Quotes
Some favorites — enjoy quoting them. Maybe try enjoying one letter-a-day. They obviously don’t all agree, and we put an X next to those we most disagree with. Apologies for any gender-specific language below; we haven’t switched historical uses of mankind to humankind (even for J.P. Morgan). And have a look at our: Biases, Fallacies, and Sources pages.
Contents
A
Ace, Goodman
I keep reading between the lies.
Acharya, Pundit
Only those who know how to breathe will survive.
Adams, Abigail
If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
Adams, Henry
The current moment disproves Darwin.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Adams, Joey
Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you.
Adams, John
To believe all men honest is folly. To believe none is something worse.
Facts are stubborn things.
Adams, John Quincy
Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.
Adams, Scott
It helps to see failure as a road and not a wall.
When did ignorance become a point of view?
Adenauer, Konrad
An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
Adichie, Chimamanda
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.
Adler, Alfred
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
Agar, Herbert
Man tends to treat all his opinions as principles.
Aharish, Lucy
Truth doesn’t matter. Facts don’t matter. The only thing that matters is what every individual with 10,000 followers thinks is the truth. I used to think people just don’t know. I now understand that people just don’t want to see.
Aiken, George
If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.
Alder, Shannon
Your religion is not what you do on Sunday. It is how you live Monday through Saturday.
Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are.
Alderson, M.H.
If at first you don’t succeed, you’re running about average.
Ali, Muhammad
Don’t count the days; make the days count.
A man who views the world the same at 50 as he did at 20 has wasted thirty years of his life.
It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.
Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.
Live everyday as if it were your last because someday you’re going to be right.
It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.
Me? We!
Allen, Fred
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
Allen, Marty
A study of economics usually reveals that the best time to buy anything is last year.
Allen, Woody
I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering — and it’s all over much too soon.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hoplelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Allison, Graham
What price are we willing to pay for greater certainty of an adversary’s intentions and capabilities? In the case of terrorist groups, if we don’t defeat them today, in their incipient phases, we risk allowing them to mature to the point where they can conduct Paris-style attacks — or even another 9/11 — tomorrow.
Allport, Gordon
Given a thimbleful of facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.
Amara, Roy
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Ameringer, Oscar
Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
Anderson, Alun
Only a present crisis wakes us.
Anderson, Hans Christian
The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them that we call them ordinary things.
Andretti, Mario
If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.
Angelou, Maya
When people tell you who they are, just believe them.
Every storm runs out of rain.
Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breaths away.
If you’re always trying to be normal, you’ll never know how amazing you can be.
There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
Anthony, Susan B.
The only question left to be settled now is, are women persons?
Applbaum, Yoni
Democracy depends on the consent of the losers.
Archer, William
Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
Arendt, Hannah
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.
The fault is in us.
Ariely, Dan
The more cashless our society becomes, the more our moral compass slips.
Quality of life is not about the view from the window but rather who we have coffee with.
We are fallible, easily confused, not that smart, and often irrational. We are more like Homer Simpson than Superman. So, from this perspective, it is rather depressing. But there is a silver lining: free lunches!
Aristotle
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Every virtue carried to the extreme is a vice.
To avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.
How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms?
Anybody can become angry — that is easy — but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power.
Armour, Richard
Shake and shake / The catsup bottle, / None will come, / And then a lot’ll.
Retired is being tired twice, I’ve thought, / First tired of working, / Then tired of not.
Armstrong, Louis
Man, if you have to ask, it won’t do me any good to try to explain.
Aron, Raymond
I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.
Asimov, Isaac
Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while or the light won’t come in.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of 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.’
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Your fixed notion about the world may be sabotaging your progress. Make mindset upgrade a way of life.
Assagioli, Roberto
Without forgiveness, life is governed by an endless cycle of resentment and retaliation.
Attenborough, David
To continue will require more than intelligence, it will require wisdom.
Augustine
Make me chaste and celibate — but not yet.
Austen, Jane
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn? — Mr. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice”
B
Bacon, Francis
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
Baer, Arthur
She’s generous to a fault — if it’s her own.
Bagehot, Walter
The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.
Baldwin, James
When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something you don’t want to know.
Baltzell, E. Digby
History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.
Bancroft, George
The prejudices of ignorance are more easily removed than the prejudices of interest; the first are blindly adopted, the second willfully preferred.
Barksdale, Jim
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
Barnum, P.T.
Nobody ever lost a nickel betting against the intelligence of the American public. X
There’s a sucker born every minute.
Baruch, Bernard
During my eighty-seven years I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.
Bateson, Gregory
The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.
A man walking is never in balance, but always correcting for imbalance.
It takes two to know one.
Beale, Howard (“Network”)
I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore. (Peter Finch)
Beckett, Samuel
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Beecher Stowe, Harriet
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
Beecher, Henry Ward
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Bell, Daniel
The nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life. . . . In short, there is a mismatch of scale.
Bellow, Saul
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Belson, Gavin (“Silicon Valley”)
I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place than we do.X (Matt Ross)
Bennett, Naftali
If I could push a button that would make all those who think differently from me disappear – I wouldn’t push it.
Berenson, Bernard
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
Berlin, Isaiah
Few things have done more harm than the belief on the part of individuals or groups (or tribes or states or nations or churches) that he or she or they are in sole possession of the truth, especially about how to live, what to be and do — that those who differ from them are not merely mistaken, but wicked or mad: and need restraining or suppressing. It is terrible and dangerous arrogance to believe that you alone are right, have a magical eye which sees the truth, and that others cannot be right if they disagree.
Bernbach, Bill
You cannot sell to a man who isn’t listening.
Bernstein, Leonard
To achieve great things, two things are required: a plan, and not quite enough time.
Time is the cruelest teacher; first she gives the test, then teaches the lesson.
Berra, Yogi
If the world was perfect, it wouldn’t be.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
It’s difficult to predict, especially the future.
When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it.
Baseball is ninety percent mental and the other half is physical.
He hits from both sides of the plate. He’s amphibious.
Half the lies they tell about me aren’t true.
I’m not going to buy my kids an encyclopedia. Let them walk to school like I did.
If you ask me anything I don‘t know, I’m not going to answer.
If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.
The future ain’t what it used to be.
We made too many wrong mistakes.
You can observe a lot by just watching.
You wouldn‘t have won if we’d beaten you.
I never said most of the things I said.
It ain‘t over till it’s over.
Betteridge, Ian
Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Bezos, Jeff
Changing your mind a lot is so important. Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.
Be stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
Failure and innovation are inseparable twins.
Cleverness is a gift; kindness is a choice.
You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.
Disagree and commit.
It remains Day 1.
Bickel, Alexander
Where nothing is unspeakable, nothing is undoable.
Bismarck, Otto von
God protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.
Any fool can learn from experience. It’s better to learn from the experience of others.
Blair, Cristopher
We live in an Idiocracy.
Blair, Tony
The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Blank, Steve
A startup is a temporary organisation used to search a scalable and repeatable business model.
There comes a time when you just need to blow it up.
Boethius
Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
Bohr, Niels
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have hope of making some progress.
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
There are two kinds of truth, small truth and great truth. You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich
Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. Neither protest nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved.
The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.
The Jew keeps the question of Christ open.
Bojaxhiu, Mary Teresa (Mother Teresa)
The problem with the world is that we draw our family circle too small.
Borlaug, Norman
You can’t build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery.
Born, Max
The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.
Bowlby, John
All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.
Box, George
All models are wrong but some are useful.
Bradbury, Ray
I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.
Bradley, Omar
Our knowledge of science has clearly outstripped our capacity to control it. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. We have achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Brady, Tom
If you win, be humble; if you lose, be curious.
Brandolini, Alberto
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.
Brault, Robert
Most people would rather defend to the death your right to say it than listen to it.
Brel, Jacques
𝄞“Sons of the thief, sons of the saint,
Who is the child with no complaint?
Sons of the great or sons unknown,
All were children like your own.
The same sweet smiles, the same sad tears,
The cries at night, the nightmare fears.
Sons of the great or sons unknown
All were children like your own.”
Brendon, Piers
The broadness of its grasp concealed the fragility of its grip.
Breyer, Stephen
Many of our Supreme Court cases, the most difficult ones, are not about right versus wrong. They are about right versus right.
Brontë, Charlotte
Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.
Brooks, David
Impartiality is our scarcest resource.
Euphoria goeth before the fall.
The callous tolerance of cruelty is a river that runs through human history.
Sometimes in life you should stick to your worldview and defend it against criticism. But sometimes the world is genuinely different than it was before. At those moments the crucial skills are the ones nobody teaches you: how to reorganize your mind, how to see with new eyes.
Brooks, Mel
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Brown, Brené
Don’t surround yourself with candle blower outers.
Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others.
Brown, Emmet (“Back to the Future”)
1.21 gigawatts?! (Cristopher Lloyd)
Bruni, Frank
When you sell your soul, you get no receipt.
Humility is the antidote to grievance.... While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are.
Bryant, Kobe
I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.
Buber, Martin
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Buck, Pearl
Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
Buffett, Warren
You never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.
We’re best at interpreting new information so that our prior conclusions remain intact.
Trust is like air — nobody appreciates it until there’s a shortage.
Don’t ask the barber whether you need a haircut.
You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It just doesn’t work that way.
It’s not because we’re smart. It’s because we’re sane.
Bukowski, Charles
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Bunker, Edith (“All in the Family”)
Archie doesn’t know how to worry without getting upset. (Jean Stapleton)
Bunker, Edward
Facts and truth are often cousins — not brothers.
Burke, Edmund
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.
Burke, Leo
People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one.
Burns, George
Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
Bush, George W.
We judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions. And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.
Butler, Katy
Even though, at age 70, I swim daily and take no medications, somewhere beyond the horizon, my death has saddled his horse and is heading my way.
Butler, Nicholas Murray
Many people’s tombstones should read, “Died at 30. Buried at 60.”
C
Cabell, James Branch
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
Cain, Susan
There’s zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.
Canham, Erwin
People cannot and need not absorb meaning at the speed of light.
Cantor, Eddie
It takes twenty years to make an overnight success.
Carlin, George
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in a large group.
Think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of us are stupider than that.
Carlyle, Thomas
Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.
Carnegie, Dale
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.
Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn — and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.
Criticism is futile because it puts a person on the defensive and usually makes him strive to justify himself. Criticism is dangerous, because it wounds a person’s precious pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.
Caro, Robert
Power may or may not corrupt but it always reveals.
Carrey, Jim
Every morning, I wake up saying, ‘I’m still alive, a miracle.’ And so I keep on pushing.
I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.
Carroll, Lewis
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.
Sentence first, verdict afterwards.
Carse, James
To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.
Cervantes, Miguel de
Gray hairs should be respected.
Cecil, David
The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
Chaffee, Edmund
The majority of us are for free speech only when it deals with those subjects concerning which we have no intense convictions.
Chaimberlain, Joshua Lawrence
Stand firm, you boys from Maine, for not once in a century are men permitted to bear such responsibilities for freedom and justice, for God and humanity, as are now placed on you. (Battle of Gettysburg, Little Round Top, 2-Jul-1863)
Chamberlain, Neville
My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. And now I recommend you go home and sleep quietly in your beds. — 30-Sep-1938 X
Chaplin, Charlie
Our knowledge has made us cynical, and our cleverness hard and unkind. (“The Great Dictator”)
Charlemagne
To have another language is to possess a second soul.
Chase, Dan (“The Old Man”)
Everything’s in free fall. We’re not wired to cope with that, so we’ve all agreed to pretend that it isn’t happening. But it is. (Jeff Bridges)
Chase, Stuart
The violation of some laws is a normal part of the behavior of every citizen.
Chekhov, Anton
Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.
Man will only become better when you make him see what he is like.
Chesterton, GK
We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.
There’s big difference between listening and hearing.
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
Chisholm, Shirley
The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.
Chomsky, Noam
If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.
You can’t expect somebody to become a biologist by giving them access to the Harvard University biology library and saying, “Just look through it.” That will give them nothing. The internet is the same, except magnified enormously.
Chopra, Deepak
The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.
Massive crises have one great advantage: They show you where you stand. The sight can be distressing and shocking. But it would be wrong to say “Who knew?” We all knew.
We have had the luxury of ignoring self-awareness for a long time, and it has given us a chance to deny responsibility for the problems that no self-aware person would tolerate.
Christie, Agatha
It is the brain, the little gray cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within — not without.
The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
Churchill, Winston
A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
Personally I’m always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.
If the present tries to sit in judgment on the past, it will lose the future.
True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information.
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. [also Jonathan Swift]
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.
The era of procrastination is coming to its close, now we are entering a period of consequences.
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.
The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.
The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.
You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.
Cialdini, Robert
We all fool ourselves from time to time to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.
Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius
Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
If a politician made only promises he was sure he could keep, he wouldn’t have many friends. It is better to have a few people in the Forum disappointed when you let them down than have a mob outside your home when you refuse to promise them what they want.
Clark, Arthur C.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic..
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Clark, Christopher
Given the inter-relationships across the system, the consequences of any one action depended on the responsive action of others, which were hard to calculate in advance, because of the opacity of decision-making processes.... In this sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watching but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.
