We have met the enemy and he is us.
--Pogo (Walt Kelly, cartoonist, 1913-1973)
Between two evils I always pick the one I never tried before.
--Mae West
The forces that affect our lives, the influences that mold and shape us, are often like whispers in a distant room, teasingly indistinct, apprehended only with difficulty.
--Charles Dickens
Language is not neutral. It is not merely a vehicle which carries ideas. It is itself a shaper of ideas.
--Dale Spender, (1943- )
Don't worry about avoiding temptation... as you grow older, it will avoid you.
--Winston Churchill
History is the study of the world's crime.
--Voltaire (1694-1778)
I am free of all prejudices. I hate everyone equally.
--W. C. Fields
The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
--James Branch Cabell, (1879-1958)
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.
--Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Whatever you do will be insignificant. But it is very important that you do it.
--Gandhi
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
--Aldous Huxley
The palest ink is better than the best memory.
- -Chinese proverb
It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
--Moliere, (1622-1673)
You see things and you say 'why?" But I dream things that never were and I say 'why not?'
--George Bernard Shaw
Social research of any kind is advanced by ideas, it is only disciplined by fact.
--C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959
People at present think that five sons are not too many and each son also has five sons...Therefore people are more and wealth is less; they work hard and receive little.
--Han Fei-Tzu, 500 B.C.
I believe that what may be called classic social analysis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles.
--C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959
Eschew Obfuscation.
--Anonymous
Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity's governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of creation, we began to mechanize both the creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.
--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, "Thus far and no farther."
--Ludwig van Beethoven, (1770-1827)
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
-Leonardo da Vinci, (1452-1519)
Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.
--Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
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