The Haversian Canal

The complete list, which Vagabox split over five pages. Note: while I recognize some of these, they have not been systematically verified.

I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
~ Stephen Roberts

Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
~ Charles Elachi

If you can conceive of morality without god, why can you not conceive of society without government?
~ Peter Saint-André

When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist.
~ Archbishop Helder Camara

I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.
~ Harry S Truman, 1961

Man is certainly stark mad: he cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.
~ Michel de Montaigne

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
~ Albert Einstein

Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
~ Nietzsche

We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us?
~ Abraham Lincoln

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
~ Denis Diderot

The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scale.
~ Aesop

Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
~ Steve Eley

All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Take only memories; leave nothing but footprints.
~ Chief Seattle

Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem.
~ Howard Zinn

They made a wasteland and called it peace.
~ Tacitus

Religion, comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.
~ Sigmund Freud

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
~ Anatole France

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
~ Mohandas Gandhi

The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but can’t afford an air force.
~ William Blum

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be ... surer of the noose than a private homicide.
~ H. G. Wells

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
~ Abraham Lincoln

A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
~ Albert Einstein

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
~ Oscar Wilde

When you philosophically oppose an entire power elite, you cannot help but sound like a conspiracy theorist. Social power is by nature a conspiracy.
~ Tom N

Humanity without religion is like a serial killer without a chainsaw.
~ Unknown

In all the disputes, which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning powers.
~ Voltaire

Because I do it with one small ship, I am called a terrorist (pirate?). You do it with a whole fleet and are called an emperor.
~ St. Augustine

Insanity in individuals is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.
~ Nietzsche

If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
~ Thomas Szasz

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
~ Napoleon

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
~ George Orwell

It is not so much the suffering as the senselessness of it that is unendurable.
~ Nietzsche

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.
~ Albert Einstein

You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do.
~ [Usenet]

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
~ Henry David Thoreau

One man's magic is another man's engineering. Supernatural is a null word.
~ Robert Heinlein

We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
~ Gene Roddenberry

A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.
~ Elbert Hubbard

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
~ Bertrand Russell

Men who believe absurdities will commit atrocities.
~ Voltaire

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

Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth.
~ Lucy Parsons

If child molestation is actually your concern, how come we don't see Bradley tanks knocking down Catholic churches?
~ Bill Hicks, 1993, referencing the Waco siege

Do you see now that your self-righteousness was nothing more than breeding and years of privilege? You know, we are one nation under a god. Yes, you were right. An angry, crack slinging god who decorates with bullets and spent condoms, a blind god whose eyes are just like yours.
~ Solipsist by Henry Rollins

The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
~ Prophet Muhammad

The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.
~ Ivan Illich

… The biggest detractors of communism and socialism always seem to want to embrace the worst excesses of both.
~

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a god.
~ Jean Rostand

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith ... we need believing people.
~ Adolf Hitler

I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Men are not punished for their sins, but by them.
~ Elbert G Hubbard

Unless Americans come to realize that they are not stronger in the world because they have the bomb but weaker because of their vulnerability to atomic attack, they are not likely to conduct their policy, in a spirit that furthers the arrival at an understanding.
~ Albert Einstein

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~ George Bernard Shaw

The same people that wrote the bible thought the world was flat.
~ Unknown

Stopping terrorism is simple. Just quit screwing around with other people's countries and the terrorists will go home. But the government of the United States wants to go on screwing around with other people's countries, refuses to stop, indeed views it as Manifest Destiny for the United States Government to persist in screwing around with other people's countries, and views the inconvenience, increased tax burden, loss of civil liberties, and even deaths among the American people as just another cost of doing business.
~ Michael Rivero

If god created us in his image we have certainly returned the compliment.
~ Voltaire

Git yer guns, the liberal folks are gonna let the coloreds vote!
~ Unknown

Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
~ Satchel Paige

Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
~ Scottish proverb

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be kind; everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
~ Plato

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.
~ Joseph Heller

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
~ Voltaire

Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.
~ John Maynard Keynes

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
~ Susan B. Anthony

I am tired of fighting, our chiefs are killed...it is cold and we have no blankets. The little children are freezing to death...hear me, my chiefs, I am tired: my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands...I will fight no more forever...
~ Chief Joseph, before his tribe was slaughtered

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.
~ Orson Scott Card

It is poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
~ Mother Teresa

I'm ineffably tired of pro-war ideologues moaning about how the anti-war folk are just 'complaining' without 'offering solutions' to global dilemmas. Peace doesn't need a freekin moral, ethical, economical, or political qualification; war does. Peace doesn't ravage, plunder, rape, or kill; war does. Peace does not need justification, war does.
~ <|OnAir|>

History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
~ Ambrose Bierce

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.
~ Aleister Crowley

Laurel and Hardy, that's John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise because all the serious people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.
~ John Lennon

Does anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? . . . And do you know how far away he was? . . . Two hundred and fifty feet. He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. He got off three shots with a bolt action rifle in six seconds, and got two hits, including a head shot. Do you know where those men learned to shoot like that? . . . In the Marines! Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
~ Full Metal Jacket

I love talking about the Kennedy assassination. The reason I do is because I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated that our government could lie to us so blatantly, so obviously for so long, and we do absolutely nothing about it.
~ Bill Hicks

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
~ George Orwell
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear, kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor, with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.
~ General Douglas MacArthur

Knowledge, idea, belief stands in the way of wisdom.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

If we'd been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe.
~ A church sign in Northern Ireland

My humble friend, we know not how to live this life which is so short yet seek one that never ends.
~ Anatole France

It makes no difference as to the name of the God, since love is the real God of all in the world.
~ Apache

Statistically one hundred percent of the shots you don't take don't go in.
~ Wayne Gretsky

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Christianity exceeds all other faiths in its power to deform and finally invert the mental process.
~ Ida White

God favors no group. Only religions do that.
~ Bumper Sticker

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
~ Virginia Woolf

The fascist state is the corporate state.
~ Benito Mussolini

Jehovah was not a moral god. He had all the vices and he lacked all the virtues. He generally carried out all his threats, but he never faithfully kept a promise.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Guns make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
~ Nazi Hermann Goering

Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having read the reviews.
~ John Updike

Everyone likes to say Hitler did this and Hitler did that. But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class asshole, but the evil actually done, from the death camps to World War Two, was all done by citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.
~ Michael Rivero

Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.
~ Mark Twain

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
~ Ho Chi Minh, 1945, as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was created