Clark, Kenneth
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.
Clemenceau, Georges
War is too important to be left to the generals.
Cleveland, Grover
Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.X
Clinton, Bill
My daddy never had to whip me twice for the same mistake.
Americans know what we’re against. Let’s show them what we’re for.
I’ve come to believe that one of the most important things is to see people. The person who opens the door for you, the person who pours your coffee. Acknowledge them. Show them respect. The traditional greeting of the Zulu people of South Africa is ‘Sawubona’. It means ‘I see you’. I try and do that.
Meet as many people who are not like you.
Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking.
We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry.
Clopton, Richard
For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.
Close, Chuck
Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.
Coelho, Paulo
Life is too short to be wasted in finding answers. Enjoy the questions.
Be proud of your scars. They remind you that you have the will to live.
If you are never alone, you cannot know yourself.
You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one. Each day is a different one, each day brings a miracle of its own. It’s just a matter of paying attention to this miracle.
You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
A mistake repeated more than once is a decision.
Coffin, Harold
Most of us hate to see a poor loser — or a rich winner.
Cohen, Felix
Generally the theories we believe we call facts, and the facts we disbelieve we call theories.
Cohen, Herb
Power is based on perception. If you think you got it, you got it, even if you don’t got it.
Cohen, Leonard
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in
Cohen, Richard
Antisemitism does’t need a reason, only an excuse.
Cohn, Roy
(1) Always attack — use lawsuits as a weapon of intimidation. (2) Never apologize — deny everything. (3) Never retreat — always claim victory. X
Collins, Jim
Good is the enemy of great.
Collins, Michaels
I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced.
Columbus, Christopher
You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Commoner, Barry
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over. Every major advance in the technological competence of man has enforced revolutionary changes in the economic and political structure of society.
Confucius
What I hear, I forget. / What I see, I remember. / What I do, I understand.
If your plan is for one year, plant rice. / If your plan is for ten years, plant trees. / If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children.
Conley, Chip
It’s hard to microwave your emotional intelligence.
Connolly, Cyril
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.
Connolly, Mike
Coexistence — what the farmer does with the turkey — until Thanksgiving.
Cook, Barbara
The place that seems most dangerous is exactly where safety lies.
Cooke, Alistair
We’ve been conducting the wrong kind of search. The object in question is the body of the constitution. When we find it with a hundred stab wounds, there’s no point in looking for a smoking gun.
Coolidge, Calvin
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Cooper, Kate
The power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated.... We only get away with it because everyone is prepared to look the other way.
Coppola, Francis Ford
Failure is not necessarily durable. Remember that the things that they fire you for when you are young are the same things that they give lifetime achievement awards for when you’re old.
Costner, Kevin
Wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice.
Covey, Stephen
Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiographies into other people’s lives.
Cox, Harvey
Not to decide is to decide.
Cox Richardson, Heather
Democracy is not a spectator sport.
The past has its own terrible inevitability, but it is never too late to change the future.
Cripps, Stafford
The Soviet Union has no desire to interfere in other countries’ affairs. I heard this from the lips of Stalin himself. X
Cromwell, Oliver
I beseech you, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Cummings, E.E.
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
Cutler, Jim (“Mad Men”)
Until this works, I’m against it. (Harry Hamlin)
D
Da Vinci, Leonardo
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
Dalai Lama
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Just remember that you are one in 7 billion.
The goal is not to be better than the other man, but your previous self.
When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.
We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.
Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.
Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means. Through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.
Man sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present, the result being that he does not live in the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die — and then dies having never really lived.
Sleep is the best meditation.
Dalio, Ray
If you worry, you don’t need to worry. If you don’t worry, you need to worry.
Expect surprises.
Be an imperfectionist.
Embrace reality and deal with it.
Know that nobody can see themselves objectively.
Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible but probabilities matter.
Watch out for people who think it’s embarrassing not to know.
Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life — you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.
Do not feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them!
You don’t achieve happiness by getting rid of your problems — you achieve it by learning from them.
If you worry, you don’t have to worry. And if you don’t worry, you have to worry.
Dante Alighieri
The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crises maintain their neutrality.
Darrow, Clarence
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.
Darwin, Charles
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
Davis, Mackenzie
If you cut yourself, it will heal, but there’s still a mark there. I didn’t know that for so long. Everything leaves a mark.
Davis, Miles
It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note — it’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
De Andrade, Mário
We have two lives and the second begins when you realize you only have one.
De Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron
Pleasure isn’t in the fulfillment, but in the pursuit.
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
De Bernieres, Louis
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.
De Bono, Edward
If you never change your mind, why have one?
De Gaulle, Charles
No nation has friends, only interests.
De La Bruyère, Jean
The great misfortune is to be incapable of solitude.
De Maistre, Joseph Marie
Every nation has the government that it deserves.
De Saint-Exupery, Antoine
All grown-ups were once children… but only few of them remember it.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
If you wish to build a ship, do not divide the men into teams and send them to the forest to cut wood. Instead, teach them to long for the vast and endless sea.
De Tocqueville, Alexis
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than other nations but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
Dean, Jeremy
Great beauty in another person inspires all kinds of emotions: admiration, desire, hope, despair and envy.
Debs, Eugene V.
Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.
Dershowitz, Alan
Political truth has replaced scientific truth in our highly partisan age.
Deverett, Larry
You should own your money — your money should not own you.
Devlin, Patrick
Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist. If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail.
Dewar, Thomas
The mind is like a parachute — it functions only when it is open.
Diderot, Denis
Ignorance is less remote from truth than prejudice.
Disraeli, Benjamin
We now have two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.
We cannot be wrong, because we have studied the past and we are famous for discovering the future when it has taken place.
A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.
He was one of those men who think that the world can be saved by writing a pamphlet.
Dole, Bob
They are opponents, not enemies.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
If God does not exist, everything is permitted.
Douglass, Frederick
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
Draper, Don (“Mad Men”)
People tell you who they are but we ignore it, because we want them to be who we want them to be. (John Hamm)
Drucker, Peter
Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Working with people is difficult, but not impossible.
The important and difficult job is never to find the right answer; it is to find the right question.
Drummond, William
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
Dubos, René
The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.
Duc de La Rochefoucauld
If we had no faults, we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others.
Duckworth, Angela Lee
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Duncan, Isadora
If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.
Durant, Will and Ariel
The conservative who resists change is as valuable as the radical who proposes it.
To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves.
If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all.
No one ever wants to recognize the inexorable periodicity of war.
Perhaps we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently and to respect one another’s delusions.
We are thrilled by the new, however deformed.
The Ten Commandments must be silent when self-preservation is at stake.
New generations will rebel against the old and pass from rebellion to conformity and reaction.
We double, triple, centuple our speed, but we shatter our nerves in the process, and are the same trousered apes at two thousand miles an hour as when we had legs.
Have we given ourselves more freedom than our intelligence can digest?
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality. East is West and West is East, and soon the twain will meet.
We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are not the best informed as to the events of the last sixty centuries.
Only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.
Dyer, Wayne
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
Dylan, Bob
𝄞 “Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head / And pretend that he just doesn’t see?” — Blowin’ in the Wind
𝄞 “For the times they are a-changin’.” — The Times They Are a-Changin’
Dyson, Esther
He who pays for lunch gets to choose the menu.
Dytri, Sue
Tact: tongue-in-check.
E
Earhart, Amelia
The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.
Eban, Abba
Men and nations behave wisely, once they exhausted all the other alternatives.
Eco, Umberto
A dialect is a language without an army and navy.
Edison, Thomas Alva
When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this — you haven’t!
Never go to sleep without a request to your subconscious.
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.
Vision without execution is hallucination.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the real labor of thinking.
Eger, Edith
We are all likely to be victimised in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimisation. It comes from the outside. In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us but when we choose to hold on to our victimisation. We develop a victim’s mind – a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries.
Einstein, Albert
Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.
Assumptions are made and most assumptions are wrong.
You can’t solve the problem with the same mind that created it.
Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
The only thing more dangerous than ignorance is arrogance.
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.
Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.
If I am proved correct, the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me a Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German and the Germans will call me a Jew.
I do not know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science.
A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.
If you can drive safely while kissing a girl, you are simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.
Any fool can know. The point is to understand.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.
I have no special talents, but I am passionately curious.
Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays it.
Don’t listen to the person that has the answers; listen to the person who has the questions.
Life is like riding a bicycle — to keep your balance, you must keep moving.
The more I study science, the more I believe in God.
Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht. /
I had not thought of that at all.
Eisenberg, Leon
Nothing is as constant about human behavior as people’s opinion about it.
Eisenhower, Dwight
Plans are worthless but planning is everything.
What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important.
The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
I made the visit [to Buchenwald Concentration Camp] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’
Eldred, Leon
If I’d known I was going to live so long, I’d have taken better care of myself.
Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (“Vilna Gaon”)
The purpose of life is to strive to break bad habits and improve oneself. Otherwise, what is life for?
Eliot, George
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
Eliot, T.S.
Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
The years teach much which the days never know.
Of cheerfulness, or a good temper — the more it is spent, the more of it remains.
It is a luxury to be understood.
Erickson, Milton
Allow yourself to see what you don’t allow yourself to see.
Every person’s map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint. There are no two people alike. No two people who understand the same sentence the same way. So, in dealing with people, you try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.
What is easiest to see is often overlooked.
Enlightenment is always preceded by confusion.
A goal without a date is just a dream.
Don’t take insults. Leave them with the insulter.
Erikson, Erik
The more you know yourself, the more patience you have for what you see in others.
I am what survives me.
Erlich, Simha
I don’t say what I think and don’t think what I say.
F
Facher, Jerome
Truth is found at the bottom of a bottomless pit. [Also Tennessee Williams]
Faulkner, William
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Feather, William
Success makes us intolerant of failure, and failure makes us intolerant of success.
Feynman, Richard
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
The first principle is that you must never, ever fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
Intellectual humility is simply the recognition that the things you believe in might, in fact, be wrong,
Fields, W.C.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.
Finkelstein, Arthur
A crook always beats a fool.
Fischer, Bobby
Chess is life.
Fischer, Martin
Knowledge is a process of piling up facts. Wisdom lies in their simplifcation.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.
You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
The victor belongs to the spoils.
Flannery, (Father) Edward H.
It was Judaism that brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world. The Jew carries the burden of God in history and for this has never been forgiven. — National Conference of Catholic Bishops
Flaubert, Gustave
Speak of progress as much as you want. Even when you take out the canines of a tiger, and he can only eat gruel, his heart remains that of a carnivore.
Foote, Shelby
We think that we are a wholly superior people. If we’d been anything like as superior as we think we are, we would not have fought that war. But since we did fight it, we have to make it the greatest war of all times, and our generals were the greatest generals of all times. It’s very American to do that.
Forbes, Malcolm
You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
Ford, Gerald
Impeachable offenses are whatever Congress says they are.
Ford, Henry
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.
Whether you think you can or you can’t — you’re right.
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
When everything seems to be going against you, remember that airplanes takes off against the wind, not with it.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Ford, Norman
Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time.
Formica, Piero
The stronger the assumption that the future will function as today does, the greater the gravitational force of the status quo.
Forrester, E.M.
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.
Fox, Dickey (“Jerry McGuire”)
The key to this business is personal relationships.
If you don’t love everybody, then you can’t sell anybody.
Roll with the punches. Tomorrow is another day.
I love getting up in the morning... I clap my hands and say ‘This is going to be a great day.’
If this [pointing to heart] is empty, then this [head] doesn’t matter.
I don’t claim to have all the answers... I’ve lost as many times as I’ve won... But I love my wife and I love my life, and that’s the best I could wish for you. (Jared Jussim)
Fox, Michael J.
One’s dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.
Frankl, Victor
I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard. In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.
Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Meaning must be found and cannot be given.
Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
It does not really matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. [see Nietzsche]
No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.
Yes I learned that in Auschwitz. There are only two races: the race of the decent and the race of the indecent.
The world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
Franklin, Benjamin
A republic, if you can keep it. (in response to the question “what kind of government our founders had given us?”)
We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.
Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect.
French Gates, Melinda
There is nothing about putting your country first that requires turning your back on the rest of the world. If anything, the opposite is true.
Freud, Sigmund
Man possesses an infinite capacity for rationalization.
The intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation.
Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if attacked. . . . A powerful desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their endowment.
It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.
Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.
Those who first flung a word of abuse at their enemy instead of an arrow were the founders of civilization.
History is just new people making old mistakes.
Friedman, Matti
The world is not a mirror. The world is a kaleidoscope that can be understood only by people who are experts in each individual shard, and even then only partially.
Friedman, Milton
The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits. X
Fromm, Erich
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is Dead. In the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
Frost, Robert
Home is the place where, / When you have to go there, / They have to take you in.
If we follow our fears and give in to the temptation to say “this is the end,” we make ourselves miserable. Life goes on. It always has. It always will.
If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane.
A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.
Fuller, Buckminster
We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively, sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around earth…We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
Fuller, Thomas
He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.
G
Galbraith, John Kenneth
Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Economists were put on Earth only to make astrologers look good.
Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite
It is impossible in a democratic society to think of a single measure for the improvement of social well-being which is not subject to subversion by ill-conceived minority or even majority pressures.
Galilei, Galileo
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him.
Who would set a limit to the mind of man? Who would dare assert that we know all there is to be known?
I do not feel obliged to believe that that same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.
Gallant, Yoav
Do not calculate who is right and who is wrong by the numbers of the casualties. In the Second World War, 7.5 million Germans were killed and only 500,000 British. So who was the aggressor, the Germans or the British? The issue is not the numbers. The issue is who is doing what.
Galloway, Scott
There are no conservatives or progressives in foxholes.
During an earthquake, solid ground is an illusion.
It’s difficult to read the label from inside the bottle.
We’ve conflated luck and talent, with a disastrous outcome — a lack of empathy.
We have come to accept, and this is a general unfortunate problem in our society, that the world is what it is and we have to accept it. No it’s not. The world is what we make of it.
We are irrationally suspicious of those different from us — and far too trusting of those like us.
It shouldn’t be the iPhone X, it should be called the “iPhone Cross.” We have our religion; it’s Apple. Our Jesus Christ is Steve Jobs, and we’ve decided this is holier than our person, our house or our computer. We have become totally out of control with the gross idolatry of innovation and of youth. We no longer worship at the altar of character, of kindness, but of innovation and people who create shareholder value.
Gandhi, Mahatma
Hate the sin and love the sinner.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members.
There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.
Gascoyne-Cecil, Robert, Lord Salisbury
Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible. X
Gates, Bill
You are not a slacker if you cut yourself some slack.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
It’s fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.
Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
If people think it’s easy, they’re wrong, but, if they think it’s impossible, they’re wrong.
Gates, Robert M.
Contrary to the views of some politicians, continuing American global leadership is in our own economic, political, and security interest. . . . America turning inward not only will make the world more dangerous for others, but also for us.
Gauss, Carl Friedrich
It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.
Geisel, Theodor (Dr. Seuss)
Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
Today you are you! That is truer than true! There is no one alive who is you-er than you!
The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
A person’s a person, no matter how small.
Gellman, Harvey
Sinners can be forgiven, but stupid is forever.
George, Henry
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed.
There are people into whose heads it never enters to conceive of any better state of society than that which now exists.
Gershenfeld, Neil
The only thing that’s shared is the certainty of your infallibility.
Gershwitz, Wanda (“A Fish Called Wanda”)
Otto, the central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself’. I looked it up.(Jamie Lee Curtis)
Gibbon, Edward
The shores of history are strewn with the wrecks of empires.
The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
Gibson, William
The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
Ginsburg, Ruth Bader
What is the difference between a bookkeeper in New York’s garment district and a Supreme Court Justice? Just one generation.
Gise, Lawrence (grandfather of Jeff Bezos)
Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.
Giuliani, Rudy
When I said that there was no collusion, I meant there was some collusion. X
Gladwell, Malcolm
Doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.
The world is a lot more complex than we imagine in our first impressions.
We associate the willingness to risk great failure — and the ability to climb back from catastrophe — with courage. But in this we are wrong. That is the lesson of Taleb and Niederhoffer, and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.
Nothing of consequence gets accomplished without courage.
Human beings are by definition vulnerable to those determined to mislead them.
Be humble. Be cautious. Don’t imagine that you can get to the heart of someone else from a single encounter. Human beings are much more complex than that.
This belief we have that the future is knowable is crazy. People need to have the freedom to take more chances.
Glassman, Alan
We all come with baggage. None of us truly understands what the other is feeling. We guess at it and apply our history to someone else’s issues. That doesn’t really work.
Godin, Seth
Safe is risky.
The need to win every interaction, the inability to apologize, the short-term over the long-term–this isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a symptom of immaturity and weakness that almost always leads to suboptimal results.
Goebbels, Joseph
Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty. X
If you repeat the lie often enough, it becomes the truth. X
Goethe, Johan W. von
Everything has been thought of before, but the problem is to think of it again.
Goggins, David
Denial is the ultimate comfort zone.
The most important conversations you’ll ever have are with yourself.
Goldberg-Polin, Rachel
How do we go on? To go on, you must think of hope as mandatory, not a choice, not advice. It ’s actually a command. You must be hopeful.
The lost art of respect is something we need to re-find. You have to really try to understand the other side. You don’t have to agree with them, but you have to open yourself up to really understand when they’re explaining why they feel how they feel. You need to be ready to hear — and listen. We’ve perfected shouting and screaming and yelling and insulting. We get A+ in all of those. And now it’s time to really do what’s hard. What’s hard is to hold back, and listen, to hold back, and try to understand, to hold back and have respect. That’s our biggest challenge right now.
Golden, Arthur
A wounder tiger is a dangerous beast.
Goldberger, Moshe
After all is said and done, more is said than done.
Goldrich, Robert
Don’t worry, folks, there will be plenty of time to point fingers later.
Goldsmith, Marshall
What got you here won’t get you there.
Goldwater, Barry
There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many.
Goleman, Daniel
In a very real sense we do have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.
Gordis, Daniel
Having people be afraid of you comes with responsibility.
Gordis, Elisheva
Just because you win a debate does not mean that you are right.
Gorenberg, Gershon
Despair is immoral. When you say change is impossible, you free yourself of responsibility of working for it.
Gornick, Vivian
Humiliation lingers in the mind, the heart, the veins, the arteries forever. It allows people to brood for decades on end, often deforming their inner lives.
Gouthey, A.P.
No man knows of what stuff he is made until prosperity and ease try him.
Graham, Benjamin
In the short run, the market is a voting machine but, in the long run, it is a weighing machine.
Gramsci, Antonio
When debating with an opponent, try to put yourself in his shoes.
Graham, Paul
You can be ornery when you’re Scotty but not when you’re Kirk.
Grant, Adam
The absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy.
No, you don't get an A for effort.
Grant, Hugh
There is space in the supermarket shelf for all of us.
Grayson, David
Commandment Number One of any truly civilized society is this: Let people be different.
Greenberg, Irving (Yitz)
I don’t care what denomination you belong to, as long as you’re embarrassed by it.
Greene, Robert
There is a continuum of human aggression, and we are all on the spectrum.
The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.
If we could step back and somehow examine the train of our daily thoughts, we would realize how they tend to circle around the same anxieties, fantasies, and resentments, like a continuous loop. Even when we take a walk or have a conversation with someone, we generally remain connected to this interior monologue, only half-listening and paying attention to what we see or hear.
In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them — those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn. (The 50th Law)
Greenspan, Alan
I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
Greer, Germaine
The basic idea of The Female Eunuch has never been very well understood, perhaps because I was unable to explain it properly. Nevertheless the concept of the castration of women is the key to the book and, I still believe, the key to the situation. Women’s sexuality has been repressed because it served no social or domestic function. Whole women would have been restless, aggressive, unpredictable, curious, lustful, imaginative and in league with their naughtiest children against men and their machines. They might have been artists, inventors, explorers, revolutionaries, but they would not have been housewives, and housewives were what was wanted. Because they did not want them to be miserable, women connived in the deadening of their daughters.
Gretzky, Wayne
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Griswald, Wendy
All audiences can be seduced.
Grove, Andy
Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
Attack the idea, not the person.
Guest, Edward A.
Here lies the body of William Jay,
Who died maintaining his right of way.
He was in the right as he sped along,
But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.
Guitton, Jean
We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.
H
Haberman, Bonna Devora
Life is short and love is urgent.
Haidt, Jonathan
Morality binds and blinds.
Our politics is groupish, not selfish.
The emotional tail wags the rational dog.
Anyone who values truth should stop worshipping reason.
We’re all stuck here for a while, so let’s try to work it out.
Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments.
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.
If you want to change people’s hearts, you don’t change them by vilifying them and attacking them. You change them by drawing a larger circle, showing them what we have in common, and then making your case.
Hale, Mandy
Trust the wait. Embrace uncertainty. Enjoy the beauty of becoming. When nothing is certain, anything is possible.
Hamilton, Alexander
Here, sir, the people govern.
We must take man as we find him and, if we expect him to serve the public, we must interest his passions in doing so.
Act with fortitude and honor. If you cannot reasonably hope for a favorable extrication, do not plunge deeper. Have the courage to make a full stop.
Hammerstein, Oscar II
𝄞 “ You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late / Before you are six or seven or eight / To hate all the people your relatives hate / You’ve got to be carefully taught.” — South Pacific
Hand, Billings Learned
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
Handa, Sahil
Politics is a game of competing stories about national identity.
Hanks, Tom
Never give up because you never know what the tide will bring in the next day.
If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. It’s the hard that makes it great.
Hanlon, Robert
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. [Hanlon’s Razor]
Hanning, Terry (“The Wire”)
A lie ain’t a side of a story. It’s just a lie. (Aubrey Deeker Hernandez)
Hansen, Marcus
What the second generation wants to forget, the third generation wants to remember.
Harari, Yuval Noah
Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it.
Humans find it very difficult to know what is real and what is just a fictional story in their own minds.
In exchange for power, the modern deal expects us to give up meaning.
Stay open to criticism. Nobody is free from ignorance, bias and error. It is therefore important to examine criticism carefully instead of rushing to dismiss it.
One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility.
Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100 percent correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility. Science gives us power. The more useful that power, the better the science.
If somebody describes the world of the mid-twenty-first century to you and it doesn’t sound like science fiction, it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics; change itself is the only certainty.
Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.
Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited. Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.
We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc on our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?
Hare, David
There are some subjects about which two points of view are not equally valid. We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding “Well, that’s my opinion” – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn’t.
Harris, Sam
You become where you spend your time.
All we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with each other, there is no path forward but violence.
Harris, Sydney
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
Harris, Tristan
Twitter is not the town square, it’s the town gladiator arena.
Harrison, George
You mustn’t listen to Eastern music with a Western ear.
Hartley, L.P.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
The past is a foreign country, but the future is an undiscovered one.
Hartman, David
The advantage of believing in God is that it frees you of being God.
Hartman, Donniel
Despite the comforts of victimization, our tradition was frightened by its over-utilization, as it too often could serve as a foundation for mediocrity. If I am but the passive target of injustice, I am immune from having to consider my possible complicity in shaping my reality.
Haught, Jim
Be careful when you take a middle of the road position. It is just a yellow line with a few dead possums.X
Hawkings, Stephen
Look up at the stars and not down at your feet.
Hay, Louise
Remember, you have been criticizing yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
Hayakawa, S.I.
We should keep the Panama Canal. After all, we stole it fair and square. X — U.S. Senator from California, 1977-1983
Hazlitt, William
Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain.
Actors are the only honest hypocrites.
Hearst, William Randolph
You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war. X
Heffernan, Margaret
That means we have to resist the neurobiological drive, which means that we really prefer people mostly like ourselves, and it means we have to seek out people with different backgrounds, different disciplines, different ways of thinking and different experience, and find ways to engage with them. That requires a lot of patience and a lot of energy.
The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we’ve witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can’t handle, don’t want to handle, the conflict that it provokes.
Anyone who tries to tell you that they know the future is just trying to own it, a spurious kind of manifest destiny. The harder, deeper truth is that the future is uncharted, that we can’t map it till we get there. But that’s OK, because we have so much imagination — if we use it. We have deep talents of inventiveness and exploration — if we apply them. We are brave enough to invent things we’ve never seen before. Lose those skills, and we are adrift. But hone and develop them, we can make any future we choose.
Heifetz, Jascha
No matter what side of an argument you’re on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side.
Heine, Heinrich
Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies — but not before they have been hanged. X
Helitzer, Mel
If at first you don’t succeed... then skydiving isn’t for you.
Hellman, Lillian
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
Helps, Arthur
A kind word is never thrown away.
Hemingway, Ernest
Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticise, wait. Before you quit, try.
A big lie is more plausible than truth.
Bankruptcy happens two ways, gradually, then suddenly.
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.
Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place and then come down and shoot the survivors.
Life breaks us all but in the end we are stronger in the broken places.
Hendel, Samuel
Freedom, to be meaningful in an organized society, must consist of an amalgam of hierarchy of freedoms and restraints.
Hepburn, Audrey
Nothing is impossible; the word itself says “I’m possible”.
For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands — one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.
Heraclitus
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.
The only constant is change.
Herold, Don
There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
Hesburg, Theodore
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
Heschel, Abraham Joshua
When I was a young man, I admired clever people. Now that I am older, I admire kind people.
Why were so few voices raised in the ancient world in protest against the ruthlessness of man? Why are human beings so obsequious, ready to kill and ready to die at the call of kings and chieftains? Perhaps it is because they worship might... The splendor and the pride of kings blinds the people.
Show me a man without problems and I’ll show you an idiot.
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of knowledge.
Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Unless we continue to dissent, unless we continue to say ‘No’ to idol worship, in the name of a higher ‘Yes,’ we will revert to paganism.... The scarcity of dissent today may be explained by the absence of assets that make creative dissent possible: deep caring, concern, untrammeled radical thinking informed by rich learning, a degree of audacity or courage, and the power of the word.
