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Albert Einstein:
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Aristotle:
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.
Man is by nature a political animal.
Mohandas Ghandi:
Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not any man’s greed.
The Rich must live more simply so that the Poor may simply live.
like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
Thomas Jefferson:
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Ben Franklin
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
A Democracy will vote away its rights.
God made beer because he loves us and wants us to be happy.
Galileo:
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
Issac Asimov:
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
If I am right, then religious fundamentalists will not go to Heaven, because there is no Heaven. If they are right, then they will not go to Heaven, because they are hypocrites.
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
Carl Sagan
A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.
We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean, we are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
Archimedes:
Eureka!
Give me a lever, and I shall move the world.
Francis Bacon
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
Niels Bohr:
Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Your theory is crazy, the question is whether it's crazy enough to be true.
Stop telling God what to do with his dice. (to Einstein)
Marcus Tullius Cicero:
To be ignorant of the past is to forever be a child.
The people's good is the highest law.
Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.
Compliance produces friends; truth produces hate.
Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.
The wise are instructed by reason; ordinary minds by experience; the stupid, by necessity; and brutes by instinct.
We are obliged to respect, defend and maintain the common bonds of union and fellowship that exist among all members of the human race.
Simon Conway Morris:
Richard Dawkins is arguably England's most pious atheist.
Francis Crick:
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity.
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
All of us have heard this term 'preventative war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I recall that is about the first time I heard it. In this day and time... I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing.
Every gun that is made, 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. This 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.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…we must guard against the 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.
JFK:
Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.
Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
Mark Twain:
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A classic is something that everybody praises and nobody has read.
Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
Winston Churchill:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
In War: Resolution. In Defeat: Defiance. In Victory: Magnanimity. In Peace: Good Will.
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Dictators ride to and fro on tigers they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
The biggest argument against democracy is a five minute discussion with the average voter.
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"We do not inheret the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." -Navajo proverb
"Capitalism has always been a failure for the lower classes. It is now beginning to fail for the middle classes." ~ Howard Zinn (author of A People's History of the US)
"We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of the few. We cannot have both." ~ Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court Justice from 1916-1939
"This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. <...> An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career." ~ Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?
"Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money." - Cree Indian Proverb
"This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Only the educated are free." Epictetus
"In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved." Franklin D. Roosevelt
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe." -- H. G. Wells
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas." -- Alfred Whitney Griswold
"The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful." ~ Noam Chomsky
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen. ~ Leon Trotsky
Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. ~ H.L. Mencken
The 20th century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance. The growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda against democracy. ~ Alex Carey, Australian social scientist.
The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it. ~ Edward Dowling, Editor and Priest, Chicago Daily News (28 July 1941)
The people who vote decide nothing. The people who count the vote decide everything. ~ Joseph Stalin
Wherever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship. ~ President Harry S Truman
Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant. ~ Henri Queuille, The Bureaucrat (1985)
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. ~ Unknown
We're the first society in history with the option of living in a world without poverty. The fact poverty still exist says more about our political leaders than I can. ~ Clint Borgen, architect behind the movement to make poverty a political priority.
I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. ~ James Baldwin
If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all. ~ Noam Chomsky
The problem with political jokes is that they get elected. ~ unknown
If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restore to the people, to whom it properly belongs. ~ Thomas Jefferson
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal. ~ Emma Goldman
The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. ~ Robert Lynd
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