If there has to be a blood bath, let's get it over with.
~Ronald Reagan, Vietnam

You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.
~ Ho Chi Minh

I ain't got no quarrel with the Vietcong ...
No Vietcong ever called me nigger.
~ Muhammad Ali, stripped of boxing title, convicted of a felony for refusing to serve during the Vietnam War

I can envision a small cottage somewhere, with a lot of writing paper, and a dog, and a fireplace and maybe enough money to give myself some Irish coffee now and then and entertain my two friends.
~ Richard Van de Geer, letter, 1975, last American to die in Vietnam War, Time, 1985

If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
~ Katherine Anne Porter

I spent thirty-three years in the marines, most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.
~ General Smedley Butler, Marine

Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.
~ Dalton Trumbo

I dream that someday the United States will be on the side of the peasants in some civil war. I dream that we will be the ones who will help the poor overthrow the rich, who will talk about land reform and education and health facilities for everyone, and that when the Red Cross or Amnesty International comes to count the bodies and take the testimony of women raped, that our side won't be the heavies.
~ Richard Cohen

Throughout the world, on any given day, a man, woman or child is likely to be displaced, tortured, killed or disappeared, at the hands of governments or armed political groups. More often than not, the United States shares the blame.
~ Amnesty International, in its annual report on U.S. Military aid and human rights, 1996

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
~ Malcolm X

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong.
~ Eugene V. Debs

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.
~ John Morley

The Church says that the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
~ Ferdinand Magellan - (disputed)

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
~ Nietzsche

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
~ Tom Robbins

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion.
~ Thomas Paine

I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.
~ James Buchanan

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
~ P. J. O'Rourke

Fascism is capitalism in decay.
~ Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

The police are not here to create disorder. They're here to preserve disorder.
~ Ex-Chicago Mayor Daley during the 1968 riots

We need a common enemy to unite us.
~ Condoleezza Rice, March 2000

I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
~ President George Bush, August 27, 1988

Peace is over rated. Any slave can have peace. Just pick the cotton.
~ TheSong

Pain is certain, suffering is optional.
~ Buddha

When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
~ Jack Gurney - "The Ruling Class"

Could a being create the fifty billion galaxies, each with two hundred billion stars, then rejoice in the smell of burning goat flesh?
~ Ron Patterson

The United States is in no sense founded upon the Christian doctrine.
~ George Washington Administration Treaty

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.
~ Malcolm X

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
~ Stanley Kubrick

The Pope!?! How many divisions has he got?
~ Joseph Stalin

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
~ Jeff Burroughs

It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
~ Albert Einstein

I'm so sick of arming the world, then sending troops over to destroy the fucking arms; you know what I mean? We keep arming these little countries, then we go and blow the shit out of them. We're like the bullies of the world, y'know. We're like Jack Palance in the movie Shane, throwing the pistol at the sheepherder's feet. ‘Pick it up.’ ‘I don't wanna pick it up, mister, you'll shoot me.’ ‘Pick up the gun.’ ‘Mister, I don't want no trouble, I just came downtown here to get some hard rock candy for my kids, some gingham for my wife. I don't even know what gingham is, but she goes through about ten rolls a week of that stuff. I ain't looking for no trouble, Mister.’ ‘Pick up the gun.’ The sheepherder picks up the gun, three shots ring out. ‘You all saw him, he had a gun.’
~ Bill Hicks

Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.
~ Norman Vincent Peale

Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education.
~ Braham Flexner

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
~ General Douglas MacArthur

Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way; stop participating in it.
~ Noam Chomsky

Everyone laughs and cries in the same language.
~ dreamslaughter

I saw a human skull the other day. There was an inscription below it: ‘Look long and hard at me, for I was once as you are and you will soon be as I am.’
~ Unknown

I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’
~ Annie Dillard

Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
~ Charles Dickens

I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work.
~ Adolf Hitler

What do the nationalists say about killers punishing murderers and thieves sentencing looters?
~ Kahlil Gibran

The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies.
~ Voltaire, deathbed, when asked to renounce Satan

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
~ Douglas Adams

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.
~ Oscar Wilde

If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for them Mexicans.
~ Texas politician, Spanish as a second language

The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool.
~ Voltaire

Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
~ Ambrose Bierce

No one rules if no one obeys.
~

Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
~ Louis Brandeis

The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
~ Woodrow Wilson

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
~ Thomas Jefferson

All Bibles are man-made.
~ Thomas Edison

In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos.
~ Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, explaining Nazi policy

I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down. I killed him to reason with him.
~ Henry Rollins

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good and it would spread a lively terror.
~ Winston Churchill commenting on the British use of poison gas against the Iraqis after World War I

How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy!
~ Nietzsche

The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody cares to talk about them.
~ Harold Pinter

How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen.
~ Emma Goldman

You get what anyone gets; you get a lifetime.
~ Death, Neil Gaiman Comic Sandman

To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.
~ Confucius

The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self.
~ Whitney Young

If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone.
~ Jack Handey

All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal.
~ Albert Einstein

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
~ Aesop

In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy.
~ David Korten

The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster, an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self.
~ William Dugger

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
~ Nietzsche

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
~ Mark Twain

In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking?
~ Thomas Carlyle

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own; a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms…
~ Albert Einstein, obituary

In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.
~ Thomas Jefferson

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
~ Carl Sagan

I am amazed how many people on this planet are happy and free and never even saw the US constitution.
~

Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent. Representative government required to speak, lies with impunity.
~ Napoleon

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world, in the field of advertising, and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency. Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious. I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours and we tend to disbelieve ours.
~ A U.S. based Soviet correspondent

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

... The CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over twenty countries.
~ John Stockwell, former CIA official

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.
~ Jean Paul Sartre

If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup.
~ Turkish proverb

... Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.
~ John Foster Dulles

To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
~ Abraham Lincoln

If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
~ Philip K. Dick

As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized.
~ Ohiyesa, Sioux

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad.
~ CIA officer at US Senate hearing on 1963 overthrow of Iraqi Prime Minister Kassem

Those who hate and fight must stop themselves; otherwise it is not stopped.
~ Spock, Day of the Dove

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?
~ Blaise Pascal

I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.
~ Aleister Crowley

The greatest artists of this world are never puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
~ H. L. Mencken

Prohibition goes beyond reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite through legislation. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles this country was founded upon.
~ Abraham Lincoln

It is hard to free fools from chains they revere.
~ Voltaire

There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Where the mountains are of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; not one comfort would be added to the human race.
~ Percy B. Shelley

Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country.
~ Gary Hart, BC Comic Strip

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
~ Nietzsche

Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.
~ Mark Twain

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
~ Sophocles

The truth is more important than the facts.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.
~ Thomas Huxley

The world is divided into people who think they are right.
~ Unknown

Faith is belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
~ Ambrose Bierce

My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pity the warrior that kills all his foe.
~ Star Trek

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
~ Samuel Johnson, English lexicographer, to which Ambrose Bierce replied: ‘I beg to submit that it is the first.’

Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
~ Lenny Bruce

My final point about alcohol, about drugs, about pornography; what business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, fuck or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being whilst on this planet? And for those of you having a little moral dilemma on how to answer this, I'll answer for you. None of your fucking business! Take that to the bank, cash it and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life.
~ Bill Hicks

A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.
~ Plato

War is an instrument entirely insufficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.
~ Thomas Jefferson

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

The wise man will love; all others will desire.
~ Afranius

Christianity makes suffering contagious.
~ Nietzsche

May your fondest wish be granted.
~ Traditional Chinese curse

The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth.
~ Jean de la Bruyère

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.
~ Mark Twain

Life is too short to waste in critical peep or cynic bark, quarrel or reprimand: It will soon be dark.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
~ Nazi Hermann Goering

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
~ Andre Gide

That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude.
~ Alexander Haig

Truth is for the minority.
~ Baltasar Gracián

There must be more to life than having everything.
~ Maurice Sendak

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
~ Bertrand Russel

I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.
~ Frederick Douglass, escaped slave

If one acknowledges a group or a nation willing to commit atrocities, then one must also acknowledges the existence of a nation willing to commit atrocities to blame on the first nation.
~ Michael Rivero

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.
~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
~ Abraham Lincoln

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. For if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
~ Nietzsche

When encountering a new philosophy or religion, do not convert, but rather assimilate.
~ Shawn Mikula

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
~ Attributed to Charles Austin Beard

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.
~ Ernesto 'Che' Guevara

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
~ Edmund Burke

The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.
~ Mark Twain

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.
~ Nietzsche

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing.
~ Martin Luther

If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.
~ Isaac Asimov

The modern conservative is engaged in one man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
~ John K. Galbraith

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
~ John Stuart Mill

It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him.
~ Arthur C. Clarke

I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
~ Thomas Jefferson

In order to learn, one must change one's mind.
~ Orson Scott Card

Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others.
~ William Greider

Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.
~ Benito Mussolini

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
~ Oscar Wilde

Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons.
~ Thomas Hardy

If fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
~ Anatole France

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
~ Thomas Jefferson

I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
~ Robert Frost

Written laws are like spider's webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
~ Anacharsis

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
~ Pablo Picasso

You simply cannot hang a millionaire in America.
~ Bourke Cockran

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
~ Joseph Campbell

When the president does it that means it is not illegal.
~ Richard Nixon

War is hell and all that, but it has a good deal to recommend it. It wipes out all the small nuisances of peacetime.
~ Ian Hay

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
~ Bertrand Russell

All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it ... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.
~ Adolf Hitler

If there was a god, he wouldn't let a guy walk right up and shoot you in the face now would he? That's right, now you get the picture. Truth burns doesn't it?
~ Henry Rollins

This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or exercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it.
~ Abraham Lincoln

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
~ Jonathan Meades

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
~ Dr. Strangelove

I know of no crime that has not been defended by the church, in one form or other. The church is not a pioneer; it accepts a new truth, last of all, and only when denial has become useless.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

In general the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.
~ Voltaire

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.
~ William R. Inge

Cast aside those who liken godliness to whimsy and who try to combine their greed for wealth with their desire for a happy afterlife.
~ Kahlil Gibran

If we do not like the world the way it is, then it is because we are not okay the way we are.
~ deeshan

Your every decision conspires to make this moment happen.
~ Christi Philpott

Yes, my friends, I too am prepared to die for a cause, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.
~Mohandas Gandhi

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.
~Vernon Saunders Law

It is your business, when the wall next door catches fire.
~ Horace

Once you have seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
~ Arundhati Roy

Translate ‘Allah’.
~ Bumper Sticker

Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness.
~ Aleister Crowley

They said I was the greatest pitcher they ever saw; I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t give me no justice.
~ Satchel Paige

A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.
~ Benjamin Disraeli

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
~ George Orwell

Think my friends! You adulate a stone as Vishnu but you cannot see God in a fellow man.
~ Sankaracharya

The total absence of humor in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

All I know is that I am not a Marxist.
~ Karl Marx

There is enough for man's need but not for man's greed.
~Mohandas Gandhi

Before you speak, ask yourself is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?
~ Shirdi Sai Bab

Everything of importance has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
~Saint Augustine

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

The color of the skin makes no difference. What is good and just for one is good and just for the other. And the Great Spirit made all men brothers.
~ White Shield, Arikara

The reasonable man adjusts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
~ George Bernard Shaw

I did not know how to say goodbye. It was harder still, when I refused to say it.
~ Native American saying

Never was anything great achieved without danger.
~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Those who see and feel beyond illusion have acquired a far greater gift than could ever be derived from studying scripture and philosophy books, for these were meant only to guide the blind.
~ Shawn Mikula

If you understand everything, you must be misinformed.
~ Japanese Proverb

Theology is never any help; it is searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there. Theologians can persuade themselves of anything.
~ Robert Heinlein

This monkey mythology of Darwin is the cause of permissiveness, promiscuity, prophylactics, perversions, pregnancies, abortions, porno-therapy, pollution, poisoning and proliferation of crimes of all types.
~ Judge Braswell Dean

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil. Suddenly the light broke through to me and I saw a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty. Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?
~ H. G. Wells

The state has not the right to leave every man free to profess and embrace whatever religion he may desire.
~ Pope Pius IX

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
~ H. L. Mencken

It's not what you don't know that hurts you. It's what you know that just isn't so.
~ Satchel Paige

We've got to pause and ask ourselves, how much clean air do we need?
~ Lee Iacocca

It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
~ Albert Einstein

The difference between our decadence and the Russians' is that while theirs is brutal, ours is apathetic.
~ James Thurber

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
~ Franz Kafka

Don't join the book burners.
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

To date, despite the efforts of millions of true believers to support this myth, there is no more evidence for the Judeo-Christian god than any of the gods on Mount Olympus.
~ Joseph Daleiden

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.
~ Bertrand Russell

Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
~ Tao Te Ching

if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten.
~ Jim Rohn

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

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
~ Albert Einstein

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?
~ Epicurus

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.
~ Thomas Huxley

It is a government of the people by the people for the people no longer; it is a government of corporations by corporations for corporations.
~ Rutherford B. Hayes

