Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.

--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

The essential ingredient of politics is timing.

--Pierre Elliott Trudeau

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

What is history but a fable agreed upon?

--Napoleon Bonaparte

There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.

--J. Robert Oppenheimer

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

--James A. Baldwin

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

--Robin Williams

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked for forgiveness.

--Emo Philips, (1956- )

But then it must be asked if we can remove cultural value from one part of our lives without destroying it also in the other parts.  Can we justify secrecy, lying, and burglary in our so-called intelligence organizations and yet preserve openness, honesty, and devotion to principle in the rest of our government?  Can we subsidize mayhem in the military establishment and yet have peace, order, and respect for human life in the city streets?  Can we degrade all forms of essential work and yet expect arts and graces to flourish on weekends?

--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

--Alexis de Tocqueville

The law an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

--Mohandes Gandhi

There's two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery.

--Enrico Fermi

Modes of production establish constraints with which humanity must come to terms, and the constraints of the industrial mode of production are peculiarly demanding...Industrial production...confronts men with machines that embody "imperatives" if they are to be used at all, and these imperatives lead easily to the organization of work, of life, even of thought, in ways that accommodate men to machines rather than the much more difficult alternative.

--Robert Heilbroner, The Human Prospect

During the past century the successive advances in technology have been accompanied by corresponding advances in organization. Complicated machinery has had to be matched by complicated social arrangements, designed to work as smoothly and efficiently as the new instruments of production.

--Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

--Albert Einstein

No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.

--Jacob Bronowski

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

--Malcom X

For some time now ecologists have been documenting the principle that "you can't do one thing"--which means that in a natural system whatever affects one thing ultimately affects everything.  Everything in the creation is related to everything else and dependent on everything else.  The creation is one; it is a uni-verse, a whole, the parts of which are all "turned into one."

--Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

A society that defines immediate productivity and efficiency as ultimate value, that judges all by these standards, cannot afford concern for tradition, environment, or wider social concern.

--Anonymous