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JSONPhilosophy
Something of a catch-all category for things that are true, but don't fit anywhere else.
Quote | Author | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common sense is what tells you that the world is flat. | ||||
| How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all, and it often comes with bitter agony. Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You cannot now believe that you will ever feel better. But this is not true. You are sure to be happy again. Knowing this, truly believing it, will make you less miserable now. I have had enough experience to make this statement. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent. | Abraham Lincoln | |||
| When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him, and you are torn by the thought of unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter. | Albert Camus | |||
| If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward then we are a sorry lot indeed. | Albert Einstein | |||
| Now I know why there are so many people who enjoy chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees the results. | Albert Einstein | |||
| Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. | Albert Einstein | |||
| Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. | Albert Einstein | |||
| Facts do not cease to exist simply because they are ignored. | Aldous Huxley | |||
| It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. | Alfred Adler | |||
| Perfection has been achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away | Antoine de Saint-Exupery | |||
| When people realize that things are going wrong, there are two questions they can ask. One is, 'What did we do wrong?' and the other is 'Who did this to us?' | Bernard Lewis | |||
| The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. | B.H. Liddell Hart | |||
| The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. | Calvin Coolidge | |||
| My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there. | Charles F. Kettering | |||
| The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it. | Chinese Proverb | |||
| Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. | C.S. Lewis | |||
| Thinking for yourself is like most addictive behaviour. It is frowned upon by all right thinking people and is bound to get you killed sooner or later. | Daniel Safford | |||
| The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were. | David Brinkley | |||
| Nothing is so easy as to deceive oneself; for what we wish, we readily believe. | Demosthenes | |||
| There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism. | Denis Diderot | |||
| Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian. | Dennis Wholey | |||
| Forgive everybody everything everyday. | Dulles | |||
| Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little. | Edmund Burke | |||
| Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. | Fred Brooks | |||
| Anyone taken as an individual, is tolerably sensible and reasonable. As a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. | Friedrich von Schiller | |||
| If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking. | Gen. George S. Patton | |||
| When a stupid man is doing something he knows is wrong, he always insists that it is his duty. | George Bernard Shaw | |||
| One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. | George Orwell | |||
| There is nothing more terrifying than ignorance in action. | Goethe | |||
| Greed is good. | Gordon Gekko | |||
| No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. | Helmuth von Moltke the Elder | |||
| The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. | Herbert Spencer | |||
| For every complex problem there is a solution which is straightforward, simple, and wrong. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers. | H.L. Mencken | |||
| There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death. | Isaac Asimov | |||
| The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true. | James Branch Cabell | |||
| Every rooster likes to think it brings the sun up. | James Oberg | |||
| It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life. | Jean Luc Picard | |||
| It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard... is what makes it great. | Jimmy Dugan | |||
| Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action. | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | |||
| An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. | John Gardner | |||
| Of the various fundamentalist belief systems I encounter, absolute atheism may be the most blindly sure of itself. | John Perry Barlow | |||
| All bad precedents begin as justifiable measures. | Julius Caesar | |||
| Trivial facts are often the best hints to what is going on. | J.M. Roberts | |||
| In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car. | Larry Summers, president of Harvard | |||
| Everybody thinks of changing humanity and nobody thinks of changing himself. | Leo Tolstoy | |||
| The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him. | Leo Tolstoy | |||
| The first and last battleground is the mind. All else is just maneuvering. | Lois McMaster Bujold | |||
| Save me, oh God, from people who have no sense of humor. | Ludlow Porch | |||
| The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot. | Ludwig von Mises | |||
| ...there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. | Machiavelli, The Prince | |||
| The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated. | Mahatma Gandhi | |||
| Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. | Mahatma Gandhi | |||
| You may chain a man, but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him but you will not conquer his spirit. | Margaret Thatcher | |||
| Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. | Mark Twain | |||
| The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either. | Mark Twain | |||
| The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so. | Mark Twain | |||
| There isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights. | Mark Twain | |||
| There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions. | Milton Friedman | |||
| An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. | Niels Bohr | |||
| The ultimate inspiration is the deadline. | Nolan Bushnell | |||
| Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. | Phillip K. Dick | |||
| But an invention is something that was 'impossible' up to then--that's why governments grant patents. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| If you pray hard enough, water will run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Most people can't think, most of the remainder won't think, and the small fraction who do think mostly can't do it very well. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| Psychologists once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find. The ape escaped a fifth way. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| The hardest part of gaining any new idea is sweeping out the false idea occupying that niche. | Robert A. Heinlein | |||
| You are entitled to your own opinion but you are not entitled to your own facts. | Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan | |||
| The genius of a construction lies in its simplicity. Everybody can build complicated things. | Sergei P. Korolev | |||
| Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. | Silas Mitchell | |||
| The bane of our age is not intolerance, but a fuzzy-minded wishy-washy kind of tolerance based upon the notions that there's something good about everyone and deep down everyone is just like us. Well, there isn't, and they aren't. | Steve Stirling | |||
| To sit home, read one's favorite newspaper, and scoff at the misdeeds of the men who do things is easy, but it is markedly ineffective. It is what evil men count upon the good men's doing. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war. | Theodore Roosevelt | |||
| From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day. From his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce. | Thomas A. Edison | |||
| You will have many opportunities in life to keep your mouth shut: You should take advantage of every one of them. | Thomas A. Edison | |||
| Half the harm that is done in the world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't want to do harm—but the harm does not interest them . . . or they do not see it . . . because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves. | T.S. Eliot | |||
| Civilizations fail not because of a single bad mistake, but because of a series of bad mistakes. | Walter Cronkite | |||
| Life is not fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all. | William Goldman | |||
| Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival. | W. Edwards Deming | |||
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