Favourite Quotes

I have decided to start keeping track of quotes I run across that really speak to me.

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

~ William Paley

As the area of our knowledge grows, so too does the perimeter of our ignorance.

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

"You must construct additional morons"
(fictional) Quote from Trumpcraft - A (fictional) dystopian political battle game

~ Khaos WolfKat

Speak when you’re angry and you’ll make the best speech you’ll ever regret.

~ Laurence J. Peter

A man’s only choice when he learned of the great inequality of the world was to decide if he would break under that knowledge or go on.

~ Wong, Tao. (A Thousand Li: the First Step: Book 1 Of A Xianxia Cultivation Series (p. 86). Kindle Edition.)

To do nothing is failure. To try, and in the trying you make some mistakes, and then you make some positive changes as a result of those mistakes, is to learn and to grow and to blossom.

~ Darlene Larson Jenks

One deceit needs many others, and so the whole house is built in the air and must soon come crashing down.

~ Baltasar Gracian

Grief is just love with no place to go.

~ Jamie Anderson

 Yet that glorious promise had died. Not at the hands of foreign conquerors or barbarians from the marches, but in its sleep, victim of the best of motives. It had sacrificed itself upon the altar of equality. Not the equality of opportunity, but of outcomes. It had looked upon its own wealth and the inevitable inequities of any human society and decided to rectify them, and somehow the lunatics had taken over the asylum. They'd transformed the Republic into the People's Republic—a vast, crazed machine that promised everyone more and better of everything, regardless of their own contributions to the system. And, in the process, they'd built a bureaucratic Titan locked into a headlong voyage to self-destruction and capable of swallowing reformers like gnats.

~ Weber, David. Flag in Exile (Honor Harrington Book 5) (p. 77). Baen Books. Kindle Edition.

A closed mouth gathers no foot.

~ Anonymous

“That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

~ P.C. Hodgell (Seeker's Mask )

“The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak becomes a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong."

~ Thomas Carlyle

"When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose lives are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home." - Tecumseh

~ Toby Neighbors (Lorik The Defender - The Lorik Trilogy Book 3)

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.”

~ Isaac Asimov

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom."

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."

~ Arthur Ashe

"Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom."

~ Thomas Jefferson

"Alcohol is the only fluid that dissolves in the dignity of man."

~ Mark Twain

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Delay is preferable to error."

~ Thomas Jefferson

"Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle."

~ Thomas Jefferson

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education."

~ Thomas Jefferson

"Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state."

~ Thomas Jefferson

"But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!"

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others."

~ Bertrand Russell

"We have, in fact, two kinds of morality side by side: one which we preach but do not practice, and another which we practice but seldom preach."

~ Bertrand Russell

"There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it."

~ Denis Diderot

"Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return."

~ Jonathan Haidt

"Morality is herd instinct in the individual."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

“Difficulties mastered are opportunities won”

~ Winston Churchill

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”

~ Plato

“Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.”

~ James Dean

"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."

~ Jean de La Fontaine

"Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through. Struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums."

~ Captain James T. Kirk, USS Enterprise

"There is nothing noble in being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self."

~ Indian Proverb

"you know what a real friend does when he's got a secret? He keeps his mouth shut."

~ character on television series, "Lie to Me".

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

~ Lao Tzu

The power of Christ compelled me to wear pantyhose.

~ Wandarella
(during a discussion regarding religious fanatic assholes teaching parents how to "cure" their children of their non gender normative tendencies)

"To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

~ Thomas Paine

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

~ L. Mencken

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"A belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind."

~ Robert Oxton Bolton

“Live so that when your children think of fairness and integrity, they think of you.”

~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

“Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact”

~ Honore de Balzac

“It is what a man thinks of himself that really determines his fate.”

~ Henry David Thoreau

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”

~ Abraham Lincoln

“Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.”

~ Arthur Golden

"Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds."

~ Franklin D. Roosevelt

“It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”

~Sally Kempton

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

~ Galileo Galilei

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

~ Galileo Galilei

“Smoking cigars is like falling in love. First, you are attracted by its shape; you stay for its flavour, and you must always remember never, never to let the flame go out!”

~ Winston Churchill

"Nothing is as strong as gentleness; Nothing is so gentle as true strength."

~ Ralph Sockman

" Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

~ Cyril Connolly (1903 - 1974)

"Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars."

~ Kahlil Gibran

"When love is in excess it brings a man no honor nor worthiness."

~ Euripides, Medea, 431 B.C.