Some Favorite Quotes
"Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something."
— Plato
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
— Winston Churchill
If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.
— Michael Chriton
"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."
— Charles Dickens
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts."
— Bertrand Russell
"The man who prays is the one who thinks that god has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct god how to put them right."
— Christopher Hitchens
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain
"The acceptance of assertions without evidence is the greatest sin against the human heart."
— T.H. Huxley
^ While written as an observation on the style of argument employed by anti-Semites, it applies equally well to modern social media and political trolls.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
— Issac Asimov
"Cultivate the habit of attention and try to gain opportunities to hear wise men and women talk. Indifference and inattention are the two most dangerous monsters that you will ever meet. Interest and attention will ensure you an education."
— Robert Millikan
"We ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?"
— Franz Kafka
Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
— Unknown
"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt."
— (often attributed to Lincoln or Twain, but it's older than either)
“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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. … Is there no other way the world may live?”
— President Dwight D. Eisenhower
Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
— Epicurus
“I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.”
— Carl Sagan
"If one harbors anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable."
— George Orwell
“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
— Bertrand Russell
