These started as the quotes that i used at the beginning of my classes
on History of Knowledge.
They are not necessarily quotes that i agree with.
In fact, i strongly disagree with many of them.
"Democracies are never killed: they die and then we blame those who bury them" (Indro Montanelli)
"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place" (Sheila Peltz upon visiting Auschwitz)
“No exponential is forever, but your job is delaying forever” (Gordon Moore)
"It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being begins" (Kazimir Malevich)
"Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin" (John Von Neumann)
"The purpose of art is to prepare the soul for death" (Aleksandr Sorukov)
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts - Albert Einstein" (Ivanka Trump, misquoting Albert Einstein who actually never said this)
“If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory, but too often it's easier to keep the theory and change the facts” (Product Engineering magazine, 1958)
"People constantly create one another; only a man can be god to another man" (Czeslaw Milosz)
"I have no time to waste, but I waste it anyway" (Ed Theil)
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting" (Ernest Rutherford)
"My job as a spacecraft engineer is not to land on Mars, but to land on the model of Mars provided by the geologists" (James Martin, the leader of NASA's robotic missions to Mars)
"If we opened people up, we'd find landscapes" (Agnes Varda)
“We do not seek highly probable theories but explanations, that is to say, powerful and highly improbable theories” (Karl Popper)
"They say to think outside the box, but what if your box is doing the thinking?" (Marco Morelli)
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” (Edward Abbey)
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits" (Alexandre Dumas, although often credited to Einstein)
"Smartphones have replaced torture chambers" (Byung-Chul Han)
"Individuals degrade into the genital organs of capital" (Byung-Chul Han)
“Protect me from what I want” (Jenny Holzer)
“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy” (John Updike)
"If it can be done, why do it?" (credited to Gertrude Stein)
"There's a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot" (Steven Wright)
"Every person is a new door, opening up into other worlds" ( John Guare)
“When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” (Buddha)
"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people" (HL Mencken, often paraphrased in the USA as “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people” and credited to PT Barnum )
"The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth" (Niels Bohr)
"Our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end" (Henry Thoreau)
"There is no there there" (Gertrude Stein)
"The spectator feels at home nowhere because the spectacle is everywhere" (Guy Debord)
"Planning is essential, but plans are useless" (Dwight Eisenhower)
"Terrorism in art is called the avant-garde" (Alberto Moravia)
"Every machine loses its identity in its function" (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
"It is not enough to have achieved personal success - one's best friend must also have failed" (Somerset Maugham, often paraphrased as "It is not enough to succeed - others must fail" and mis-credited to Gore Vidal)
"The future does not exist" (Alexander Herzen)
"The USA has always thought itself in an eminent sense the land of freedom, even when it was covered with slaves" (George Santayana)
"Humanity's self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (Walter Benjamin)
"Where we are there is no here" (Jean Cocteau)
"Every extension is an amputation" (Marshall McLuhan)
"Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did" (Lillian Hellman)
"Not All Who Wander Are Lost" (JRR Tolkien)
"The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed" (Mahatma Gandhi)
"The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship" (George Bernard Shaw)
"Boundaries are not our enemies, they are necessary for making meanings, but this does not make them innocent" (Karen Barad)
"After your death you will be what you were before your birth" (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him" (Galileo Galilei)
"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people." (Isaac Newton)
"Every step is a miracle" (Olga Koroleva)
"Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque" (Galen of Pergamum, 2d c. AD)
"Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain" (Schiller)
"If it can be done, why do it?" (Gertrude Stein)
"Post-truth is pre-fascism" (Timothy Snyder)
"I once followed a trail of sugar on a supermarket floor, pushing my cart down the aisle on one side of a tall counter and back the aisle on the other, seeking the shopper with the torn sack to tell him he was making a mess. With each trip around the counter, the trail became thicker." (John Perry)
"It's a terrible statement unless he gets away with it" (Donald Trump in a 2004 television interview with Chris Matthews, talking about someone who just told a colossal lie)
"The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice." (Bryan Stevenson)
"The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there" (L.P. Hartley)
"A poem is really a kind of machine" (Paul Valery)
"Keep the company of those who seek the truth, but run from those who have found it" (Vaclav Havel)
"The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living" (Gertrude Stein)
"Observe unfolding events with equanimity; remain secure in our stance; remain unperturbed in the face of challenges; hide our capacities and bide our time; avoid claiming leadership while advancing our cause." (Xiaoping Deng)
"Men have secrets while women have mysteries" (credited to Jean-Luc Godard
"A riot is the language of the unheard" (Martin Luther King)
"The past is unpredictable" (Russian adage)
"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment." (Freeman Dyson)