The principle to be kept in mind is to know what we see rather than to see what we know.
Hesse, Hermann
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
Heywood, John
There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Higgins, Henry (“My Fair Lady”)
𝄞 “Pickering, why can’t a woman be more like a man?” X (Rex Harrison) [See also Nikki Newman.]
Hill, Harold (“The Music Man”)
You pile up enough tomorrows, and you’ll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.(Robert Preston)
Hillel the Elder
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? But when I am for myself, then what am “I”? And if not now, when?
Take care of yourself — you never know when the world will need you.
What you yourself hate, don’t do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and study.
In a place where there are no humans, one must strive to be human.
Judge not your friend until you stand in his place.
The shy man will not learn; the impatient man should not teach.
Who does not grow declines.
Hillis, Burton
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good.
Himmelfarb, Gertrude
Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely.
Hindenburg, Paul von
Neither of the contending parties knew the exaltation of victory. [regarding the Battle of the Somme]
Hirohito
The war has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.
Hitchens, Christopher
What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Hobbes, Thomas
(on life outside society): In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (Leviathan, XIII.9, 1651)
Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad, but because man is by nature more individualistic than social.
Hoenlein, Malcolm
It’s not important what we say; it’s important what they hear. It’s important how they perceive what we’re saying.
Dictators tell the truth.
We have to deal with the threats earlier on.
Hoffer, Eric
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a Devil.
Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in the world.
Hoffman, Reid
If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.
In theory, you don’t need practice.
Hofstadter, Douglas
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Holiday, Ryan
The only guarantee is that things will go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation. Because the only variable we control is ourselves.
Hollweg, Theobald von Bethmann
Answering the question, what caused the catastrophe of World War I — German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg replied: “Ah, if we only knew.” — a favorite quote of JFK
Holmes, Oliver Wendall, Jr.
To have doubted one’s own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.
We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.
If there is any principle of the Constitution that most imperatively calls for attachment, it is the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought that we hate.
Hopkins, Anthony
None of us are getting out of here alive, so please stop treating yourself like an afterthought. Eat the delicious food. Walk in the sunshine. Jump in the ocean.
Hopper, Grace
The most damaging phrase in the language is: ‘It has always been done this way.’
Horace
Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. /
You can throw out Nature with a pitchfork, but she’ll always come back.
Housel, Morgan
Embrace volatility.
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
Howe, Ed
When I say ‘everybody says so,’ I mean ‘I say so’.
No man would listen to you talk if he didn’t know it was his turn next.
Hubbard, Elbert
If you can’t answer a man’s argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names.X
Huber, R.M.
The suffering of the rich is among the sweetest pleasures of the poor.
Hughes, Langston
Hold fast to dreams / For when dreams go / Life is a barren field / Frozen with snow.
Hugo, Victor
On résiste à l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l’invasion des idées. /
One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world: and that is an idea whose time has come.
The future has many names. For the weak, it’s unattainable. For the fearful, it’s unknown. For the bold, it’s ideal.
Hume, David
It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.
Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
When men are most sure and arrogant, they are commonly most mistaken.
Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of man, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
Humphrey, Hubert
The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
There are not enough jails, not enough policemen, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.
Hungate, William
In the last decade, politics has gone from the age of ‘Camelot,’ when all things were possible, to the age of ‘Watergate’ when all things are suspect.
Huntingdon, Samuel
Confucian values are based on authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, “saving face,” and the supremacy of the state over society and society over the individual. Americans value liberty, equality, democracy and individualism. We tend to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition and sanctify human rights.
Huxley, Aldous
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
Peace-loving people exhausted by war will do almost anything ‘for a quiet life.’
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance: we don’t know because we don’t want to know.
They will try to control the emotional side of the human being by appealing to your subconscious, your deepest emotions, and your physiology. And then they will make you love your slavery, and you will feel happy in situations that you should not be happy.
I
Iacocca, Lee
It’s easier to survive your failures than to survive your successes.
We are continually faced by great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
Ignatius, David
The sleepwalkers should consider: On the brink of conflict, you never know just where the edge of the cliff may be.
We are a country where people are angry at each other, yes, but also feel their core beliefs are under attack. The more each side tries to defend itself, the more the other feels that its identity is demeaned and defamed. That’s the death trip that America seems to be on.
Here’s a chance to get it right. It’s September 10 in cyberspace.
Inglehart, Robert
Man does not live by bread alone, especially if he has plenty of bread.
Isaiah
Woe to those who call darkness light and light darkness. (5:20)
Israel, Alex
Faith does not mean certainty; it means the courage to live with uncertainty.
Israel ben Eliezer (“Ba’al Shem Tov”)
Just as we love ourselves despite our faults, so too should we love others despite their faults.
Ivins, Molly
Polarizing people is a good way to win an election and also a good way to wreck a country.
J
Jackson, Jamie
No happy person goes on Twitter to call other people idiots. Trust me.
Jackson, Robert
The price of freedom of religion or of speech or of the press is that we must put up with, and even pay for, a good deal of rubbish.
A peace deal must not be a suicide pact.
James, Henry
Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.
James, WIlliam
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
There is no greater lie than a truth misunderstood.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
The most immutable barrier in nature is between one man’s thoughts and another’s.
Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves… instead of talking to themselves.
Whenever two people meet there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood.
The theorizing mind tends constantly to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by way of which both philosophy and faith have been infested.
Jefferson, Thomas
Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.
When angry, count to ten, before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.
I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind.
No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.
The problem with internet quotes is you never really can know if they’re true. 🙂
Jeffrey, Francis
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.
Jerome, Jennie
After sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman.
Jessel, George
If you haven’t struck oil in your first three minutes, stop boring!
Jesus
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. [Matthew 5:7]
Judge not — lest you be judged. [Matthew 7:1]
Why look at the speck of dust in your brother’s eye — yet pay no attention to the log in your own?[Matthew 7:3]
Do to others what you would have them do to you. [Matthew 7:12]
Jillette, Penn
If there’s something you really want to believe, that’s what you should question the most.
Jinping, Xi
The crumbling of a regime always starts in the realm of ideas. Changing the way people think is a long-term process. Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend.
Jobs, Steve
It just works.
Be less sure about everything.
Most people just don’t bother to ask.
People will never know what they want until you show it to them.
If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.
Choice drains energy.
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
I’m as proud of many of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.
I want to put a ding in the universe.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Creativity is connecting things.
My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. But the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world — are the ones who do.
Joelson, Mitchell
When you read what they write about you, it’s amazing that you believe anything you read.
Johnson, Lyndon
A president’s hardest task is not to do what is right, but to know what is right.
Johnson, Samuel
Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
Joll, James
Mentality is a fabric of unspoken assumptions.
Jones, Franklin
Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.
Jordan, Michael
I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Republicans buy sneakers, too.
Josephson, Michael
If you want to know how to live your life, think about what you would like people to say about after you die-then live backwards.
Joyce, James
Life is too short to read a bad book.
Judd, Naomi
A dead end is a good place to turn around.
Jung, Carl
Man needs difficulties. They are necessary for health.
Until we make the unconscious conscious, we will be dictated by it and call it fate.
Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Junger, Sebastian
Humans don’t mind hardship; in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
K
Kabat-Zinn, Jon
You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.
Kael, Paul
I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.
Kafka, Franz
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle — maybe there is none.
Kagan, Robert
Appeasement always begins with underestimation.
Kahneman, Daniel
We are blind, and we are blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to know how little we know.
Wherever there’s judgment, there’s noise — and more of it that you think
True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.
That was wonderful — I was wrong — but now I am less wrong than before!
Kalanithi, Paul
The future I had imagined, the one just about to be realized, the culmination of decades of striving, evaporated. [famous last words]
Kanfer, Stefan
Inside every man is a poet who died young.
Kann, Peter
Facts are facts. They are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting. Truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral. Truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.
Kant, Immanuel
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become, by your will, a universal law of nature.
Karlton, Phil
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
Kasparov, Garry
The point of modern propaganda is not only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.
Katie, Byron
Life is love, all else is imagined confusion.
Kawasaki, Guy
Everyone you meet is better at something than you are.
Kay, Alan
The best way to predict the future is to invent it yourself.
Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
Project the need 30 years out and imagine what might be possible in the context of the exponential curves.
Keane, Bill
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.
Keller, Helen
Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.
Kelly, Mary Ellen
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
Kelly, Walt (“Pogo”)
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Kelso, Bob
Life is scary. Get used to it. There are no magical fixes. It’s all up to you. So get up off your keister, get out of here, and go start doin’ the work. Nothing in this world that’s worth having comes easy.
Kennan, George
Russia can have at its borders only enemies or vassals.
Here men determine what is true and what is false.
Kennedy, John
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we’d been saying they were.
Kennedy, Joseph
Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide. X [letter to JFK]
Kennedy, Robert
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator and change has its enemies.
Kern, Joseph
Obesity is really widespread.
Kernan, Sean
Sometimes saying I’m joking doesn’t mean I’m joking.
Kerry, John
There’s no known plan ‘to actually destroy us’. X
Kershaw, Ian
The path to Auschwitz was paved with indifference.
Kesey, Ken
All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.
Keynes, John Maynard
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
The problem lies not so much in developing new ideas, but in escaping from old ones.
For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.
Kierkegaard, Søren
Human reason has boundaries.
I must find a truth that is true for me.
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.
There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
King, Martin Luther
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated.
Darkness can not drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
King, Stephen
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us get up and go to work.
Kipling, Rudyard
If you give any man anything that he has not painfully earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his descendants your devoted enemies.
Kissinger, Henry
A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone.
As a professor, I tended to think of history as run by impersonal forces, but when you see it in practice, you see the difference personalities make.
Whenever peace — conceived as the avoidance of war — has been the primary objective, the international system has been at the mercy of its most ruthless member.
Koch, Ed
If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist.
Koestler, Arthur
History carries a whip in its hand. To ask whether this premise is right or wrong is meaningless.
Kook, Abraham Isaac
I don’t speak because I have the power to speak; I speak because I don’t have the power to remain silent.
The righteous do not complain of the dark, but increase the light; they do not complain of evil, but increase justice; they do not complain of heresy, but increase faith; they do not complain of ignorance, but increase wisdom.
The defects of the world, both material and the spiritual, all derive from the fact that every individual sees the aspect of existence that pleases him, and all other aspects that are baffling to him deserve purging from the world. This thought leaves its imprint on individuals and groups, on generations and epochs — whatever is outside one’s own is destructive and disturbing.
Koppel, Ted
Don’t think yourself an individual because you create your own salad at the salad bar.
Korczak, Janusz
Children are not the people of tomorrow, but are people of today. They have a right to be taken seriously, and to be treated with tenderness and respect. They should be allowed to grow into whoever they were meant to be. ‘The unknown person’ inside of them is our hope for the future.
I exist not to be loved and admired, but to love and act. It is not the duty of those around me to love me. Rather, it is my duty to be concerned about the world, about man.
Korn, Eugene
When we don’t understand ourselves is when the pathologies kick in.
Korzybski, Alfred
The map is not the territory.
Kotschnig, Walter
Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
Koyré, Alexandre
Lying never was more widespread than today. Or more shameless, systematic, and constant. Lies don’t even need to be plausible to work. On the contrary, the grosser, the bigger, the cruder the lie, the more readily is it believed and followed.
Krastev, Ivan
The most important and positive hero for the democratic society is somebody ready to change his views after a rational argument.
Krauthammer, Charles
The dumbing of America has gone far enough.
Those who believe that the end of the world is coming and that they hold the key to preventing it, tend to believe that their program is good — indeed, absolutely necessary — for all. They become convinced of their obligation to carry out their mission, and impatient with those standing in their way. It is an approach marked by a profound intolerance, which not only rigs the terms of the debate . . . but often abolishes debate altogether. Liberal democracy does not fare well in this environment.
Krishnamurti, Jiddu
The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.
Kristol, Irving
Whom the gods would destroy, they first tempt to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Krueger, William Kent
The biggest word in the human vocabulary has only four letters and no definition that’s ever been adequate. We love our dogs. We love our children. We love God and chocolate cake. We fall in love and fall out of love. We die for love and we kill for love. We can’t spend it. We can’t eat it when we’re starving or drink it when we’re dying of thirst. It’s no good against the bitter cold of winter, and even a cheap electric fan will do more for you on a hot summer day. But ask most human beings what they value above all else in this life and, five’ll get you ten, it’s love.
Krugman, Paul
Many people get worse as they grow older because they become more like themselves.
Kuhn, Maggie
Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.
Kuhn, Thomas
We see the world in terms of our theories.
Kundera, Milan
Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.
Kurzweill, Ray
The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.
As humans, we are linear and scarcity-minded. As entrepreneurs, we must think exponentially and abundantly.
L
L'Amour, Louis
A wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat.
Lamott, Anne
We’re a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. I’m every age I’ve ever been, and so are you.
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes — including you.
You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly — that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.
Lanier, Jaron
This is stupid — we can do better. It’s like the critics are the true optimists.
I don’t believe our species can survive unless we fix this. We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.
Lao Tzu
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.
A great man is hard on himself; a lesser man is hard on others.