In all affairs, it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
~ Bertrand Russell

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses; it's the cyanide.
~ Tom Robbins

Nothing overshadows truth so much as authority.
~ Leon Battista Alberti

In Christianity, neither morality nor religion comes into contact with reality at any point.
~ Nietzsche

A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
~ Max Weinreich

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.
~ Voltaire

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
~ Samuel Johnson

Turn over the pages of history and read the damning record of the church's opposition to every advance in every field of science.
~ Upton Sinclair

Don't try to teach a pig to sing, it can't be done and it only ticks off the pig.
~ Robert Heinlein

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.
~ Zoroaster

The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.
~ Lao Tsu

People with virtue must speak out; People who speak are not all virtuous.
~ Confucius

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.
~ Josef Stalin

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.
~ Dorothy Thompson

Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.
~ Albert Einstein

We can often do more for other men by trying to correct our own faults than by trying to correct theirs.
~ Francois Fenelon

News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising.
~ Ex-NBC news president Rubin Frank

When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.
~ Elayne Boosler

To use the term blind faith, is to use an adjective needlessly.
~ Julian Ruck

The establishment of Christianity arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years.
~ Andrew Dickson White

It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means.
~ Lydia Maria Child

Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.
~ Duke of Wellington

All warfare is based on deception.
~ Sun tzu

Nothing brings people together more, than mutual hatred.
~ Henry Rollins

Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
~ Buddha

The best way to make children good is to make them happy.
~ Oscar Wilde

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.
~ Albert Einstein

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
~ Havelock Ellis

Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.
~ Marion Barry, former mayor Washington D.C.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?’
~ Quentin Crisp

Whatever the natural cause, sin is the true cause of all earthquakes.
~ John Wesley

Anyone who has two shirts when someone has none is not a Christian.
~ Lenny Bruce

Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do.
~ Kahlil Gibran

You exist only in what you do.
~ Federico Fellini

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

You can't say civilizations don't advance, because they kill you in a new way in each war.
~ Will Rogers

In order to be an immaculate member of a flock of sheep, one must above all be a sheep oneself.
~ Albert Einstein

The church tries to save sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
~ Elbert Hubbard

I can't embrace a male god who has persecuted female sexuality throughout the ages; and that persecution still goes on today, all over the world.
~ Amanda Donohoe

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Pontius Pilate was the first great censor, and Jesus Christ the first great victim of censorship.
~ Ben Lindsay

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
~ Buddha

I thought dying for your country was the worst thing that could happen to you. I think killing for your country can be a lot worse; because that's the memory that haunts.
~ Bob Kerry told to The New York Times

It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind.
~ Voltaire

Contraction of theological influence has at once been the best measure, and the essential condition of intellectual advance.
~ William H. Lecky

Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
~ Arthur C. Clarke

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Oh Mortal Man, is there nothing you cannot be made to believe?
~ Adam Weishaupt, Co-founder New World Order

There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.
~ Chinese proverb

People only see what they are prepared to see.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lying is done with words and also with silence.
~ Adrienne Rich

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

The man who accumulates, whether money or knowledge, can never be free.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

There is a tragic clash between truth and the world. Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.
~ Nikolay Berdyayev

Just drive down that road, until you get blown up.
~ General George Patton, reconnaissance troops

If I could find a way to get [Saddam Hussein] out of there, even putting a contract out on him, … ahh … if the CIA still did that sort of thing, . . . ahh . . . assuming it ever did . . . . . . . I would be for it.
~ Richard Nixon

I never advocated war except as a means of peace.
~ Ulysses S. Grant

If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.
~ Steve Allen

Spiritual maturity is a lifelong process of replacing lies with truth.
~ Kurt Bruner

I was under medication when I made the decision to burn the tapes.
~ Richard Nixon

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given, freedom is something people take.
~ James Baldwin

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
~ Oscar Wilde

Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
~ Albert Einstein

Acceptance without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western religion, rejection without proof is the fundamental characteristic of Western science.
~ Gary Zukav

How can you make a revolution without executions?
~ Lenin on hearing that the death penalty had been abolished by the Soviet

True and false are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood.
~ Thomas Hobbes

Do you love your Creator? Love your fellow beings first.
~ Prophet Muhammad

Laws are silent in time of war.
~ Cicero

I shall be an autocrat: that's my trade. And the good Lord will forgive me: that's his.
~ Empress Catherine the Great

Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
~ Rousseau

Never go to sleep when your meat is on the fire.
~ Pueblo

A treatise upon human nature: It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
~ David Hume

You can't step twice into the same river.
~ Heraclitus

You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty.
~ Henrik Ibsen

Necessity never made a good bargain.
~ Ben Franklin

You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.
~ Dante

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
~ George Bernard Shaw

This is very true; for my words are my own, and my actions are my ministers.
~ Charles II

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.
~ Mao Tse Tung

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
~ George Bernard Shaw

There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.
~ Andre Gide

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
~ Allen Ginsberg

Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
~ Native American saying

One-tenth of the folks run the world. One-tenth watch them run it, and the other eighty percent don't know what the hell's going on.
~ Jake Simmons

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.
~ Albert Einstein

Religion is the end of love and honesty, the beginning of confusion; faith is a colorful hope or fear, the origin of folly.
~ Tao Te Ching

Why do we kill people who are killing people to show that killing people is wrong?
~ Holly Near

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
~ Cardinal Richelieu

Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.
~ African proverb

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.
~ Elwyn B. White

The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself.
~ Sir R. F. Burton

We are ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent; we are set free by the foolishness of God.
~ Saint Augustine

We live in our desires rather than in our achievements.
~ George Moore

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality, for one very rich man; there must be at least five hundred poor.
~ Adam Smith

When a government lasts a long while, it deteriorates by insensible degrees. Republics end through luxury, monarchies through poverty.
~ Montesquieu

The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.
~ Andrew Dickson White

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best stage, is but a necessary evil; in its worst stage, an intolerable one.
~ Thomas Paine

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
~ Sun tzu

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.
~ Lao tzu

Oh, how bitter a thing is to look through another man's eye.
~ William Shakespeare

Know all and you will pardon all.
~ Thomas à Kempis

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing everything.
~ Vladimir Nabokov

All natural institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
~ Thomas Paine

They that die by famine die by inches.
~ Matthew Henry

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of another. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
~ Immanuel Kant