"I want death to find me planting my cabbages, indifferent to it and even more indifferent to my unfinished garden" (Michel de Montaigne)
"There are books in which the footnotes or comments scrawled by some
reader's hand in the margin are more interesting than the text. The world is
one of these books" (George Santayana)
"I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends" (Dalai Lama)
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" (credited to Napoleon)
"America has been fighting without winning for 20 years. China has been winning without fighting for 20 years" (a senior Indian diplomat in Washington)
"There's nothing artificial about Artificial Intelligence" (Feifei Li)
"Anything that survives death is a paltry, pathetic victory over the eternity of nothingness" (Danilo Kis)
"You can't rule out the possibility that beneath the elaborately constructed veneer of a blithering idiot, there lurks a blithering idiot" (Boris Johnson)
"Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot; but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot" (Groucho Marx)
"To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" (George Orwell)
"By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail" (Benjamin Franklin)
"I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people" (Isaac Newton)
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm" (Winston Churchill)
"Art is what you can get away with" (Andy Warhol)
"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it" (Confucius)
"We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten" (Bill Gates)
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter" (Thomas Jefferson)
"The nature of things is to have no nature; it is their non-nature that is their nature. For they have only one nature: no-nature." (Nagarjuna)
"Anyone who denies the law of non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned." (Avicenna)
"Compassion is the radicalism of our time" (Dalai Lama)
“The problem with introspection is that it has no end" (Philip Dick)
“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise” (William Blake)
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide" (Albert Camus)
"When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion" (Yuval Harari)
"There is no such thing as globalization, there is only virtualization" (Paul Virilio)
Software firms "keep fixing what's not broken until it's broken" (Alan Cooper)
"To know where we are going, we need to look in the rear-view mirror" (Mark Dery)
"The frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness" (Heidegger)
"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it" (George Santayana)
"Technology is the answer, but what is the problem?" (Cedric Price)
"Art communicates nothing to noone" (Marc Lebot)
"Civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess" (Frederick Hayek)
"If a man never contradicts himself, the reason must be that he never says anything at all" (Erwin Schroedinger)
"Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate" (Niklas Luhmann)
"We cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order to see itself" (George Spencer-Brown)
"The perennial mistake of western philosophers has been to suppose, with no justification whatever, that nothing cannot have any consequences" (George Spencer-Brown)
"Never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world. In fact, it is the only way it ever has" (Margaret Mead)
"Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing." (Konrad Lorenz)
"Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years" (Bill Gates)
"Novelists have a better track record than economists at foretelling the future" (Dani Rodrik)
"If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito" (Dalai Lama)
"The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true" (Hannah Arendt, 1958)
"The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep" (Milton Keynes in 1919)
"America abandoned teaching geography after WWII and hasn't won a war since" (Jerry Dobson)
"If children fail to understand one another, it is because they think they understand one another" (Jean Piaget)
"We don't see things as they are. We see things as we are". (Anais Nin)
"Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think" (Werner Heisenberg)
"If i had eight hours to chop down a tree, i would spend six sharpening my axe" (Abraham Lincoln)
"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do" (Burrhus Skinner)
"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes it visible" (Paul Klee)
"The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything" (Albert Einstein)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" (Edmund Burke)
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" (Simone de Beauvoir)
"Science progresses one funeral at a time" (Max Planck)
"Each writer creates his precursors" (Jorge Luis Borges)
"Be kind whenever possible - It is always possible" (Dalai Lama)
"Art is a lie that helps us see the truth" (Pablo Picasso)
"Natural selection didn't design us to be happy" (Robert Wright)
"Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake" (Napoleon Bonaparte)
"The higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of its behind" (St Bonaventure, 13th century)
"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it" (Blaise Pascal)
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" (attributed by Mark Twain to Benjamin Disraeli)
"The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits" (Alexandre Dumas)
"A Uterus Is a Feature not a Bug" (Sarah Lacy)
"We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth" (Buckminster Fuller)
"Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them." (Tolstoy)
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" (Edmund Burke)
"Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons" (Buckminster Fuller)
"It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice" (Xiaoping Deng)
"We are like olives: only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us."