Larson, Jonathan
Why does it take a disaster for things to change?
Lasker, Emmanuel
When you see a good move, look for a better one.
Lawrence, T.E. (“Lawrence of Arabia”)
Nothing is written.
The trick, Mr. Potter, is not minding that it hurts. (Peter O’Toole)
Lebowitz, Fran
Think before you speak. Read before you think.
No one young enough to be in school is aware that they will lose their looks, okay? This is stuff that doesn’t happen till you do. Because, if I see someone that I haven’t seen in a long time, I think, “What the hell happened to you?” And I realize that they’re thinking the same thing about me. And the only reason that I don’t think that about me is that I see myself every day. Although as briefly as possible. I found these contact sheets that were from a shoot for Vogue. And I see that I had written all over it, “these photographs are horrible. You can’t run them. We have to re-shoot this.” And I looked at them now and thought, “If I woke up today looking like this, I’d be ecstatic.”
Lee, Bruce
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Legasov, Valery (“Chernobyl”)
What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories.
I’ve already trod on dangerous ground. We are on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They’re practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. (Jared Harris)
Lembke, Anna
The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain... leads to pain.
LeMond, Greg
It never gets easier, you just go faster.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich
There are decades where nothing happens; and, there are weeks where decades happen.
A revolution without firing squads is meaningless. X
Lennon, John
Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
Being honest may not get you a lot of friends, but it’ll always get you the right ones.
Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
The more I see, the less I know for sure.
𝄞 “He’s as blind as he can be / Just sees what he wants to see / Nowhere man, can you see me at all?”
𝄞 “Nothing’s going to change our world.” ☺
𝄞 “Imagine there’s no countries, It isn’t hard to do, Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion, too.” X
Lepore, Jill
A nation born in contradiction will fight forever over the meaning of its history, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.
Lessig, Lawrence
Every healthy mind should spend time every week in slow thinking.
Levant, Oscar
I once said cynically of a politician, “He’ll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.”
Levenson, Sam
It’s not so hard to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and don’t say it.
Levin, Yuval
Unity doesn’t mean thinking alike; unity means acting together.
We need to think and speak about America in the first-person plural.
Levinas, Emmanuel
If one could only possess, grasp, and really know the other, it would not be other.
Levine, Emily
Make friends with reality.
Levinsky Rigler, Sara
I saw that deeds are all that count — not good intentions, not beliefs, not convictions, not even spiritual consciousness — but deeds.
Lewinsky, Monica
Online we have a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.
Lewis, Bernard
Get tough or get out.
Lewis, C.S.
Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.
I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.
When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
Lewis, John
Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Do not become bitter or hostile. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble. We will find a way to make a way out of no way.
Lewis, Sinclair
Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country.
Liebling, A.J.
People everywhere confuse what they see in the news media with news.
Liebman, Joshua
Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.
Lincoln, Abraham
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all in their separate and individual capacities.
To be hectored and condemned; to be told that they were wholly wrong is a path not to reform but to intransigence. If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.
Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.
If you wish to win a man over to your ideas, first make him your friend.
Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Those who look for the bad in people will surely find it.
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he made so many of them.
Achievement has no color.
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Don’t criticize them; they are just what we would be under similar circumstances.
My countrymen, one and all, think calmly and well, upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Lippmann, Walter
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
Leaders are the custodians of a nation’s ideals, of the beliefs it cherishes, of its permanent hopes, of the faith which makes a nation out of a mere aggregation of individuals.
We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.
Lipstadt, Deborah
The absence of political power does not excuse the presence of prejudice.
Littell, Philip
Our stereotypes will not be contaminated by understanding.
Livni, Tzipi
History is not made by cynics; it is made by realists who are not afraid to dream.
Lloyd George, David
The most dangerous thing in the world is to leap a chasm in two jumps.
Locke, John
Whatever I write, as soon as I discover it not to be true, my hand shall be the forwardest to throw it into the fire.
Lopez, Barry
It’s so difficult to be a human being. There are so many reasons to give up. To retreat into cynicism or despair. I hate to see that and I want to do something that makes people feel safe and loved and capable.
Louis XIV of France
[on his deathbed, to his heir] Do not follow the bad example which I have set you; I have often undertaken war too lightly and have sustained it for vanity. Do not imitate me, but be a peaceful prince, and may you apply yourself principally to the alleviation of the burdens of your subjects.
Louis XV of France
Après moi, le déluge./ X
When I’m gone, let the Flood come, for all I care.
Louis, Joe
I did the best I could with what I had.
Luce, Claire Booth
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.
M
MacAskill, William
Morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own.
MacDonald, Dwight
Conversation means being able to disagree and still continue the conversation.
Machiavelli, Niccolò
It is better to be feared than to be loved, if one cannot be both.
One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived. X
MacIntyre, Alasdair
Man is in his actions and practice as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.
MacManus, Seumas
He is as good as his word — and his word is no good.
Maddox, John
People are easily anesthetized by overstatement, and there is a danger that the movement will fall flat on its face when it is most needed, simply because it has pitched its tale too strongly.
Maeda, John
Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.
Maher, Bill
You can’t learn history from Instagram. There’s just not enough space.
America is a country whose children score low in math and science but off the charts in self-esteem. Yes, we’re number one in thinking we’re number one.
Mailer, Norman
Every one of my books had killed me a little more.
Malamud, Bernard
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others.
Malcolm, Ian (“Jurassic Park”)
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should. (Jeff Goldblum)
Melfi, Jennifer (“The Sopranos”)
We crave familiarity even when it’s bad for us.(Lorraine Bracco)
Malloch, Douglas
The biggest liar in the world is ‘They Say’.
Malraux,André
There’s no such thing as a grownup person.
Mandela, Nelson
Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.
A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.
There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.
To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
When we dehumanise and demonize our opponents, we abandon the possibility of peacefully resolving our differences, and seek to justify violence against them.
Mann, Charles
It is always easier for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.
Marcus Aurelius
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
What’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee.
Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
To feel affection for people, even when they make mistakes, is uniquely human.
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.
Marcus, Ruth
Beware new friends bearing yachts.
Marshak, Benny
When it’s cold and raining on you, remember, it’s also cold and raining on the enemy.
Marston, Ralph
Life does not owe you anything because life has already given you everything.
Martin, David
If you always look up at the stars you may miss the dog poop at your feet.
Martin, Demitri
A know-it-all is a person who knows everything except for how annoying he is.
Martin, Sam
We tend to fight the next war in the same way we fought the last one. We are prisoners of our own experience. And many of the things that we learned that worked in World War II were not applicable to the war in Vietnam. We simply thought we’d go in with a sledgehammer and knock things down, clean them up, and it would be all over. It was a kind of oversimplification of the problem, combined with our overconfidence, that caused us to be arrogant. And it’s very, very difficult to dispel ignorance if you retain arrogance.
Marx, Groucho
Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them... well, I have others.
Mattis, Jim
If you don’t fund the State Department fully, then I need to buy more ammunition.
Maugham, Somerset
People will sometimes forgive you the good you have done them, but seldom the harm they have done you.
McAdoo, William
It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.
McAvoy, Will (“The Newsroom”)
We aspired to intelligence; we didn’t belittle it; it didn’t make us feel inferior. We didn’t identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we didn’t scare so easy. And we were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed. (Jeff Daniels, written by Aaron Sorkin)
McCain, John
Facts are stubborn things.
It’s always darkest… before it turns pitch black.
McCarthy, Joe
If you want to get anywhere in politics, you’ve got to feed the public what they want to hear and not what you believe. X
McCartney, Paul
Microphones are just like people, if you shout at them, they get scared.
I’ve grown to be a fan of the Beatles. Because back then, I was just a Beatle.
𝄞 “Ah, look at all the lonely people.”
𝄞 “And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make.”
McClellan, George
The United States will never understand the Middle East’s peoples so long as we judge them by the rules we are accustomed to apply to ourselves.
McDaniel, Jeffrey
I realize there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go.
McGrath, Maureen
Technology is fast replacing human connection, at high speed.
Spend more time in your bedrooms than in your boardrooms, or your bedrooms are going to become your bored-rooms.
McGriffy, Michael
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.
McKenzie, Patrick
If you build it, they will do absolutely nothing.
McMillan, Ron
Respect is like air. As long as it’s present, nobody thinks about it. But if you take it away, it’s all that people can think about. The instant people perceive disrespect in a conversation, the interaction is no longer about the original purpose — it is now about defending dignity.
McNamara, Robert
Understand your enemy’s psychology.
McNealy, Scott
A CEO’s job is hiding the terror behind his eyes.
McRaney, David
We reach for the same brand not because we trust its quality but because we want to reassure ourselves that we made a smart choice the last time we bought it.
A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there’s nothing to learn.
Mead, Margaret
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Meeker, Mary
If it feels like we’re all drinking from the data firehose, it’s because we are.
Meir, Golda
If we have to choose between being dead and pitied — and being alive with a bad image — we’d rather be alive and have the bad image. Better bad press than a good eulogy.
We don’t have the luxury of being pessimists.
Don’t be so humble, you aren’t that great.
Melandri, Francesca
I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance. We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say“it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.
Menand, Louis
Most people don’t like righteousness in others, and they can be quite righteous about it.
Mencken, H.L.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone may be looking.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Mendelsohn, Daniel
There’s no bottom to the things that people will do to one another. The structures of what we think of as our civilized lives — they fall apart very easily — surprisingly easily.
Merchey, Jason
Wisdom is gained only through doubt and mental rigor, if at all.
Mickiewicz, Adam
Take the forces to the target, not the target to the forces.
Middleton, Thomas H.
It’s like challenging a school of piranhas to a game of water polo.
Miksche, Ferdinand
The Maginot Line was a formidable barrier, not so much against the German Army as against French understanding of modern warfare.
Mill, John Stuart
One of the worst offences against freedom is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows but little of that.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing.
There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home.
(on Liberals and Conservatives) A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it.
Every great movement must experience three stages: ridicule, discussion, adoption.
That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
Miller, Arthur
No one wants the truth if it’s inconvenient.
An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
Miller, Madeline
However immortal we feel, we are all just one infection away from a new life.
Miller, Olin
You’ll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
Milne, A.A.
“What day is it?” asked Pooh. / “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet. / “My favorite day,” said Pooh.
Milton, John
Revenge, at first though sweet, bitter ere long back on itself recoils.
Mitchell, Margaret
Life’s under no obligation to give us what we expect.
Mokhonoana, Mokokoma
Masochism is the art of turning punishments into rewards.
The happiest people are not those who have the most, but those who are most grateful for what they have.
Only fake happiness comes with the compulsion to flaunt it.
Most people believe most of the things they believe only because they believe that most people believe them.
Molcho, Itzik
This is the Middle East, where one-sided concessions don’t build trust. They build the demand for the next concessions.
Monroe, Marilyn
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Montaigne, Michel de
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which is least known.
All that I know is that I know nothing, and I not even sure of that.
My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.
Montesquieu
Liberty does not flourish because men have natural rights, or because they revolt if their leaders push them too far. It flourishes because power is so distributed and so organized that whoever is tempted to abuse it finds legal restraints in his way.
Morgan, J.P.
There are two reasons why a man does anything. There’s a good reason and there’s the real reason.
Funny thing about these skyscrapers, not a single one was built by a bear!
I don’t want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do; I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.X
Morgensztern, Menachem Mendel (of Kotzk)
Not all that is thought need be said, not all that is said need be written, not all that is written need be published, and not all that is published need be read.
Deceiving another person is a sin. Deceiving oneself is stupidity.
If I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you.
You don’t love fish. If you loved the fish, you would not have killed it and cooked it on a fire.
Morley, John
You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
Morrison, Samuel Elliot
The genius of our democracy is its room for compromise, our ability to balance liberty with authority.
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Mozer-Glassberg, Yael
We teach our kids that monsters aren’t real, but they are.
Muir, John
Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.
Mumford, Lewis
For most Americans, progress means accepting what is new because it is new, and discarding what is old because it is old.
Munger, Charlie
Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.
Always take the high road, it’s far less crowded.
Take a simple idea, and take it seriously.
A man who jumps out of a building is okay — until he hits the ground.
I did not succeed in life by intelligence. I succeeded because I have a long attention span.
Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it’s you. A victimisation mentality is so debilitating.
We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side,
Munny, Will (“Unforgiven”)
“Well, I guess they had it coming.” — The Schofield Kid /
“We all have it coming, kid.” — Will Munny (Clint Eastwood)
Murdock, Iris
Love is the very difficult understanding that someone other than yourself is real.
Murray, Douglas
It’s pretty hard to listen to somebody who says: I don’t know what I’m talking about, but now I’m going to talk.
Murrow, Edward R.
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.
Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
Musk, Elon
The most entertaining outcome is the most likely. X
Myers, David
‘What have I done to deserve this?’ is one we ask of our troubles, not our successes… How do I love me? Let me count the ways. .
Myers, Tom
I will gladly take what happened to my body for the wisdom I have gained.
N
Naisbitt, John
We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.
Napier, Augustus
The greatest impediments to changes in our traditional roles seem to lie not in the visible world of conscious intent, but in the murky realm of the unconscious mind.
