RS Classics: Saturday Quote-a-thon - Words of Wisdom I

So, since we were dealing with an angsty teen, I decided to provide the kind of words of wisdom the young are so unlikely to heed until it’s too late. Or maybe I’m doing them a disservice. These are among my favorites, though I should add that I have many more. It’s just the tip of the iceberg and all for you to enjoy.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
–Albert Einstein

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
–Dwight D. Eisenhower

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
–William Faulkner

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
–Douglas Adams

The blackest billingsgate, the most ungentlemanly insolence, the most yahooist brutality, is patently endured, countenanced, propagated, and applauded. But touch a solemn truth in collision with the dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes.
–John Adams

It is ridiculous to lay the blame of our wrong actions upon external causes, rather than on the facility with which we ourselves are caught by such causes.
-Aristotle

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
–Frederic Bastiat

As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.
–Josh Billings

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
–Daniel Boorstin

Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.
–Heywood Broun

Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable. However, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.
–Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield

You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.
–Winston Churchill

Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.
–Charles Caleb Colton

Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.
–Clarence Darrow

Why are CEO’s who slash jobs so proud of themselves? Instead of bragging about “cutting fat,” they ought to be getting up before their employees and saying, “We did such a lousy job of planning and hiring that we have more people than work. And we are so broke and so dim-witted that we can’t come up with any way to get more work. So our only solution is to send a lot of good people home. I am ashamed and I am sorry.”
–Dale Dauten

Let no man turn aside, ever so slightly, from the broad path of honor, on the plausible pretence that he is justified by the goodness of his end. All good ends can be worked out by good means.
–Charles Dickens

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
–Fyodor Doestoyvsky

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.
–Peter Drucker

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
–Thomas Edison