"God is a retired engineer" (EJ Dijksterhuis)
"Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival" (Jack Sepkoski)
"The Universe is the aggregate of all humanity's consciously apprehended and communicated, nonsimultaneous, and only partially overlapping experiences." (Buckminster Fuller)
"There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in" (Leonardo Cohen)
"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)
"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument" (George Santayana)
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" (Alan Kay) which is really a paraphrase of "The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented" (Dennis Gabor in "Inventing the Future", 1963)
"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss" (Friedrich Nietzsche)
"Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards" (Aldous Huxley)
"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception" (Aldous Huxley)
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history" (Aldous Huxley)
"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you" (Aldous Huxley)
"Technology is ideology" (Neil Postman)
"Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people" (Proust)
"The major difference between rats and people is that rats learn from experience" (Burrhus Skinner)
"The problem is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it" (Seneca)
"The medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan)
"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us" (Father John Culkin)
"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror" (Marshall McLuhan)
"We are failing to understand why we are failing" (Erik Brynjolfsson, 2011)
"Computers are useless: they can only give you answers" (Pablo Picasso, interviewed by William Fifield, 1964)
"All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them" (Umberto Eco)
"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else" (Umberto Eco)
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion" (Steven Weinberg)
"If God didn't exist, everything would be possible" (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
"Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure." (George Carlin)
"Education is a wise and liberal system of police, by which property, and life, and the peace of society are secured" (Daniel Webster)
"If we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed" (Carl Sagan)
"The best way to predict your future is to create it" (Peter Drucker)
"Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend" (Napoleon)
"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born" (Antonio Gramsci)
"Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned" (Roberto Calasso)
"Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be." (Miguel de Cervantes)
"The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error." (Karl Popper)
"The task is...not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees" (Erwin Schroedinger)
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought" (Albert Szent-Gyorgyi)
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" (Marcel Proust)
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible" (Maurits Cornelis Escher)
"A man wants what a woman has: sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or own it outright (marriage in most societies)" (Andrea Dworkin)
"A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all" (Tacitus)
"God is a hacker, not an engineer" (Francis Crick)
"Not to be mad is another form of madness" (Blaise Pascal)
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" (Oscar Wilde)
"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience" (George Bernard Shaw)
"Experience is not what happens to a man, it is what a man does with what happens to him" (Aldous Huxley)
"What we understand is not enough to understand why we understand it" Piero Scaruffi)
"No one believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach" (composer Mauricio Kagel)
"To leave is to arrive and to arrive is to leave" (Yong-Kyun Bae)
"Hell is other people" (Sartre)
"Art is anything you can get away with" (Marshall McLuhan)
"There's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure." (Clay Shirky)
"... the death of the spirit which threatens every man unless he is conscious of the danger and has a real purpose which can keep it alive and enable it to thrust its way through the choking weeds and thorns to the air and to the sun" (Hugh Trevor-Roper)
"We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine." (Henry Louis Mencken)
"The hallmark of a deep explanation is that it answers more than you ask" (Max Tegmark)
"I think people who write programs do have at least a glimmer of extra insight into the nature of God... because creating a program often means that you have to create a small universe" (Don Knuth)
"It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation." (Vladimir Putin)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" (Voltaire)
"Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too" (Heinrich Heine)
"The goal of the future is full unemployment" (Arthur Clarke)
"We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like" (Dave Ramsey)
"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans" (Allen Saunders, 1957)
"To find something interesting you merely have to look at it long enough" (Flaubert)
"I'm a question mark guy in an exclamation point world" (Charles O'Meara, aka Chuck Vrtacek)
"The horse does not eat cucumber salad" (Johann Reis, the first sentence uttered in a telephone)
"Science is always wrong - It never solves a problem without creating 10 more" (George-Bernard Shaw)
"The world is but a canvas to our imaginations" (Henry Thoreau)
"There is no position so absurd that some philosopher has not held it" (James Fetzer)
"A little rebellion every now and then is a good thing" (Thomas Jefferson)
"It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter" (Herbert Hoover talking about the radio in 1922).
"In 3000 AD one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking in a few hours. But if the civilization of these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so." (Aldous Huxley in 1926)
"Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain." (Carl Sagan)
"Radio broadcasting is a sort of cleansing instrument for the mind just as the bathtub is for the body" (David Sarnoff at RCA in the 1920s).
