Quotes

Quotes

History

History Religion Politics Demagoguery Ideas Economics

"It is only those that are profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret 'the good old times'."
-Marquis Françios-Jean de Chastellux (1734-1788)
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.
-Alexander Fraser Tytler, 1747-1813
probably not by Tytler, it seems to date from about 1950

It is not, perhaps, unreasonable to conclude, that a pure and perfect democracy is a thing not attainable by man, constituted as he is of contending elements of vice and virtue, and ever mainly influenced by the predominant principle of self-interest. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted, that there never was that government called a republic, which was not ultimately ruled by a single will, and, therefore, (however bold may seem the paradox,) virtually and substantially a monarchy.
-Alexander Fraser Tytler, 1747-1813 from his Universal History
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.
-Mark Twain
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.  We're no longer interested in finding out the truth.  The bamboozle has captured us.  It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken.  Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
-Carl Sagan from The Demon-Haunted World


Religion

History Religion Politics Demagoguery Ideas
"For many years I have observed that the moralist typically substitutes anger for perception. He hopes that many people will mistake his irritation for insight...The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about 'values' then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?...Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity."
-Marshall McLuhan
"Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate."
-Bertrand Russell
"Of all the tyrannies, tyranny in religion is the worst."
-Thomas Paine
"A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side."
-Aristotle
"The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a lunatic asylum."
-Thomas Paine
"The Church says the Earth is flat.
But I know that it is Round.
For I have seen the shadow on the Moon,
And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church"
-Ferdinand Magellan
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
-H.L. Mencken.
Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity. Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities. Outlawed by all governments everywhere. Possession is normally punishable by death.
-John Gilmore
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
-Blaise Pascal
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, had intended for us to forgo their use.
-Galileo
I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoiint him or the people who might elect him.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish, where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose it's will directly or indirectly upon the public populace or the public acts of its officials--where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."
-John F. Kennedy, Sept 12, 1960
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot.
-Thomas Jefferson
In morals, what begins with fear usually ends in wickdness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
Anna Jameson (1794-1860)
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
-George Bernard Shaw
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca 3-65 AD (Seneca the Younger)
Faith may defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
-H. L. Mencken
I don't want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.
-Rev. Billy Graham, Parade, 1981
"Patriotism too often means concealing a world of error and wrong judgement beneath the flag."
-Lyndon Baines Johnson
"A wise person changes his mind, a fool never will."
-Abraham Lincoln
It is irresponsible in a time of war, or any time for that matter, to attack or defend unthinkingly or because partisan identification is one's supreme interest. But it is not responsible or right to shrink from offering thoughtful criticism when and to whom it is due, and when the consequences of incompletely understanding failures of governance are potentially catastrophic. On the contrary, such timidity is indefensibly irresponsible especially in times of war, so irresponsible that it verges on the unpatriotic
-Senator John McCain.
Washington Post, May 22, 2002
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." Soon it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
-Abraham Lincoln.
August 24, 1855
Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
-Abraham Lincoln.
December 3, 1861
Those willing to give up a little liberty for a little security deserve neither security nor liberty.
-Benjamin Franklin
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
-Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1791. ME 8:276
The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.
-Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823. ME 15:491
The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers.
-Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp
Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632
What Country can preserve it's liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time that it's people preserve the spirit of resistance.
-Thomas Jefferson
The true barriers of our liberty in this country are our state governments...
-Thomas Jefferson
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-George Bernard Shaw
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-Molly Ivins.
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
-William O. Douglas.
Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
-Albert Einstein
the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
-Samuel P. Huntington
There is no such thing as a left or a right. There is only an up or down. Man's old age dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistant with law and order, or down to the antheap of totalitariansm. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade their freedom for security are embarking on this downward choice.
-Ronald Reagan Oct 27, 1964
Liberty has never come from government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is the history of resistance.
-Woodrow Wilson
In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.
-Friedrich Nietzshe
We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
-Carl Sagan
Politcal satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
-Tom Lehrer
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women.
-Billings Learned Hand, 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals 1924-51
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny spliter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them [are a few] Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
-Dwight Eisenhower, in a letter to his brother, 8 Nov 1954.
"Nothing is so common as to imitate one's enemies, and to use their weapons"
-Voltaire
"It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it."
-Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
Elected prime minister of Burma 1990,
imprisoned by ruling Junta ever since.
Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability
-Cicero
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
-Groucho Marx
No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
-H. L. Mencken
There is always a well-known solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong.
-H. L. Mencken
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right
-H. L. Mencken
The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.
-H. L. Mencken
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
-H. L. Mencken
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
Although is is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
-John Stuart Mill
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
-Jerry Pournelle
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-H. L. Mencken
It may be true...that "you can't fool all the people all the time,", but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.
-Will & Ariel Durant
The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned, generation.
-William T. Gossett, 1969, President ABA
Our Republic and it's press will rise or fall together. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will in time produce a people as base as itself.
-Joseph Pulitzer, 1904
Naturally, the common people don't want war, but they can be brought to the bidding of the leaders. Tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and endangering the country. It works the same in every country.
-Herman Goering, at the Nuremberg Trials
If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.
-Adolf Hitler
Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.
-Adolf Hitler
The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.
-Adolf Hitler Men Kampf (1925)
It is a true saying that "One falsehood leads easily to another"
-Cicero
Common sense is the collection of prejudices collected by age 18.
-Albert Einstein 
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

--Lord Acton
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.
--Lord Acton
Property is not the sacred right.  When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, not a moral evil.  When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
--Lord Acton
A man who does not know the truth is just an idiot but a man who knows the truth and calls it a lie is a crook!
--Bertolt Brecht
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
--Henry Ford

Ideas

History Religion Politics Demagoguery Ideas Economics
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow.
-Charles Brower
Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.
-Pete Seeger
"The sign of a truly educated man is to be deeply moved by statistics"
-George Bernard Shaw
"Le mieu est l'ennemi du bien." "The perfect is the enemy of the good."
-Voltaire
It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.
Nicolo Machiavelli
from The Prince (1513)
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
-Sinclair Lewis
Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people;
-Eleanor Roosevelt

Economics

History Religion Politics Demagoguery Ideas Economics

A business which does nothing but make money is a poor business
-Henry Ford
Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is why so few engage in it
-Henry Ford
A business which is absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits: They will be embarrassingly large.
-Henry Ford
A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
-Henry Ford

1 comment:

  1. Bob DunningMay 27, 2014 at 10:17 PM

    The whole world is a Rorschach blot. The things we choose to repeat and propagate say more about ourselves than they say about the world as a whole.

    ReplyDelete

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