The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. 

--Samuel Johnson, (1709-1784)

It’s interesting to read the archives of Nazi Germany, fascist Japan, the Soviet Union. The leaders are acting from the highest imaginable motives, and probably believed it. It is remarkably easy to come to believe what it is convenient to believe. That’s the secret of being a "responsible intellectual,” someone who serves power abjectly while believing oneself to be an independent thinker.

--Noam Chomsky

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on. 

--Joseph Heller, (1923-1999)

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

--William Butler Yeats, (1865-1939)

A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.

--Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (1935- )

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. 

--Carl Jung, (1875-1961)

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

-Harper Lee, (1926- )

I do not believe that women are better than men. We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislature, nor done many unholy things that men have done; but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.

--Jane Addams

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. 

--George Bernard Shaw, (1856-1950)

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can't - you're right. 

--Henry Ford

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

--Pearl S. Buck, (1892-1973)

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

--Robert Maynard Hutchins, educator (1899-1977)

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. 

--Salman Rushdie, (1947- )

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights. 

--Henry David Thoreau

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled. 

--Barnett Cocks

A teacher who is attempting to teach, without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn, is hammering on a cold iron.

--Horace Mann, (1796-1859)

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. 

--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. 

--James McNeill Whistler, painter (1834-1903)

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

--Francis Bacon, (1561-1626)

The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.

--Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)

Let the gods avenge themselves.

--Roman law maxim, on blasphemy