Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
--Arthur Schopenhauer , philosopher (1788-1860)
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief ... that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
--Walter Lippman, (1889-1974)
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.
--Carl Sagan, (1934-1996)
The living are soft and yielding; the dead are rigid and stiff. Living plants are flexible and tender; the dead are brittle and dry.
--Lao Tzu, (6th century BCE)
God made man to go by motives, and he will not go without them, any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.
--Henry Ward Beecher
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship.
--Louisa May Alcott
If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
--Seneca
Do not believe that it is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as fast.
--Peter Drucker, (1909-2005)
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
--Gilbert Highet, writer (1906-1978)
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.
--Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790)
I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.
--Thomas Jefferson, (1743-1826)
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
--Charles Darwin, (1809-1882)
When Democrats open their mouths, they try to say something interesting. If the true thing is obvious and boring, the liberal person will go off and say something original, even if it is completely idiotic. This is how deconstructionism got started.
--David Brooks
The best writing is rewriting.
--E. B. White, (1899-1985)
Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
--John Adams, (1735-1826)
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
--Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)
The important fact of the present time is not the struggle between capitalism and socialism but the struggle between industrial civilization and humanity.
--Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970)
One need not have been Caesar in order to understand Caesar.
--Max Weber, (1978: 5)
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
--Bill Moyers, 2004
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
--Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
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