Nazarian, Vera
It’s a fact — everyone is ignorant in some way or another. Ignorance is our deepest secret. And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don’t know it or don’t want to admit it. Here is a quick test: If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.
Neusner, Jacob
Civilisation hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.
Newman, Nikki (“Trying”)
As long as you have the choice, why would you want to adopt a little boy when you could get the better gender? X (Esther Smith) [See also Henry Higgins.]
Newton, Howard
The thoughtless are rarely wordless.
Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
When a man blames others for his failures, it’s a good idea to credit others with his successes.
Newton, Isaac
What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh
While it is is better to be loved than hated, it is better to be hated than ignored. X
Nichols, Mike
You’ll never really know what I mean and I’ll never know exactly what you mean.
Nicholson, Harold
We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.
Nicodemus, Ryan
Love people, not things.
Niebuhr, Reinhold
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and then wisdom to know the difference.
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism.
Niemann, Cristoph
You measure yourself against a lucky moment.
Niemöller, Martin
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Nietzsche, Friedrich
He who has a why in life can bear almost any how.
People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.
The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.
Madness is rare in individuals but, in groups, states, and societies, it’s the norm.
Nin, Anaïs
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow.
Nixon, Richard
Always remember, others may hate you — but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.
Norman, Don
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to not learn from it.
The future cannot be predicted, not even by trying to invent it. Although inventions can change the future, their long-term impact cannot be predicted.
Nye, Bill
Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don’t.
O
Obama, Barack
This idea of purity and you’re never compromised and you’re always politically “woke” and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. There is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people. That’s enough.
The average American doesn’t think we have to completely tear down the system and remake it.
Olivier, Laurence
After filming Marathon Man together, Dustin Hoffman asked his legendary co-star Sir Laurence Olivier, “Why is it that we do what we do?” Olivier answered him, “The reason we do what we do, dear boy, is — ‘look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me...’ ”
Olson, Peggy (“Mad Men”)
We are starved for connection. We really are. (Elisabeth Moss)
Onizuka, Ellison
Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds... to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.
Oppenheimer, Frank
The worst thing a son-of-a-bitch can do is turn you into a son-of-a-bitch.
Oppong, Thomas
We don’t think thoughts. Thoughts think us.
Oren, Michael
Some people prefer the moral ease of victimhood to the complexities of power.
John Lennon, forgive me, but sometimes we have to give war a chance.
Ortega y Gasset, José
Civilization is nothing else but the attempt to reduce force to being the last resort.
Orwell, George
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.(1984)
The more society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Newspeak: War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face — forever. And remember that it is forever.
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
The sinister fact about censorship is that unpopular ideas can be silenced and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. [attributed]
P
Page, Larry
What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!
Paine, Thomas
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Parker, Theodore
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
Pascal, Blaise
The heart has its reasons which reason does not understand.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Vanity is so secure in the heart of man that everyone wants to be admired: even I who write this, and you who read this.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo
It isn’t that the dead don’t speak, it’s just that we forget how to listen.
Pasternak, Boris
When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss.
Pasteur, Louis
Luck favors the prepared.
Patton, George
A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.
Pauling, Linus
The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Peale, Norman Vincent
The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.
Pearson, Lester
Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.
Pell, Dave
Don’t mistake funny for harmless.
Peres, Shimon
The choice the pioneers faced was stark: succeed or starve.
When a friend makes a mistake, he remains a friend, but the mistake remains a mistake.
If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact — not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.
There are two things that cannot be achieved in life unless you close your eyes a little bit. And that’s love and peace. If you want perfection you won’t obtain either of them.
Without emboldening people to envisage the unlikely, we increase risk rather than diminish it.
The tools of his trade included faith, perseverance, resilience, and the ability to learn — to change and to grow. But his greatest tool of all, always, was hope.
If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.
Pericles
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Perls, Fritz
We live in a house of mirrors and think we are looking out the windows.
Teaching means to show a person that something is possible.
Peter, Laurence
There are two kinds of egotists: Those who admit it, and the rest of us.
An ounce of image is worth a pound of performance.
A man convinced against his will is not convinced.
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
Peterson, Jordan
You are free to ignore reality, but you are not free to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
Most people can’t think, not really. Most people think by talking. It’s really hard to think, because, to think, you have to ask yourself a question — that’s hard enough. To actually ask. You have to wait for the answer. Then you have to assess the answer critically, which means you have to divide yourself up into two or three people, each of which has a different opinion, and have them argue about something, like in the theater of your imagination, to assess the idea. That’s hard. So, normally, what we do it we talk to other people — or we stay muddle-headed and confused. So listening is half of thinking.
Petrov, Viktor (“House of Cards”)
History now belongs to the highest bidder. X (Lars Mikkelson)
Picasso, Pablo
It takes a long time to become young.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
Pickering, Charles
A healthy democracy requires a decent society; it requires that we are honorable, generous, tolerant and respectful.
Pinker, Steven
Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.
What is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?
Pitt, Brad
Stop being perfect, because obsessing over being perfect stops you from growing.
Planck, Max
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Plato
Wise men speak because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something.
Plutarch
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
Pope, Alexander
To err is human, to forgive divine.
A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Popper, Karl
In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.
True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge but the refusal to acquire it.
It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood.
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude.
Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.
Porter King, Jeanne
Everything that comes to your mind does not need to come out of your mouth.
Postman, Neil
Change changed.
The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
Pound, Ezra
Only emotion endures.
Powell, Enoch
History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.
Press, Bill
Things are not as bad as they seem. They are worse.
Putin, Vladimir
As for who to believe, who you can’t believe, can you believe at all?... You can’t believe anyone. X
Q
Quillen, Robert
Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument an exchange of ignorance.
R
Rackovsky, Baruch
Start every morning with a smile and get it over with. :)
Ramsey, Dave
We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.
Rana, Zat
There is nobody you can’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.
We now live in a world where we’re connected to everything except ourselves.
Interestingly, the main culprit isn’t our obsession with any particular worldly stimulation. It’s the fear of nothingness — our addiction to a state of not-being-bored. We have an instinctive aversion to simply being.
Rand, Ayn
Man is free to make the wrong choice, but not free to succeed with it. He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see. Man is free to choose not to be conscious, but not free to escape the penalty of unconsciousness: destruction.
Nobody has ever given a reason why man should be his brother’s keeper. X
Randall, Stanley
The closest to perfection a person ever achieves is when he fills out a job application form.
Ravikant, Naval
Happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles.
Rayburn, Sam
Any jackass can knock down a barn, but it takes a man to build one.
Reagan, Ronald
There is room in our tent for many views; indeed, the divergence of views is one of our strengths. Unity does not require unanimity of thought.
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not passed to our children in the bloodstream, for it comes only once to a people. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like to live when men were free.
Peace is not absence of conflict, it is the ability to handle conflict by peaceful means.
All great change begins at the dinner table.
You can run from a bully for so long, but at a certain point you have to stand up to him.
Human nature resists change and goes over backward to avoid radical change.
My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.
Trust, but verify.
Rebbe Ze’ev Wolf of Stryków
Remember that you are not as good as you think you are, and the world is not as bad as you think it is.
Reeves, Keanu
The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.
Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things.
It’s easy to stay grounded. The ground is very close. And we walk on it every day.
Multi-culture is the real culture of the world — the pure race doesn’t exist.
Reich, Robert
We are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society, composed of a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and disillusionment is easily manipulated. Once un-bottled, mass resentments can poison the very fabric of society, the moral integrity of a society, replacing ambition with envy, replacing tolerance with hate.
Reiner, Estelle
What’s the secret to being married for 60 years? You have to find someone who can stand you. Not somebody you can put up with, but someone who can stand you.
Rettig Gur, Haviv
If you don’t understand why the other side is not stupid, then you haven’t done your homework.
Good history inoculates us to shallow ideology.
You don’t need permission to exist. When you genuinely stop caring what they think, that’s freedom.
America has this habit of looking at the world and thinking very simple thoughts that would make sense if the whole world was made up of Americans — and then insisting that must be how the world works.
Reynolds, Joshua
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
Reynolds, Thomas (“Enemy of the State”)
Credibility — it’s the only currency that means anything. (Jon Voight)
Rice, Condoleeza
I firmly believe you should never spend any of your time being the ‘former’ anything.
Richards, Rebecca
Oh, to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small, and only half as stupid as my teen-ager now thinks I am.
Ries, Al
People are seldom, if ever, wrong. At least not in their own minds.
Ripley, Amanda
Humans need to be heard before they will listen.
Robbins, Tony
If you want to succeed in your life, remember this phrase: The past does not equal the future. Because you failed yesterday, or all day today, or a moment ago, or for the last six months, the last sixteen years, or the last fifty years of life, doesn’t mean anything. All that matters is: What are you going to do, right now?
Most people fail in life because they major in minor things.
Robinson, James Harvey
Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
Robinson, Ken
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
Rockne, Knute
Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Rogers, Fred
You were a child once, too.
No child is born with self-discipline.
Children feel safer when they know what the rules are.
Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.
There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.
Rogers, Kenny
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.
Rogers, Will
Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
I would rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it.
Romer, Paul
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.
Roosevelt Longwirth, Alice
If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me. X
Roosevelt, Eleanor
To handle yourself, use your head; to handle others, use your heart.
Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.
You must do the things you think you cannot do.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
A stumbling block to the pessimist is a stepping-stone to the optimist.
It’s your life — but only if you make it so.
Happiness is not a goal...it’s a by-product of a life well lived.
A woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong it is until it’s in hot water.
Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Do what you feel in your heart to be right — for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.
It always amuses me when any one group of people take it for granted that because they have been privileged for a generation or two, they are set apart in any way from the man or woman who is working in order to keep the wolf from the door. It is only luck and a little veneer temporarily on the surface, and before very long the wheels may turn and one and all must fall back on whatever basic ‘quality’ they have.
Roosevelt, Franklin
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
I am a Christian and a Democrat, that’s all.
I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.
When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.
There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.
I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.
Dante told us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Once you have spent two years trying to wiggle one toe, everything is in proportion.
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
Be sincere; be brief; be seated.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
We must reform if we would conserve.
Remember always that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from migrants and revolutionists.
Roosevelt, Theodore
If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.
Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Rose, Moira (“Schitt’s Creek”)
Look at yourself with kinder eyes. (Katherine O’Hara)
Rosenberg, Shimon Gershon
Openness can be a higher perspective – absolute commitment to my truth, but with the capacity to recognize the truths of others.
Rosenschein, Martin
When somebody threatens to kill you... just believe him.
Rosling, Hans
The problem for me was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas.
There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.
The media can’t waste time on stories that won’t pass our attention filters. e.g. malaria continues to decline gradually.
Sweeping generalizations can easily hide behind good intentions.
People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”.
Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.
Rothko, Mark
Silence is so accurate. [when asked why he stopped titling his paintings]
Ruiz, Don Miguel
There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.
Rumsfeld, Donald
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.
Rusk, Dean
While we are sleeping two-thirds of the world is plotting to do us in.
One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears — by listening to them.
Ruskin, John
When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.
Russell, Bertrand
If we were all given by magic the power to read each other’s thoughts, I suppose the first effect would be to dissolve all friendships.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither . . . over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
The secret of happiness is this: Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Common sense cannot avoid being surprised from time to time.
War does not determine who is right — only who is left.
Much that passes as idealism is disguised love of power.
Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
Ruth, Babe
You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.
S
Sacks, Jonathan
Think not less of yourself, but do think about yourself less.
To be free, you have to let go of hate.
Freedom is lost when it is taken for granted.
To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.
Armchair morality is thinking you can change the world by pushing like or dislike.
The real challenge is not poverty but affluence, not insecurity but security, not slavery but freedom.
In a true conversation, I open myself up to the reality of another person. I enter his or her world. I begin to see things from a perspective not my own — a genuine, human conversation.
Atonement and forgiveness are the supreme expressions of human freedom – the freedom to act differently in the future than one did in the past, and the freedom not to be trapped in a cycle of vengeance and retaliation. Only those who can forgive can be free. Only a civilisation based on forgiveness can construct a future that is not an endless repetition of the past. Our whose golden age is in the future.
One result of the new neuroscience is that we are becoming aware of the hugely significant part played by emotion in decision-making. The French Enlightenment emphasized the role of reason, and regarded emotion as a distraction and distortion. We now know scientifically how wrong this is.
True greatness is showing respect to the people other people don’t notice. The people who show respect win respect.
When difference leads to war, both sides lose. When it leads to mutual enrichment, both sides gain.
What makes us different is what we are; what unites us is what we do.
There are three barriers to growth. One is self-righteousness, the belief that we are already great. A second is false humility, the belief that we can never be great. The third is learned helplessness, the belief that we can’t change the world because we can’t change. All three are false.
Daily praise within a family gives everyone the confidence to change and grow.
The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTune, i, i, i. When you’re an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about ‘i’, you don’t do terribly well.
Crowds are moved by great speakers, but lives are changed by great listeners.
In a shame society it is difficult to create space for confession, repentance, forgiveness, and rehabilitation. Shame cultures tend to be deeply conformist and can lead to rule of the mob or, as at present, the electronic crowd.
Every technology can be used for good or evil, which is why the greater our scientific knowledge, the stronger must our ethics be.
For life to have personal meaning, there must be people who matter to us, and for whom we matter, unconditionally and non-substitutably.
More than wealth and power, education is the key to human dignity.
Humility means living by the light of that which is greater than me.
The over-emphasis on ‘I’ and the loss of ‘We’ leaves us isolated and vulnerable. It is not good to be alone.
Don’t say optimistic, say hopeful. Because optimism is waiting for something good to happen, while being hopeful includes the will to make it happen.
When hate is rational, based on some fear or disapproval that – justified or not – has some logic to it, then it can be reasoned with and brought to an end. But unconditional, irrational hatred cannot be reasoned with. There is nothing one can do to address it and end it. It persists.
Safire, Bill
The audacity of hope springs eternal.
Never assume the obvious is true.
The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right.
Sagan, Carl
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Don’t judge everyone else by your own limited experience.
Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust.
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.
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.
Salanter, Israel
The eleventh commandment is ‘Don’t be a fool’.
A person can live with himself for seventy years and still not know himself.
Samuels, Charles
Skepticism is a hedge against vulnerability.
Samuelson, Paul
The stock market has predicted nine of the past five recessions.
Sandberg, Sheryl
Whatever rug you are standing on can be pulled right out from under you with absolutely no warning.
If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.
Sandburg, Carl
If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.
Santayana, George
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
Sartre, Jean-Paul
We are our choices.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Satir, Virginia
People prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.
The message sent is not always the message received.
Scheck, Frank
We’ve all just got to get over ourselves.
Schmidt, Eric
Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn’t yet know he wants.
Growth covers a lot of sins.
Schopenhauer, Arthur
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Every person takes the limits of their own field of vision for the limits of the world.
If you come across any special trait of meanness or stupidity, you must be careful not to let it annoy or distress you, but to look upon it merely as an addition to your knowledge — a new fact to be considered in studying the character of humanity. Your attitude towards it will be that of the mineralogist who stumbles upon a very characteristic specimen of a mineral.
Schrödinger, Erwin
The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.
Schultz, Howard
What we’ve learned through all of this is that we are longing for human connection. We’re longing for a sense of humanity and kindness and compassion and empathy, people are looking for belonging, especially given what’s going on in our own country right now. Without getting too philosophical, there is a sense of loneliness in America, and I would even go as far as to say that I think we’re approaching an epidemic of loneliness. Technology has brought us so much, but it also has taken something away, so the humanity of things becomes so vitally important to what it is we do. If a company can do that and elevate that, that is our core purpose and reason for being.
Schulz, Charles M.
There’s a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker.
Schultz, Kathryn
Hold our own beliefs a bit more humbly.
Schwab, Klaus
There are four ingredients in true leadership: brains, soul, heart and good nerves.
Schwartz, Barry
Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.
Bankers are smart people. And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system “almost-collapse” can’t happen again. It is naïve beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. So it’s just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that.
Schweitzer, Albert
Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.
Seldes, George
All great ideas are controversial, or have been at one time.
Seneca
Life is very short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested.
We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.
You are living as if destined to live for ever. Your own frailty never occurs to you. You don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last.
Sewell, Thomas
Most people, when given a choice between hating themselves and hating others, choose to hate others.
Shakespeare, William
What a piece of work is a man!
One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
All the world’s a stage
Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.
They do not love that do not show their love.
This above all: to thine own self be true.
Dispute not with her: she is lunatic.
What’s past is prologue.
O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s. [King Lear]
Sharansky, Natan
Everybody has a knife in prison, but not everybody is prepared to use it.
Shaw, George Bernard
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.
Shedd, John
A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
Shellstrop, Eleanor (“The Good Place”)
Every human is a little bit sad all the time because you know you’re going to die. But that knowledge is what gives life its meaning. (Kristen Bell)
Shimon ben Lakish
All who are merciful upon those who are cruel eventually become cruel towards who are merciful.
Shulz, Kathryn
A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.
Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.
Silverman, Susan
I make it my policy in life not to become offended.
Simcha Bunim of Peshischa
Everyone must have two pockets, with a note in each pocket, so that he can reach into the one or the other, depending on the need. When feeling lowly and depressed, discouraged or disconsolate, one should reach into the right pocket and, there, find the words: “For my sake was the world created.” But when feeling high and mighty, one should reach into the left pocket and find the words: “I am but dust and ashes.”
Simmons, Gene
If you don’t have a self of history, of where you came from, you take everything for granted.
Yesterday doesn’t matter. If you can fix today, then you can make tomorrow better. [his mother, Flóra Kovács]
Simon, David
Screw the ideology you rode in on. One of the great new plagues of the Twenty First Century is people who believe they have the answer in a paragraph.
Simon, Herbert
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Simon, Paul
𝄞 “Slow down, you move too fast / You gotta make the morning last.” —The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)
𝄞 “I’m empty and aching / And I don’t know why.” —America
𝄞 “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you, wo wo wo.” — Mrs. Robinson
𝄞 “Still a man hears what he wants to hear / And disregards the rest.” —The Boxer
𝄞 “Preserve your memories / They’re all that’s left you.” —Old Friends
Simpson, Homer (“The Simpsons”) 🙂
Your point being?
Trying is the first step towards failure.
I believe that children are our future. Unless we stop them now.
Roads are just a suggestion Marge, just like pants.
Bart, with $10,000, we’d be millionaires! We could buy all kinds of useful things like... love!
If God didn’t want me to eat chicken in church, then he would have made gluttony a sin.
I guess some people never change. Or, they quickly change and then quickly change back.
Even Communism works, in theory. (Dan Castellaneta)
Sinclair, Upton
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
Sinek, Simon
What good is it having a belly if there’s no fire in it? Wake up, drink your passion, light a match and get to work.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis
We have to believe in free will. We have no choice.
Singer, Suzanne
It’s never minor when it happens to you.
Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power. Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.
Singletary, Michelle
You’re getting married. It’s not the coronation of a monarch.
You do know that your invitation isn’t a subpoena, right?
Smith, J.M.
If you dance with the devil, / Then you haven’t got a clue, / For you think you’ll change the devil, / But the devil changes you.
Smith, Megan
If you know the past, your future is different.
Smith, Sydney
Nothing is so stupid as to [mis]take the actual for the possible.
Snow, C.P.
Civilization is hideously fragile [and] there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.
Soloveitchik, Joseph
What man fails to understand is not the world around him but the world within him, particularly his destiny.
I don’t know what to fear; what not to fear; I am utterly confused and ignorant. Modern man is indeed, existentially, a slave, because he is ignorant and fails to identify his own needs.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr
You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power — he’s free again.
Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.
If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
Human nature is full of riddles. How is it that the people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can find strength in themselves to rise up and free themselves first in spirit and then in body, while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly lose the taste for it, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery?
The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer.
A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.
Sondheim, Stephen
The choice may have been mistaken, the choosing was not.
𝄞 “Jets: Well, they began it!
Sharks: Well, they began it!
All: And we’re the ones to stop ’em once and for all... Tonight!”𝄞 “We’ll find a new way of living,
We’ll find a way of forgiving,
Somewhere.”𝄞 “Nice is different than good.”
Sophocles
Whoever makes his way into a tyrant’s court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man.
Sorkin, Aaron
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.” (Andrew Shepherd, “The American President”)
People don’t speak in dialogue, and their lives don’t play out in a series of scenes that form a narrative. Dramatists do that. They prioritize truth over accuracy. Paintings over photographs.
Speth, Gus
I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that, with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.
Spielberg, Steven
All good ideas start out as bad ideas, that’s why it takes so long.
Spiers, Ronald (“Band of Brothers”)
The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. (Matthew Settle)
Spinoza, Baruch
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Men are conscious of their desire and unaware of the causes by which their desires are determined.
Spock, Benjamin
Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.
Spurgeon, Charles Haddon
If you want truth to go around the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go around the world, it will fly; it is light as a feather and a breath will carry it.
Stalin, Joseph
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. X
Stanfield, Marlo (“The Wire”)
You want it to be one way... But it’s the other way. (Jamie Hector)
Starr, Kenneth
Instead of a once-in-a-century phenomenon, presidential impeachment has become a weapon to be wielded against one’s political opponent. [sic] X
Steinbeck, John
Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?
Stengel, Richard
Unfortunately, facts don’t come highlighted in yellow. A false sentence reads the same as a true one. It’s not enough to battle falsehood with truth; the truth does not always win... Let’s face it, democracies are not very good at combating disinformation. Authoritarian governments, in contrast, have gone from fearing the flow of information to exploiting it. They understand that the same tools that spread democracy can engineer its undoing.
Stephens, Bret
Cancel culture flourishes because coward culture allows it.
Telling people that they are ignoramuses is a bad way of getting them to change their minds.
If right is one consideration, prudence is another.
Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining.
A movement that can detect a racist dog-whistle from miles away is strangely deaf when it comes to some of the barking on its own side of the fence.
Stevenson, Adlai
A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.
Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal…is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
I’m not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
Stevenson, Bryan
Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.
We cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Stewart, Jon
You’re doing theater when you should be doing debate.
You have no idea what’s about to come at you, and, man, isn’t that the beautiful part of it.
Stewart, Potter
I know it [pornography] when I see it.
Stolypin, Pyotr
In Russia, nothing is more dangerous than the appearance of weakness.
Strayed, Cheryl
Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
Streep, Meryl
We all make the mistake thinking that how you look makes you more worthy of love.
You don’t have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.
You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you’ve lost a lot of people, you realize each day is a gift.
Sullivan, Dan
Wherever you are, make sure you’re there.
Sulzberger, Arthur Hays
Along with responsible newspapers we must have responsible readers.
Summers, Larry
The main thing we have to fear is lack of fear itself.
If you’re not alarmed about anything, that’s when I’d be most alarmed.
Sun Tzu
Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
It is more important to outthink your enemy than to outfight him.
Kill one, terrify a thousand. X
Sutherland, Graham (“The Crown”)
Age is cruel. If you see decay, it’s because there is decay. If you see frailty, it’s because there is frailty. I can’t be blamed for what is, and I refuse to hide and disguise what I see. If you’re engaged in a fight with something, then it’s not with me. It’s with your own blindness! (Stephen Dillane)
Sutskever, Ilya
If you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you’re gonna have a bad time.
Swift, Jonathan
There’s none so blind as they that won’t see.
Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.
I must complain that the cards are ill-shuffled till I have a good hand.
May you live all the days of your life.
Swindoll, Charles
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Swope, Howard Bayard
I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure — which is: Try to please everybody.
Szell, George
In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain.
Szent-Györgyi, Albert
Research is to see what everybody else has seen — and to think what nobody else has thought.
T
Tadaichi, Hara
We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war.
Taft, William Howard
No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas
Never cross a river if it is on average four feet deep.
Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.
A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.
If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud.
The symmetry of skin in the game is a simple rule that’s necessary for fairness and justice and the ultimate BS-buster.
Comfort makes you weaker. We need some variability, some stressors. Not too much, but just enough.
It suffices for an intransigent minority — a certain type of intransigent minorities — to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
You never win an argument until they attack your person.
Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de
C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute. /
It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.An argument when taken to the point of exaggeration, becomes meaningless.
Tarfon Hacohen
It may not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from trying.
Tartakower, Savielly
The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made.
The move is there but you must see it.
The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.
Some part of a mistake is always correct.
Chess is a struggle against one’s own errors.
To avoid losing a piece, many a person has lost the game.
The player that takes risks may lose, the player that doesn’t always loses.
Tactics is knowing what to do when there is something to do; strategy is knowing what to do when there is nothing to do.
Erro, ergo sum.
Taub, Daniel
We seem divided between those who think we can do no right and those who think we can do no wrong.
People reject truth because of a desire for victory. The overriding wish to prevail, to achieve victory, is anathema to a genuine search for truth.
Tawney, Richard Henry
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.
If men recognize no law superior to their desires, then they must fight when their desires collide.
Teare, Keith
We tend to paint a picture of the future in present colors.
Telushkin, Joseph
Don’t read only books and publications that agree with and reinforce your point of view.... If you seldom hear, read, or listen to views that oppose your own, and if almost everyone you talk to sees the world just as your do, your thinking will grow flabby and intolerant.
Temple, Henry John (3rd Viscount Palmerston)
Die, my dear doctor? That is the last thing I shall do.
Thaler, Richard
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.
People are paying less attention to you than you think.
Thatcher, Margaret
Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.
Thompson, Hunter
A man who procrastinates in his choosing will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance.
Whether to float with the tide — or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives.
Thoreau, Henry David
I had three chairs in my house, one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society. —Walden
It is never too late to give up your prejudices.
Thorndike, Edward
An adult who ceases after youth to unlearn and relearn his facts and to reconsider his opinions…is a menace to a democratic community.
Thrun, Sebastian
It’s sad that we never get trained to leave assumptions behind.
Thucydides
It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.
Thurber, James
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
Tillich, Paul
Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
Toffler, Alvin
The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Tolstoy, Leo
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
The older generation almost always fails to understand the younger one — they think their own immutable values the only ones... And so the older generation barks like a dog at what they don’t understand.
Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
Tomlin, Lily
Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.
Toynbee, Arnold
History is something unpleasant that happens to other people.
Trotsky, Leon
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. X
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.
Truman, Harry
Sometimes you have to put your principles aside and do the right thing.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.
I sit here all day trying to persuade people to do the things they ought to have sense enough to do without my persuading them. That’s all the powers of the President amount to.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Trump, Donald
The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.
Tuchman, Barbara
Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
Tüfekçi, Zeynip
A near-miss, correctly interpreted, can be a great teacher.
We cannot outsource our moral responsibilities to machines.
Artificial intelligence does not give us a “get out of ethics” free card.
Turkle, Sherry
The phone has become an “insurance policy” against boredom.
Because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere.
Sometimes it seems easier to invent a new technology that to start a conversation.
Again, we live in a world of unintended consequences. Hyperconnected, we imagine ourselves more efficient, but we are deceived. Multitasking degrades our performance at everything we do, all the while giving us the feeling that we are doing better at everything. So it makes us less productive no matter how good it makes us feel. And recall technology’s deficiencies as a “sentimental education”: Frequent multitasking is associated with depression, social anxiety, and trouble reading human emotions.
Twain, Mark
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.
No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
The most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
I am an old man and have lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which have actually happened.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. The is the principal difference between a dog and man.
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in 7 years.
By all means, put all of your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket!
Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you’ve never been hurt and live like it’s heaven on Earth.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Nothing needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would have rather talked.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion which makes horse races.
To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I’ve done it a thousand times.
The truth must be served like a coat, and not thrown in the face like a wet towel.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
Wrinkles merely indicate where the smiles have been.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
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.
To get the full value of joy, you must have someone to divide it with.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.
Do something every day that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Buy land. They’re not making it anymore.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
Twerski, Abraham
The stimulus for the lobster to be able to grow is that it feels uncomfortable. If lobsters had doctors, they would never grow. Grow through adversity.
Tyson, Mike
Everybody has a plan, until you get punched in the face.
U
Ullman, Samuel
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life.
Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust, bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.
Whether 100 or 16, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station: so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young.
When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 100.
Underwood, Frank (“House of Cards”)
There is no right or wrong, not anymore. X (Kevin Spacey)
Ustinov, Peter
Life is unfair but remember, sometimes it is unfair in your favor.
V
Valdary, Chloé
We all have a common enemy, and the common enemy is in each of us. It’s ourselves.
Valéry, Paul
The future is not what it used to be.
Valliant, George
#1 most important finding from the Grant Study is this: The seventy-five years and twenty million dollars expended on the Grant Study points to a straightforward five-word conclusion: Happiness is love. Full stop. (See also Robert Waldinger)
Vardi, Yossi
User experience is not the most important thing. It’s the only thing.
Vasudeva (“Siddhartha”)
Listen better.
Victoria
The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them. X
I feel sure that no girl would go to the altar if she knew all.
Vidal, Gore
Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies. X
Voltaire
Je ne suis pas d’accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je me battrai jusqu’au bout pour que vous puissiez le dire. /
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said.
The more I read, the more I acquire, the more certain I am that I know nothing.
Doubt is not a pleasant situation, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
If Machiavelli had had a prince for a disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been to write a book against Machiavellism.
What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly — that is the first law of nature.
If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
Von Bülow, Bernhard
To the meaningless French idealisms, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, we oppose the German realities, Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery. X
Von Clausewitz, Carl
Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.
It is even better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past.
Von Furstenberg, Diane
The wrinkles on my face carry all of my memories. Why would I want to erase them?
Vonnegut, Kurt
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
I have something that a billionaire will never have... enough!
W
Waldinger, Robert
Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period. (See also George Valliant)
Wallace, Chris
It’s not nothing. It’s something.
Wallace, David Foster
The freedom to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
Everything I ever let go of has claw marks on it.
Walpole, Horace
The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
Ward, William Arthur
The adventure of life is to learn.
The purpose of life is to grow.
The nature of life is to change.
The challenge of life is to overcome.
The essence of life is to care.
The opportunity of life is to serve.
The secret of life is to dare.
The spice of life is to befriend.
The beauty of life is to give.
Warhol, Andy
My prediction from the sixties finally came true: ‘In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.’ I’m bored with that line. I never use it any more. My new line is, ‘In fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.’
Warrell, Margie
Only in giving up the security of the known, can we create new opportunity, build capability and grow influence.
Warren, Earl
We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honor the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.
Washington, Booker T.
A lie doesn’t become truth, wrong doesn’t become right, and evil doesn’t become good just because it is accepted by a majority.
Waterston, Sam
Yes, the word is lying — not negotiation, salesmanship, bluster, attention-getting, delusion, deception, braggadocio, exaggeration, bullying, alternative facts, or any other euphemism.
Watterson, Bill
The problem with people is that they’re only human.
Watson, Thomas
If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
Watts, Alan
You can always point out hidden things, but it is tough to point out something that everyone looks at but no one sees.
Weaver, Richard
The trouble with humanity is that it forgets to read the minutes of the last meeting.
Webb, Jimmy
𝄞 “I bruise you / You bruise me / We both bruise too easily.” — All I Know
Webb, Mary
We are tomorrow’s past.
Weidmann, Jens
The young can run faster, but the old know the shortcuts.
Weil, Simone
It goes slowly, then all at once.
Wein, Berel
Had the Second World War had been fought on CNN, neither Hitler nor Japan would have been defeated, simply because the media would not have allowed it.
Weiss, Avi
I recall from my youth the saying: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Over the years I have come to understand that this is not true. Names do harm. Words do count. And while a word is a word, and a deed is a deed, words can lead to deeds.
Welch, Jack
Change before you have to.
Welch, Joseph
At long last, have you left no sense of decency? (to Joe McCarthy)
Welles, Orson
Gluttony is not a secret vice.
When people accept breaking the law as normal, something happens to the whole society.
Wellington, Arthur
My soldiers were not braver than Napoleon’s, but they were braver five minutes longer.
Wells, H.G.
Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.
The past is but the beginning of a beginning.
Werfel, Franz
For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible.
Werner, Mark
There are no pacifists in a bomb shelter.
West, Mae
You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.
Those who are offended easily should be offended more often.
Whitehead, Alfred North
Seek simplicity and distrust it.
We think in generalities, we live in detail.
Wiesel, Elie
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.
Mankind must remember that peace is not God’s gift to his creatures; peace is our gift to each other.
Wilde, Oscar
I can resist anything except temptation.
Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go.
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
We need to believe in the impossible and remove the improbable.
I live constantly in the fear of not being misunderstood.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Always forgive your enemies — nothing annoys them so much.
Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.
Only the shallow know themselves.
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.
Will, George
If someone is sufficiently eager to disbelieve something, there is no Everest of evidence too large to be ignored.
He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.
Expiration is written into the lease we have on our bodies.
In life’s unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices.
The barbarians are not at America’s gate. There is no gate.
Willbanks, James
Rolling Thunder [in Vietnam] was the dumbest military campaign every devised by a human being. The normal human thing to do is to think that your enemy thinks like you. There’s the old apocryphal story that when McNamara wants to know what Ho Chi Minh is thinking, he interviews himself. The problem then becomes is that you keep trying to send messages that are rational based on your judgment of rationality but have nothing to do with the definition of rationality on the other side. So what is irrational to us is totally rational to the other side, if you’ve decided that you were going to reunify the Vietnams. No matter what it takes. No matter how many casualties.
Williams, Grace
We learn from experience. A man never wakes up his second baby just to see it smile.
Williams, John
Democracies aren’t overthrown, they’re given away.
Williams, Robin
Reality... what a concept.
Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?
You’re only given a little spark of madness, you mustn’t lose it.
Everyone has these two visions when they hold their child for the first time. The first is your child as an adult saying ‘I want to thank the Nobel Committee for this award’. The other is ‘You want fries with that?’
Williams, Tennessee
The truth is at the bottom of a bottomless well. [Also see Jerome Facher]
Wilson, Edward Osborne
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technologies.
Wilson, Timothy
The human brain is poorly equipped to handle the roughly 11 million bits of information that arrive in any given moment of modern life. For efficiency’s sake, people tend to make decisions based on shortcuts — assumptions and impulses — rather than careful attention to what’s really happening in the moment. Through the practice of meditation, a person can observe and reflect on the assumptions, feelings, and internal storylines that unconsciously guide words and behaviors.
Wilson, Woodrow
We are citizens of the world; and the tragedy of our times is that we do not know this.
Winfrey, Oprah
What we dwell on is who we become.
Surround yourself only with people who are going to take you higher.
Failure is an opportunity to move yourself in a different direction.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
If you have nothing to say, then be silent.
No one can think a thought for me in the way that no one can don my hat for me.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
Wolfe Herd, Whitney
I love being underestimated. It’s a total superpower..
Wolpe, David
Truth is sometimes plural.
The belief that rational self-interest is a governing principle — is a belief common to rational people.
You can blame the world, your parents, your culture, your chemistry for the pain you feel. But not for the pain you cause.
When it comes to finding fault, we are fonder of windows than of mirrors.
I know people who are extremely careful about what goes into their mouth — but never give a thought to what comes out of it.
We overestimate our power to predict the future and underestimate our power to shape it.
We may forget but history remembers.
If as Jews we cancel every hater in history, the textbooks will be thin as matchbooks. To learn from someone is not to approve of their views.
Controversy is not synonymous with savagery; we can encourage robust argument without sanctioning insult, mockery, or cruelty.
Cancellation in America is relentless. Your mistake or your crime or your sin defines you forever; it becomes the totality of who you are. We distrust regret or change. This is profoundly unfair.
I have never changed my mind by someone coming up to me and yelling at me about why I was wrong.
We, who do not know ourselves, believe we understand others. We must always be reminded that each person is a world, and that the caricatures we see of others on social media and in the news are just that — a small slice of the vastness within each human being.
Too often we argue for victory when we should talk for connection.
We live in a time when words are called violence and differences of opinion are seen by one side as evidence of the moral degeneracy of the other.
Wood, Robert C.
Scientific and humanist approaches are not competitive but supportive, and both are ultimately necessary.
Wooden, John
The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.
If you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything. I’m positive that a doer makes mistakes.
Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
Never mistake activity for achievement.
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
If you are afraid to fail, you will never do the things you are capable of doing.
If you do your job, the score takes care of itself.
If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
Woolf, Virginia
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Wordsworth, William
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!
Wright, Frank Lloyd
There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest and, therefore, when most was required of imagination.
Television is chewing gum for the eyes.
The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.
Wright, Orville
The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have the time to fall.
No flying machine will every fly from New York to Paris.
“Cheer up boys, there is no hope!” — quoting Oberlin coach
Wright, Robert
One might think that, being rational creatures, we would eventually grow suspicious of our uncannily long string of rectitude, our unerring knack for being on the right side of any dispute over credit, or money, or manners, or anything else. Nope. Time and again — whether arguing over a place in line, a promotion we never got, or which car hit which — we are shocked at the blindness of people who dare suggest that our outrage is not warranted.
We spend our lives desperately seeking status; we are addicted to social esteem in a fairly literal sense, dependent on the neurotransmitters we get upon impressing people. Many of us claim to be self-sufficient, to have a moral gyroscope, to hold fast to our values, come what may. But people truly oblivious to peer approval get labeled sociopaths. And the epithets reserved for people at the other end of the spectrum, people who seek esteem most ardently — “self-promoter”, “social climber” — are only signs of our constitutional blindness. We are all self-promoters and social climbers. The people known as such are either so effective as to arouse envy or so graceless as to make their effort obvious, or both.
Wright, Steven
I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
What’s another word for Thesaurus?
Wrigley, William
When two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
Wroblewski, Luke
Design is obvious in retrospect, after the fact. After all the stuff behind the scenes is done, a good design should feel obvious.
If you’re doing something that people hate, it’s probably a sign that you’re doing something interesting. Now, ideally, people love it as well. Not the same people, right? If you’re doing something that people love or hate, that’s when you know that you’re doing something that matters, that actually has an impact.
Y
Yankwich, Leon
There are no illegitimate children — only illegitimate parents.
Yeats, W.B.
Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny
Silence can be a disgrace.
Yoda
Do or do not. There is no try.
Z
Zabolotsky, Nikolay
There is no sadder betrayal in the world than the betrayal of oneself.
Zend, Robert
People have one thing in common: they are all different.
There are too many people and too few human beings.
Zennström, Niklas
You should not look at failure as failure, but as part of the process.
Zhou Enlai
It’s too soon to say. [when asked his view on the French Revolution by Henry Kissinger in 1969]
Zhuangzi
As you are not a fish, how can you say this fish is happy?
Ziglar, Zig
Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.
Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.
Zimmer, Hans
Reality is the enemy of imagination.
Zucker, David
Q: “Could you make Airplane! today?” /
A: “Of course we could — just without the jokes.”
Others
“I never said that.”
— Buddha, Gandhi, Dalai Lama, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Audrey Hepburn, Sylvia Plath, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates