Some Quotes

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” – Dante Alighieri

“When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell.” – Brian Aldiss

“I am always fascinated when people talk about ‘the forging of a nation’. Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so.” – Neal Ascherson

“Find your purpose and make it your identity; don’t find an identity and then make it your purpose.” – Iyad el-Baghdadi

“Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.” – Bernard Baruch

“We must laugh before we are happy, for fear we die before we laugh at all.” – Jean de La Bruyère

“How can there be laughter, how can there be pleasure, when the whole world is burning?” – Buddha

“If a thing is worth doing at all, it is worth doing, even badly.” – William S Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads

“Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don’t go in for politics.” – Albert Camus

“Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.” – Albert Camus

“A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.” – Albert Camus

“The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” – Pablo Casals

“With thy right eye create all for thyself and with the left accept all that be created otherwise” – Alastair Crowley

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” – Charles Darwin

“Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.” – Denis Diderot

“With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.” – Desiderata, Max Ehrmann

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” – Albert Einstein

“If the gods have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not all-powerful.  If they are neither able nor willing, they are neither all-powerful or benevolent.  If they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, why does it exist?” – Epicurus

“Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?” – Euripides

“Events will take their course, it is no good of being angry at them; he is happiest who wisely turns them to the best account.” – Euripides

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” – Paulo Freire

“Idealism increases in direct proportion to one’s distance from the problem.” – John Galsworthy

“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson

“The street finds its own uses for things.” – William Gibson

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” – Antonio Gramsci

“Debi: You know what you need?
Marty: What?
Debi: Shakabuku.
Marty: You wanna tell me what that means?
Debi: It’s a swift, spiritual kick to the head that alters your reality forever.
Marty: Oh, that’d be good. I think.” – Grosse Point Blank

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” – Evelyn Beatrice Hall

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.” – Dune ‘Litany Against Fear’, Frank Herbert

“Turns out, life’s a little bit more complicated than a slogan on a bumper sticker. Real life is messy. We all have limitations. We all make mistakes. Which means, hey, glass half full, we all have a lot in common. And the more we try to understand one another, the more exceptional each of us will be. But we have to try. So no matter what kind of person you are, I implore you: Try. Try to make the world a better place. Look inside yourself and recognize that change starts with you.” – Judy Hops, Zootopia

“Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world. I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth.” – Lynne Kelly

“America is just the country that shows how all the written guarantees in the world for freedom are no protection against tyranny and oppression of the worst kind.” – Peter Kropotkin

“They see a race of law-makers legislating without knowing what their laws are about; legislating at random in all directions, but never forgetting the penalties to be meted out to ragamufffins, the prison and the galleys, which are to be the portion of men a thousand times less immoral than these legislators themselves.” – Peter Kropotkin

“When we see how voluntary societies invade everything and are only impeded in their development by the State, we are forced to recognize a powerful tendency, a latent force in modern society.” – Peter Kropotkin

“One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another.” – Gustav Landauer

“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” – Dennis Leigh (attr.)

“Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.” – C. S. Lewis

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” – C. S. Lewis

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country… corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.” – Abraham Lincoln (but read this too)

“We think we understand the rules when we become adults but what we really experienced is a narrowing of the imagination.” – David Lynch

“Education is the great engine of personal development. It is through education that the daughter of a peasant can become a doctor, that the son of a mineworker can become the head of the mine, that a child of farmworkers can become the president of a great nation. It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.” – Nelson Mandela

“No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.” – Nelson Mandela

“I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness.” – Nelson Mandela

“Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. ” – W. Somerset Maugham

“Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.” – H.L. Mencken

“Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.” – George Jean Nathan

“As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.” – George Orwell

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.” – George Orwell

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.” – George Orwell

“A free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.” – George Orwell

“I have no particular love for the idealised “”worker”” as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.” – George Orwell

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” – Thomas Paine

“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.” – Thomas Paine

“There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.” – Thomas Paine

“Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.” – Thomas Paine

“Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first a patron, the last a punisher.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

“People who say ‘write what you know’ are afraid to make shit up.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“He who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself.” – Plato

“Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear – and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!” – Principia Discordia

“To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right nor the knowledge nor the virtue.” – Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

“There are two great powers and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.” – Philip Pullman

“The free market is ugly and stupid, like going to the mall; the unfree market is just as ugly and just as stupid, except there is nothing in the mall and if you don’t go there they shoot you.” – P.J. O’Rourke

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” – Bertrand Russell

“Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of the astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.” – Carl Sagan

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.” – George Santayana

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious – makes you so sick at heart – that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” – Mario Savio

“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.” – George Bernard Shaw

“You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.” – George Bernard Shaw

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number;
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you;
Ye are many – they are few.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy

“It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion.” – Adam Smith

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” – Adam Smith

“All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.” – Logan Pearshall Smith

“It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable – he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated.” – Leo Tolstoy

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.” – Mark Twain

“I wish I was a glow worm,
A glow worm’s never glum,
‘cos how can you be grumpy,
when the sun shines out your bum?” – Unknown

“The period of Prohibition — called the noble experiment — brought on the greatest breakdown of law and order the United States has known until today. I think there is a lesson here. Do not regulate the private morals of people. Do not tell them what they can take or not take. Because if you do, they will become angry and antisocial and they will get what they want from criminals who are able to work in perfect freedom because they have paid off the police.” – Voltaire

“I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer. I didn’t know that. I supposed I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labelled ‘science fiction’ ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal. The way a person gets into this drawer, apparently, is to notice technology. The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown suit in the city.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.” – Horace Walpole

“My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.” – Robert Anton Wilson

“There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled — by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.” – Robert Anton Wilson, Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy (The Trick Top Hat)

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” – W. B. Yeats

“Self-confidence is not a feeling of superiority, but of independence.” – Lama Yeshe

“Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” – Frank Zappa

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.” – Noam Chomsky

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.” – Carl Sagan

“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.” – Cicero

“I think it’s better to have ideas. You can change an idea.  Changing a belief is trickier.  Life should be malleable and progressive, working from idea to idea permits that.  Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth.  New ideas can’t generate. Life becomes stagnant.” – Rufus (Chris Rock), Dogma

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” – Albert Einstein

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.” – Gore Vidal, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

“The concept of race must be rejected not for its misuse for political reasons, but because many decades of scientific research has demonstrated that it is scientifically misleading in evaluating human biological variability.” – Gianfranco Biondi/Olga Rickards, The Scientific Fallacy of the Human Biological Concept of Race