There is no sport in hate when all the rage is on one side.
~ Percy B. Shelley

Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it.
~ Bernard Berenson

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
~ Steven Wright

You must ask your neighbor if you shall live in peace.
~ John Clark

It is true that liberty, so precious, must be rationed.
~ Nikolai Lenin

It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.
~ Bertrand Russel

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.
~ Henry David Thoreau

I refuse to be labeled immoral merely because I am godless.
~ Peter Walker

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous, you don't want it.
~ Duke Ellington

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of congress; but I repeat myself.
~ Mark Twain

Know thy enemy and know thy self and you will win a hundred battles.
~ Sun tzu

Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
~ James Branch Cabell

Peace is only possible if men cease to place their happiness in the possession of things which cannot be shared.
~ Julien Benda

It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
~ Margaret Mead

Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.
~ Josh Billings

You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
~ Native Proverb

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
~ Xenocrates

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.
~ Juvenal

He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
~ William Drummond

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
~ George Orwell

Truth always lags behind, limping along on the arm of Time.
~ Baltasar Gracián

Nothing unites the English like war. Nothing divides them like Picasso.
~ Hugh Mills

...as hollow as the o in god...
~ Marilyn Manson

War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that he too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
~ Karl Kraus

It is better to be generous than just. It is sometimes better to sympathize instead of trying to understand.
~ Pierre Lecompte de Nouy

The more you own, the more it owns you.
~ Henry Rollins

Money often costs too much.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.
~ Vladimir Nabokov

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
~ David Hume

And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
~ John Steinbeck

We are condemned to kill time: thus we die bit by bit.
~ Octavio Paz

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
~ Basho

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity; another man's, I mean.
~ Mark Twain

Give to every other human being every right you claim for yourself.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
~ H. Jackson Brown

While the word is yet unspoken, you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you.
~ Arab proverb

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
~ Samuel Clemens

Ignorance is always afraid of change.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Before we blame, we should first see if we can excuse.
~ G. C. Lichtenberg

Don't speak unless you can improve on the silence.
~ Spanish proverb

I would have made a good pope.
~ Richard Nixon

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.
~ Napoleon

The purpose of law is to prevent the strong from always having their way.
~ Ovid

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
~ Hector Berlioz

A man who is afraid will do anything.
~ Jawaharlal Nehru

Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Each of us is confined to a world of our own making.
~ Shawn Mikula

Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands.
~ Jessie Helms

If a person is to get to the meaning of life, he must learn to like the facts about himself, ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity, before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.
~ Eugene O'Neill

No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit.
~ Sir Frederick G. Banting

Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.
~ General William Westmoreland

Strange is our situation here upon Earth.
~ Albert Einstein

Until the infallibility of human judgment shall have been proved to me, I shall persist in demanding the abolition of the death penalty.
~ Marquis de Lafayette

If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
~ Ancient Chinese Proverb

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
~ Sun tzu

Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
~ Confucius

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
~ Albert Einstein

One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves; it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
~ Agnes Repplier

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~ Lao tzu

The world is too dangerous to live in, not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.
~ Albert Einstein

Beliefs are what divide people. Doubt unites them.
~ Peter Ustinov

Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.
~ David Starr Jordan

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
~ George Bernard Shaw

Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
~ Mohandas Gandhi

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
~ Steven Wright

The way to find what the mainstream will do tomorrow is to associate with the lunatic fringe today.
~ Jean-Louis Gassee

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
~ Robert Frost

Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.
~ Richard Salent, Former President CBS News

You can pretend to be serious; you can't pretend to be witty.
~ Sacha Guitry

Two attitudes are all that is needed; do not harm anything, say and do things that make others happy.
~ dreamslaughter

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
~ Anne Frank, holocaust victim

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
~ Bertrand Russell

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
~ Lao tzu

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.
~ Henry Kissinger

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
~ Adolf Hitler

What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?
~ Ursula K. LeGuin

Never express yourself more clearly than you think.
~ Neils Bohr

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.
~ Aleister Crowley

The right things to do are those that keep our violence in abeyance; the wrong things are those that bring it to the fore.
~ Robert J. Sawyer

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.
~ Lao tzu

What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
~ Henry David Thoreau

I consider Christian theology to be one of the greatest disasters of the human race.
~ Alfred North Whitehead

Most people drive thru life with the parking brake on.
~ Lance Bradley

Truth is living, it is not static, and the mind that would discover truth must also be living, not burdened with knowledge or experience.
~ J. Krishnamurthi

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.
~ John Lennon

The biggest conspiracy of all is the claim that there are no conspiracies!
~ Michael Rivero

The death of dogma is the birth of morality.
~ Immanuel Kant

Can you sympathize with an exploding star?
~ Shawn Mikula

The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.
~ Fidel Castro

Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt.
~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
~ Leonardo da Vinci

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
~ Stendhal

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.
~ Mother Teresa

No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience.
~ John A. Locke

Life's under no obligation to give us what we expect.
~ Margaret Mitchell

The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people's lives for personal gains.
~ Michael Rivero

Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.
~ Casey Stengel

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion, the religion which based on experience, which refuses dogma.
~ Albert Einstein

Would you like to liberate yourself from the lower realms of life? Would you like to save the world from the degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness.
~ Lao tzu

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
~ Mark Twain

Do not mind anything that anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
~ Henry James

When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.
~ Anatole France

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
~ F. H. Bradley

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
~ Aldous Huxley

Pray: To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
~ Ambrose Bierce

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.
~ Leonardo da Vinci

Even if truth destroys the whole universe, still it is truth; stand by it.
~ Swami Vivekananda

The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts.
~John Locke

Christians are supposed not merely to endure change, nor even to profit by it, but to cause it.
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

Every man is guilty of all the good he didn't do.
~ Voltaire

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.
~ Albert Einstein

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
~ Rene Descartes

Time wounds all heels.
~ Jane Ace

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Manifest plainness, embrace simplicity, reduce selfishness, have few desires.
~ Lao tzu

When a man says he approves of something in principle, it means he hasn’t the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
~ Otto von Bismarck

A man's character is his fate.
~ Heraclitus

Quarrels would not last long if only one side was wrong.
~ Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld

Philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The point is to change it.
~ Karl Marx

I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement.
~ Fidel Castro

When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
~ Henry Ward Beecher

Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
~ Adam Smith

The Brush Dance is a Yurok healing ritual where being true to yourself means give your best to a person in need. Being true to yourself is the one and only Yurok Indian Law.
~ Brush Dance Journal

Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.
~ Thomas Szasz

Never explain, your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway.
~ Elbert Hubbard

The pious pretense that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.
~ Aleister Crowley

Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible.
~ Mao Tse Tung

Everybody sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

We will be known by the tracks we leave behind.
~ Dakota proverb

If a scholar aspires to the Way but is ashamed of bad clothes and bad food, he isn't ready to join the discussion yet.
~ Confucius

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.
~Mohandas Gandhi

...so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible.
~ Robert McChesney

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
~ William Kingdon Clifford

I do not believe that any type of religion should ever be introduced into the public schools of the United States.
~ Thomas Edison

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
~ Mark Twain

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.
~ Polybius

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
~ Napoleon

When the water starts boiling it is foolish to turn off the heat.
~ Nelson Mandela

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.
~ Thomas Jefferson

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.
~ General Omar N. Bradley

The rights of women are sacred. See that women are maintained in the rights attributed to them.
~ Prophet Muhammed

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.
~ Albert Einstein

When you meet a worthy person, focus on reaching his level. When you meet an unworthy person, take a good look inside yourself.
~ Confucius

If one were to take the bible seriously one would go mad. But to take the bible seriously, one must be already mad.
~ Aleister Crowley

All my humor is based upon destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing on the breadline right in back of J. Edgar Hoover.
~ Lenny Bruce

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
~ Emma Goldman

It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
~ Moliere

Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.
~ Napoleon

Living is change; Growth is optional.
~ Juan Wa Chang

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.
~ Steven Weinberg

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
~ Rod Serling

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.
~ John Morley

We have a political system that awards office to the most ruthless, cunning, and selfish of mortals, then act surprised when those willing to do anything to win power are equally willing to do anything with it.
~ Michael Rivero

Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
~ Henry Van Dyke

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
~ Helen Hayes, age 83

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
~ Jean Paul Sartre

The vast majority of mankind is trapped within perceptual prisons.
~ Shawn Mikula

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.
~ Seneca

America ... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
~ Hunter S. Thompson

The government of the United States does not, in its policies, express the decency of its people.
~ Jerry Fresia

Grasshopper, look beyond the game, as you look beneath the surface of the pool to see its depths.
~ Master Po

Write injuries in sand, kindnesses in marble.
~ French proverb

Kindness is a mark of faith, and whoever has not kindness has not faith.
~ Prophet Muhammad

It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless.
~ Benito Mussolini

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
~ Albert Einstein

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind it only the slime of bureaucracy.
~ Franz Kafka

Always remember you are a totally unique individual; just like everyone else.
~ Unknown

Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
~ Joseph Campbell

Someday man will imprison the power of the sun, release atomic power, and harness the rise and fall of the tides. I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill.
~ Thomas Edison

Beware the man of one book.
~ Saint Thomas Aquinas

If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.
~ Noam Chomsky

The only thing we never get enough of is love; and the only thing we never give enough of is love.
~ Henry Miller

The United States is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from its intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them.
~ Ramsey Clark

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.
~ Democritus

Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans! No more merciful beheadings! And call off Christmas!
~ The Sheriff of Nottingham

The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders, a crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The degree of one's emotion varies inversely with one's knowledge of the facts. The less you know, the hotter you get.
~ Bertrand Russel

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.
~ Lao Tzu

Christian is a VERB not a noun.
~ Meria Heller

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
~ Hungarian Proverb

I complained that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.
~ Persian proverb

Our People set about catching Cod, & haul'd up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my Resolution of not eating animal Food; and on this Occasion, I consider'd . . . the taking every Fish as a kind of unprovok'd murder, since none of them had a or ever could do us any Injury that might justify the Slaughter. All this seem'd very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great Lover of Fish, & when this came hot out of the Frying Pan, it smeled admirably well. I balanc'd some time between Principle & Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs: Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you. so I din'd upon cod very heartily and continu'd to eat with other People, returning only now & then occasionally to a vegetable Diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one ot find a or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.
~ Benjamin Franklin

Amateur bureaucrats are often even worse than professional bureaucrats.
~ John McCarthy

An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there can't be a god. He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question.
~ John McCarthy

An excessive knowledge of Marxism is a sign of a misspent youth.
~ John McCarthy

An extreme optimist is a man who believes that humanity will probably survive even if it doesn't take his advice.
~ John McCarthy

As Marx should have said, the principle of communism is From each according to what he can't get out of doing. To each according to whom he knows.
~ John McCarthy

As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.
~ John McCarthy

As we have recently seen, the function of the anti-trust laws is to protect the poor little fellow with a mere $5 billion from being bullied by the big guy with $50 billion.
~ John McCarthy

A true intellectual is a man who, after reading a book and being convinced by its arguments, will shoot someone or, more likely, order someone shot.
~ John McCarthy

Barnum predicted that most psychoanalysts would have a hard time making living when he said,"There's a sucker born every minute and two to take him." One sucker isn't really enough to support two psychoanalysts.
~ John McCarthy

Both politicians and journalists face situations which strain their honesty and humanity. My opinion is that politicians on the average stand up somewhat better than journalists.
~ John McCarthy

Committing genocide on behalf of an institution generates greater loyalty to it than merely getting people fired from their jobs on its behalf.
~ John McCarthy

Comparing oneself with Galileo or Einstein is certainly good for the ego - provided one refrains from going into too much detail.
~ John McCarthy

Compassion is contempt with a human face.
~ John McCarthy

Cynicism is a cheap substitute for sophistication. You don't actually have to learn anything.
~ John McCarthy

Don't try to talk anyone out of concentrating his hatred on Ayn Rand or any other dead person. It can't harm the dead. Diverted to a living person, it might actually do harm.
~ John McCarthy

Everyone needs computer programming. It will be the way we speak to the servants.
~ John McCarthy

Foolishness is rarely a matter of lack of intelligence or even lack of information.
~ John McCarthy

God did not design human beings in accordance with Christian principles, fascist principles, feminist principles, socialist principles, romantic principles, secular humanist priciples, vegetarian principles, deep environmentalist principles, biocentric principles, or libertarian principles. Any of these groups could have told God a thing or two.
~ John McCarthy

Hard distinctions make bad philosophy.
~ John McCarthy

He has the first half of the Golden Rule down pat: Do unto others.
~ John McCarthy

Here's a way to tell scientific intelligence from legal intelligence. Both may start from the idea that something cannot be done and think up arguments to explain why. However, it is possible that the scientist may discover a flaw in the argument that leads him to change his mind and discover a way to do it. He will be pleased. The legal thinker will merely try to patch the flaw in the argument, because once he has chosen a side, all his intelligence is devoted to finding arguments for that side.
~ John McCarthy

