--Leonardo Da Vinci, (1452-1519)

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little. 

--John Kenneth Galbraith, (1908- )

Do you know what a pessimist is? A person who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates them for it. 

--George Bernard Shaw

I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.

--Abraham Lincoln, (1809-1865)

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. 

--Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1958

Listen or thy tongue will keep thee deaf. 

--American Indian Proverb

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

--George Santayana, (1863-1952)

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.

--Joseph Joubert, (1754-1824)

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

--George Washington, (1732-1799)

In democracy it's your vote that counts; In feudalism it's your count that votes.

- Mogens Jallberg

Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.

--Arthur Schopenhauer, (1788-1860)

Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.

--Jesse Lee Bennett

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. 

--Robert Louis Stevenson

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously. 

--Samuel Butler

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

--Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

--Mark Twain, (1835-1910)

Night fell again. There was war to the south, but our sector was quiet. The battle was over. Our casualties were some thirteen thousand killed--thirteen thousand minds, memories, loves, sensations, worlds, universes--because the human mind is more a universe than the universe itself--and all for a few hundred yards of useless mud. 

--John Fowles [The Magus, 1965]

What's done to children, they will do to society.

--Karl A. Menninger, (1893-1990)

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

--H.L. Mencken, (1880-1956)

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour

Rains from the sky, a meteoric shower

                        Of facts. . . .

They lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun, but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay