweat as much.
If men were angels, no government would be necessary.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
The words 'I am...' are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you're claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.
When the character of a man is not clear to you, look at his friends.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself.
I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
By learning to discover and value our ordinariness, we nurture a friendliness toward ourselves and the world that is the essence of a healthy soul.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
When we ask for advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so.
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
The higher the buildings, the lower the morals.
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion.
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.
Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
From error to error, one discovers the entire truth.
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you!
The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.
It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right - especially when one is right.
A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority will vote for those candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with the result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship.
The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years.
Each has been through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.
The average age of the world's greatest democratic nations has been 200 years.
Each has been through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith.
From faith to great courage.
From courage to liberty.
From liberty to abundance.
From abundance to complacency.
From complacency to selfishness.
From selfishness to apathy.
From apathy to dependency.
And from dependency back again into bondage.
My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
Both Defendants and many of the leading proponents of ID make a bedrock assumption which is utterly false. Their presupposition is that evolutionary theory is antithetical to a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to religion in general. Repeatedly in this trial, Plaintiffs scientific experts testified that the theory of evolution represents good science, is overwhelmingly accepted by the scientific community, and that it in no way conflicts with, nor does it deny, the existence of a divine creator.
To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.
The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
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.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems.
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
If you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a small chance of survival. There may even be a worse case; you may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
Chances are if you need both of your hands to do something, your brain should be in on it, too.
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul.
Your theory is crazy, but it is not crazy enough to be true.
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
You haven’t achieved equality until you’re a legitimate target for humor.
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
I have learned to use the word 'impossible' with the greatest caution.
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
It ain't so much the things we know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
The gods too are fond of a joke.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.