He's a man of principle. He'd cut his mother's throat for a principle.
~ John McCarthy

He who claims that affairs could not be worse is very likely to make them worse.
~ John McCarthy

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
~ John McCarthy

He who says he will die for a cause will probably lie for it and may kill for it.
~ John McCarthy

Honor among thieves is the ancestor of all honor.
~ John McCarthy

If everyone were to live for others all the time, life would be like a procession of ants following each other around in a circle.
~ John McCarthy

If it doesn't work right, we can always try something else.
~ John McCarthy

If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.
~ John McCarthy

Inside of many liberals is a fascist struggling to get out.
~ John McCarthy

It is deplorable that many people think that the best way to improve the world is to forbid something. However, they're morally more advanced than the people who think the best way to improve the world is to kill somebody.
~ John McCarthy

It's just a pissing contest, but unfortunately the contestants never seem to run out of piss.
~ John McCarthy

It's possible to program a computer in English. It's also possible to make an airplane controlled by reins and spurs.
~ John McCarthy

Language is froth on the surface of thought.
~ John McCarthy

Malthus was right. It's hard to see how the solar system could support much more than 1028 people or the universe more than 1050.
~ John McCarthy

My hobby of not attending meetings about recycling saves more energy than your hobby of recycling.
~ John McCarthy

Never abandon a theory that explains something until you have a theory that explains more.
~ John McCarthy

No-one has yet built a monument so high that a bird can't fly over and shit on it.
~ John McCarthy

Note to Douglas Hofstadter and Raymond Smullyan: Excessive self reference is as dangerous as smoking.
~ John McCarthy

Of course, Third World leaders love you. By ascribing third world ills to First World sins, you absolve them of blame for their countries' failure to advance.
~ John McCarthy

Oh, he's sincere all right. The question is: what is he sincere about?
~ John McCarthy

Once a person has killed other people on behalf of an ideology, he becomes rather devoted to it.
~ John McCarthy

People mourn when a person dies, but no-one mourns the billions of intestinal bacteria that his death dooms. Speciesism, I calls it.
~ John McCarthy

People prefer dealing with machinery to dealing with bureaucracies.
~ John McCarthy

Personal dishonesty is not needed to produce a dishonest business plan or research proposal. Wishful thinking suffices.
~ John McCarthy

Slogans rarely convince the unconvinced. However, they do rally the troops already on your side.
~ John McCarthy

Soccer riots kill at most tens. Intellectuals' ideological riots sometimes kill millions.
~ John McCarthy

Suicidal terrorists may have short shelf lives.
~ John McCarthy

The difference between a contemporary liberal and a socialist is that to a liberal the most beautiful word in the English language is 'forbidden', whereas to a socialist the most beautiful word is 'compulsory'.
~ John McCarthy

The last ten percent of any reform is the most difficult to achieve. Moreover, it is often harmful.
~ John McCarthy

The peace movement is a great force for peace. Some of the world's most quarrelsome people act out their aggressions through the peace movement.
~ John McCarthy

The politicians have a most touching faith in technology—that it can make up for any dumb thing the politicians decide to do.
~ John McCarthy

The reason why a professor does something has even less connection with why he says he does it than with most people.
~ John McCarthy

"There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come." Yes, even if it's a bad idea.
~ John McCarthy

There is only one thing more harmful to society than an elected official forgetting the promises he made in order to get elected; that's when he doesn't forget them.
~ John McCarthy

The slogan was 'Don't trust anyone over thirty'. Sixty years later the slogan became, 'Don't trust anyone over ninety'.
~ John McCarthy

The word philistine as a pejorative is used in a variety of senses, but a common one refers to a person interested only in money and the goods and amusements money can buy. Usually it doesn't refer to someone who will do anything for money but rather a person who, if he makes a reasonable amount of money, will spend his time enjoying it without considering either the arts, the advance of science, or righting the injustices of the world—unless one of the above happens to be his job. It may not be presumed that the Philistine people of the Bible had this property any more than anyone else. Philistines do less harm than most ideologically motivated people.
~ John McCarthy

This is not the first time my views on some topic have inspired in someone the desire to psychoanalyze me. Previous experience leads me to ask about your couch. Is it comfortable? Are its springs in good shape?
~ John McCarthy

We can't afford to waste money on crossing the ocean, Mr. Columbus, when Spanish society has so many unsolved problems. Why, most of those Jews and Moors we have converted aren't really sincere Catholics, and a lack of money to hire more inquisitors has put their questionings so far behind that many have died of natural causes before the Holy Inquisition ever got around to them.
~ John McCarthy

Well, perhaps you are a pompous fool with power. Please explain what you want me to do and what harm you are threatening to do to me if I don't comply with your wishes.
~ John McCarthy

When architects get prizes, the people suffer.
~ John McCarthy

When he talks about "firing that loony" he reminds me of a robin attacking its image in a hubcap.
~ John McCarthy

When I see a slippery slope, my instinct is to build a terrace.
~ John McCarthy

When the policeman quits, each must provide for his own defense. Nuclear proliferation has become more likely.
~ John McCarthy

When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found.
~ John McCarthy

With no more than six levels of misquotation, any statement can be made to say whatever you wish.
~ John McCarthy

Would you vegetarians like a rule that food stamps cannot be used to purchase products containing meat? Would you vegans like to also forbid their use to purchase eggs, fish or milk products? Some years ago some of my fellow conservatives grumbled about the purchase of filet mignon with food stamps, but their motives were economic, and they were easily beaten down with the usual charges of heartlessness. Maybe you vegetarians would have better luck, since your hearts are pure.
~ John McCarthy

You don't want to examine the basis of your computer's morality any more than you want to see sausage being made.
~ John McCarthy

Your denial of the importance of objectivity amounts to announcing your intention to lie to us. No-one should believe anything you say.
~ John McCarthy

Your statements amount to saying that if AI is possible, it should be easy. Why is that?
~ John McCarthy

You say the only alternative to nuclear war is world government. There is only one possibility worse than nuclear war for the survival of modern civilization, and that is world government. Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China, it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries.
~ John McCarthy

You say you couldn't live if you thought the world had no purpose. You're saying that you can't form purposes of your own—that you need someone to tell you what to do. The average child has more gumption than that.
~ John McCarthy

These are the notes I took today while reading Jerome Groopman's book How Doctors Think. Dr Groopman holds the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Imagine looking for a person on a train, while standing at the station. You might be able to recognize the face if the train moves slowly enough, but if it's too fast, or you sneeze, you might miss it. And it's exhausting. That's primary care. And radiology. And emergency medicine.

