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

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Saturday Quotathon: Gandhi

For those of you keeping track, I "finished" my novel, except it's not quite done. But it's close. Hopefully, this weekend. I actually walked both yesterday and Thursday, but I focused on the novel (4500 words yesterday), instead of blogging. When I've got it finished up, I'll be able to do more blogging. In the meantime, how about a bit of wisdom from Gandhi?

Corruption ought not to be an inevitable product of democracy.
-Mahatma Gandhi

I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.
-Mahatma Gandhi

To call woman the weaker sex is a libel; it is man's injustice to woman. If by strength is meant brute strength, then, indeed, is woman less brute than man. If by strength is meant moral power, then woman is immeasurably man's superior. Has she not greater intuition, is she not more self-sacrificing, has she not greater powers of endurance, has she not greater courage? Without her, man could not be. If nonviolence is the law of our being, the future is with woman. Who can make a more effective appeal to the heart than woman?
-Mahatma Gandhi

For this cause I too am prepared to die, but for no cause, my friend, will I be prepared to kill.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Passive resistance is an all-sided sword; it can be used anyhow; it blesses him who uses it and him against whom it is used.
-Mahatma Gandhi

We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right.
-Mahatma Gandhi

If one has no affection for a person or a system, one should feel free to give the fullest expression to his disaffection so long as he does not contemplate, promote, or incite violence.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth.
-Mahatma Gandhi

If we were to drive out the English with the weapons with which they enslaved us, our slavery would still be with us even when they have gone.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and off at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.
-Mahatma Gandhi

There is no way to peace; peace is the way.
-Mahatma Gandhi

An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.
-Mahatma Gandhi

A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Truth never damages a cause that is just.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Hope is eternal - Its worship never goes in vain.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Speak only if it improves upon the silence.
-Mahatma Gandhi

If one is able to stop smoking, he may continue, if he is unable to quit, then he must!
-Mahatma Gandhi

I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong.
-Mahatma Gandhi

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.
-Mahatma Gandhi

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Saturday Quotations: History, Wisdom, Authority

Eh, why not?

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
--Aldous Huxley

It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough.
--Adam Smith

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
--Robert Louis Stevenson

Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
--Mark Twain

As one reads history... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.
--Oscar Wilde

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die out, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
-- Max Planck

As long as we're going to reinvent the wheel again, we might as well try making it round this time.
-- Mike Dennison

Be ever questioning. Ignorance is not bliss. It is oblivion. You don't go to heaven if you die dumb. Become better informed. Learn from others' mistakes. You could not live long enough to make them all yourself.
-- Admiral Hyman Rickover

Collective judgment of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgment despite collective disapproval.
-- W.A. Lewis

Despite its suffix, skepticism is not an "ism" in the sense of a belief or dogma. It is simply an approach to the problem of telling what is counterfeit and what is genuine. And a recognition of how costly it may be to fail to do so. To be a skeptic is to cultivate "street smarts" in the battle for control of one's own mind, one's own money, one's own allegiances. To be a skeptic, in short, is to refuse to be a victim.
-- Robert S. DeBear

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity
-- Jenny Holzer

"Experts," whose careers and celebrity status depend upon the existence of a problem, can write about the problem, consult about it, and speak about it on talk shows -- they can do everything but solve the problem.
-- Robert L. Woodson, Sr.

If we keep treating our most important values as meaningless relics, that's exactly what they'll become.
-- Michael Josephson

Information is just signs and numbers, while knowledge involves their meaning. What we want is knowledge, but what we get is information.
-- Heinz R. Pagels

Intellectual brilliance is no guarantee against being dead wrong.
-- David Fasold

I like to keep an open mind, but not so open my brains fall out.
-- Arthur Sulzberger

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
-- Michael Crichton


Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.
-- Edward de Bono

Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.
-- James Robinson

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
-- James Baldwin

Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
-- Demosthenes

Security can only be achieved through constant change, through discarding old ideas that have outlived their usefulness and adapting others to current facts.
-- William O. Douglas

What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!
-Robert Heinlein

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
-Albert Einstein

A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted. The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense. Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt. The "taken for granted" is the test of sanity; "what everyone knows" is the line between us and them.
This means that sometimes a society gets stuck. Sometimes these unquestioned ideas interfere, as the cost of questioning becomes too great. In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.
-Lawrence Lessig

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