Ask all your questions. Write them down you need to. Ask the questions. Tell me your story, think of every symptom you can, but for goodness sake, try not to tell me any diagnoses until I ask. I tend to interrupt.

If it's serious, bring a friend or family member.

If you get the sense I don't like you, you're probably right, and I'm probably wrong. The diagnosis and treatment might be right, but negative feelings on my part inhibit your care. Tell me, say something like "Hey, I think we're not getting along so well" or "I think we could communicate better" or "Doc, do you not like me?"

Ask "What's the worst thing I could have?"

Another really good question is "What body parts are near where I'm having my symptoms?"

Another really good question is "What systems could be involved?"

A good question for parents at the pediatrician's office is "Does my child have a serious problem?"

Ask "What was your last bad experience?" It is the most likely thing to affect my decision-making process.

If a procedure is recommended, ask "What are the possible complications?" and write every one down. Then ask "What is the likelihood of each?"

There is nothing in medicine that is so complicated it can't be explained in clear and simple language. It's not quantum physics. So ask how the diagnosis explains each symptom and how the treatment will affect that symptom. Don't be surprised if some symptoms get worse. Ask yourself it would still be better, not perfect, but better. If it wouldn't be better, based on your own value judgements, don't do it.

Ask for value judgements, like pain or discomfort, to be set in comparison to other things. More than a toothache?

I'm prone to make representativeness errors: 38 year old forest rangers don't have heart attacks, right?

I'm prone to make attribution errors: someone who has been drinking for 30 years and has an enlarged liver has alcoholic cirrhosis, right?

I'm prone to make affective errors: someone I like shouldn't be put through uncomfortable, invasive tests, right? someone I like shouldn't have to bear the indignity of a rectal exam, even if they're immunocompromised, right?

I am prone to being emotionally detached.

I use pattern recognition. Which might save your life, or allow me to irrevocably miss the diagnosis when time is of the essence.

Interestingly, if you tell me what stereotypes you fit I might look past them more readily. If you're a first-time mother, a mother of five, a patient with a psychiatric illness, an alcoholic, an IV drug user, a menopausal woman, tell me. I know. You know. There's a peculiar power to the spoken word that seems to keep me from using it against you.

If we get along not just well, but famously, we're friends, tell me you'd rather have the painful test than not know the answer definitively.

Once my search is satisfied, I may stop searching.

Ask "What else could it be?". I might commit an error of availability: if I see an obvious potential cause, like a fall may have caused a broken back, or a subclinical viral pneumonia might cause shortness of breath, I might stop looking for a definitive cause. It might be bone cancer. You might be ashamed to admit it's an aspirin overdose.

Ask "Is there anything that doesn't fit?". See, I'm prone to confirmation bias: I might further reinforce my own distorted pattern recognition by cherry-picking the available facts that fit, while ignoring or downplaying the ones that don't. If I seem anchored to an idea, it might be wrong.

Perhaps everyone is prone to commission bias: believing action is better than inaction. Every hear someone say "Don't just do something, stand there!"

Ask "Is it possible I could have more than one problem?". If you have one illness, you couldn't possibly have another, right? A woman with irritable bowel syndrome couldn't possibly have an ectopic pregnancy, right?

If I seem like I'm running on automatic, I probably am.

Make sure you know what drug you're getting, how to take, how often to take it, and how much. Not just 1 pill or 2, but 1 275 mg pill or 2 750 mg pills.

It's a solid bet that I'm running on less than six hours of sleep. See above.

I'm constantly on the alert for patients who sugarcoat things, blow them out of proportion, or who might shoot the messanger. I will catch on, sooner or later. When that happens, I might hold it against you. See above.

If you're in the hospital and can't bear the thought of yet another nurse hunting around with a needle looking for a vein, if you decline a blood draw 1) the nurse may be all for it, because it's one less thing for her to do, 2) you'll probably be labeled 'non-compliant' and both the nurses and the doctors will start to dislike you. See above.

If you know someone who can't read, try to let their doctor know. Because if that person has medications and doesn't take them, because they don't know how and don't want to admit they can't read, they'll be labeled non-compliant. See above.

I might make judgements about another doctor's competence based on flawed evidence, like research publications, grants, academic affiliations, other members of the family, past experiences, or the opinions of others. Or lack thereof.

An immunodeficient infant adopted from a foreign country might have SCID. Or may be malnourished. Or may have a number of other diseases. In either case, she might die. If a rare diagnosis is most likely, there are probably a dozen other rare diagnoses that must be ruled out. The pattern of disease in America is not the same as the pattern of disease in the rest of the world, where malnutrition, parasites, helminths are common. Don't let me retreat from the zebra. Note to self: this may prove to be one of the great values of Wikipedia. By not reiterating the same litany of common issues over, and over, and over, as one might encounter reading the primary literature or even textbooks, Wikipedia promistes to prevent the massive amount of reading necessary to accurately find the rare diagnoses and rule them in or out.

I am almost certain to act mostly through "received wisdom". Much of what doctors do, the way we do it, we do because that's how we were taught, which may be based on little more than the never-perfectly-representative catastrophes a pioneer faced and learned from a century ago. How do you drain a pericardial effusion? Why do you do it that way? Many lessons are even reiterated letter and verse from professor to student who becomes professor, and passes it one to the next student. No value added in the intervening 30 years. One can often catch this as a student by listening to residents who learned from the same professors the student is now learning from. Those residents will go on to be the professors. No value added.

Renee Fox's three types of uncertainty: incomplete mastery of the known knowledge, the limits of current knowledge, and the difficulty in distinguishing between personal ignorance and and the limitations of present knowledge.

Radiologists spot more lesions in cine mode. If your doctor shows you a 'film' with a tiled matrix of CT or MRI images (usually 12 printed on a film), ask if it was read on a computer. Chest CT with contrast can be timed to visualize different structures. The standard differential for chest pain includes pulmonary embolism and aortic dissection. If you time the scan for the PE, you miss an AD if it's there. So if you suspect PE and it's actually an AD, should you have gotten the scan? Even if it does turn out to be a PE, should you have gotten the scan?

Pharmaceutical companies want me to prescribe you all sorts of drugs and procedures.

Chronic low back pain may be due to muscle disease, nerve conduction disease, either sensory or motor, diseases of the abdomen or pelvis, autoimmune diseases, anatomic damage cause nerve root impingment, or a number of other causes.