"There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal" (Henry Ford)
"The entire Earth will be converted into a huge brain" (Nikolas Tesla, talking about the radio in 1904)
"Every monument of civilization is a monument of barbarism" (Walter Benjamin)
"Now the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room" (David Weinberger)
"Learn to appreciate what you have, before time makes you appreciate what you had" (Robert Downey)
"Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other" (Oscar Ameringer)
"Better to understand very little than to misunderstand a lot" (one-liner signature file on the internet)
"War does not determine who is right - only who is left" (Bertrand Russell)
"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does" (Michel Foucault)
"There is something not-there there" (Terrence Deacon)
"I'm dying, but so are you" (Christopher Itchens, dying of cancer)
"The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." (William Faulkner)
"Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly" (Dalai Lama)
"Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it" (Dalai Lama)
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed." (Mahatma Gandhi)
"I Seem To Be a Verb" (Buckminster Fuller)
"An optimist is someone who doesn't quite understand the problem" (Steve Kaufmann)
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew." (Marshall McLuhan)
"When you are invited to a dinner, you are either a guest or you are part of a menu" (Guy Verhofstadt)
"If you torture statistics long enough, they'll eventually confess the truth" (Alan Simpson)
"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving" (Lao Tzu)
"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas - I'm frightened of the old ones" (John Cage)
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn" (Alvin Toffler)
"Begin Anywhere" (John Cage)
"The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rulers - It's the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments - Too bad we've forgotten how to do it" (Neal Stephenson)
"Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once" (John Wheeler)
"An investor who has all the answers doesn't even understand the questions" (John Templeton)
"The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line" (Borges)
"I have been everything and it is worth nothing" (Roman emperor Septimius Severus)
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done" (Alan Turing)
"Contentment is rare among men as it is natural among animals" (Will Durant)
"Mankind's ability to understand and control the forces of nature greatly exceeds our ability to govern ourselves" (George Soros)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" (Upton Sinclair)
"We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom" (Edward Osborne Wilson)
"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding" (Khalil Gibran)
"The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting" (Charles Bukowski)
"Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed" (Samuel Johnson)
"I don't do drugs - I am drugs" (Salvador Dali)
"Love that is not madness is not love" (Pedro Calderon de la Barca)
"When a man suffers from delusions he is described as mad but when a million do so they belong to a world religion" (Anthony Storr)
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable -There is another theory which states that this has already happened" (Douglas Adams)
"If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians" (Warren Buffett)
"The world is a playground" (Indian-Persian poet Ghalib)
"Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition" (Timothy Leary)
"You are all you've got" (Janis Joplin)
"Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent" (Eleanor Roosevelt)
"If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman" (Margaret Thatcher)
"Be like a flower that gives fragrance, even to the hand that crushes it" (Ali ibn Abi Talib)
"If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married" (Katherine Hepburn)
"When women are depressed, they eat or go shopping - Men invade another country - It's a whole different way of thinking" (Elayne Boosler)
"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper" (Camille Paglia)
"If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun" (Katherine Hepburn)
"Poor clowns of the absolute, we forget that we act out a tragedy to enliven the boredom of one spectator whose applause has never reached a mortal ear" (Ciorin)
"O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small,/ Who by the dim lights of your twisted minds/ Believe you prosper even as you fall,/ Can you not see that we are worms, each one/ Born to become the angelic butterfly/ That flies defenseless to the Judgement Throne?" (Dante, Canto 10, Purgatorio)
"God doesn't vote" (Former Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti justifying his dirty political methods despite being a very religious man)
"If I owe you a pound, I have a problem; but if I owe you a million, the problem is yours" (John Maynard Keynes)
"During my lifetime most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one fashion or other, from mainland Europe, and the solutions from outside it" (Margaret Thatcher)
"Wait and see" (Albert Einstein, answering the question what's going to happen to the universe?)
"Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible" (Lord Kelvin in 1895)
"Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now - They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are" (Bill Gates)
"There is a world market for maybe five computers" (Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943)
"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value" (French general Ferdinand Foch in 1913)
"Hell is the truth seen too late" (Thomas Hobbes)
"We inhabit a universe that is still inventing itself" (Peter Corning)
"No poem is intended for the reader, no painting for the beholder, no symphony for the listener" (Walter Benjamin)
"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings" (Robert Burns)
"There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing" (Robert Burns)
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler" (Albert Einstein)
"Yvonne: Where were you last night? = Rick: That's so long ago, I don't remember - Yvonne: Will I see you tonight? - Rick: I never make plans that far ahead" (Curtiz's film Casablanca)
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood - Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less" (Marie Curie)
"The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process" (Edward Bernays)
"Nature has all the answers, so what is your question?" (Howard Odum)
"There can be no true friends without true enemies" (Michael Dibdin)
"Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an emperor" (the Pirate to Alexander the Great in St Augustine's City of God)
"The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be" (Lao Tze)
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" (Benjamin Franklin)
"The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village" (Marshall McLuhan)
"Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do" (Bertrand Russell)
"Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind (Bernard Baruch)
"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order" (Alfred North Whitehead)
"Failure is the foundation of success - Success is the foundation of failure" (Lao Tze)
"Wer immer strebend sich bemuht, Den konnen wir erlosen/ Whoever exerts himself in constant striving, Him we can save" (Goethe, Faust)
"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do" (Jalal ad-Din Rumi)
"Every journey of 10,000 li starts with the first step" (Chinese proverb)
"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library" (Jorge Luis Borges)
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal" (Albert Einstein)
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new" (Albert Einstein)
"It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice" (Deng Xiaoping)
"I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic" (JG Ballard)
"The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time" (Edward-Osborne Wilson)
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do" (Benjamin Franklin)
"Truths are more likely to be discovered by one man than by a nation" (Descartes)
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" (James Joyce)
"He who follows another will never overtake him" (Michelangelo)
"The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred" (Balzac)
"Esse Est Percipi/ To be is to be perceived" (Bishop Berkeley)
"A believer is a stranger in this world" (Al-Hasan al-Basri)
"Change has rarely ever changed things" (Walter Sorrell)
"We've learned how to make a living, but not a life" (George Carlin)
"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it" (claimed to be a Chinese proverb but in reality a joke coined at the turn of the 20th century by an anonymous person)
"There are no inevitabilities in history" (Paul Johnson)
"A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong" (Stella Adler)
"While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die" (Leonardo da Vinci)
"While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one" (Jorge Luis Borges)
"The difference between me and a madman is that i am not mad" (Salvador Dali)
"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see" (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life" (Frank Zappa)
"Show me a sane man and I will cure him" (Carl Jung)
"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" (Friedrich Nietzsche)
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them" (Albert Einstein)
"Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary" (Blaise Pascal)
"Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans" (Ralph Nader)
"Revolutions are always verbose" (Leon Trotsky)
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh" (Voltaire)
"Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something" (Anton Chekhov)
"You are mistaken if you think that your customer is paying you to have sex with him -He is also paying you to go away after the sex is over" (Anonymous prostitute quoted in a Leonard Shlain book)
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it" (George Santayana)
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" (Mark Twain)
"Men have become the tools of their tools" (Henry Thoreau)
"If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment" (Voltaire)
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading" (Lao Tzu)
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful" (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
"Everything should be as simple as possible - but no simpler" (Albert Einstein)
"Most books are about aspects of human knowledge - Few people write books about human ignorance, despite the fact that there would be much more to write about" (Piero Scaruffi)
"Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side: Hey! how do I get across? - Nasrudin shouted back: You are across!" (Popular Turkish tale)
"No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs" (Max Delbruck)
"There is no substitute for victory" (Douglas MacArthur)
"Somewhere something incredible is waiting to happen" (John Wheeler)
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" (Carl Sagan)
"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" (H.L. Mencken)
"Ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti/ The one truth is called by different names by various learned men" (Rig Veda)
"God does not exist - He is being itself beyond essence and existence - Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him" (Paul Tillich)
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing" (Wernher Von Braun)
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day - Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" (Lao Tzu)
"I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use" (Galileo Galilei)
"The Brain is wider than the Sky / For put them side by side / The one the other will contain" (Emily Dickinson)
"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced" (Frank Zappa)
"Congressmen are like diapers - You need to change them often, and for the same reason" (Pete McCloskey)
"I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it" (John Coltrane to Zita Carno on seeing one of his improvisations transcribed to music notation)
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" (Josef Stalin)
"The foolish ask questions the wise cannot answer" (Oscar Wilde)
"No one really knows enough to be a pessimist" (Norman Cousins)
"Life is a question in the form of an answer" (Piero Scaruffi)
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught" (Oscar Wilde)
"I would characterize current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous" (former USA defense secretary Robert McNamara)
"Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth" (Archimedes)
"Sometimes the metaphors write themselves" (Eugene Robinson, 2006)
"All murderers are punished unless they kill in great numbers" (Voltaire)
"Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je d‚fendrai jusqu'… la mort le droit que vous avez de le dire/ I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (Voltaire)
"It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go" (Dolores Ibarruri La Pasionaria)
"There is a limit to human intelligence, but there is no limit to human stupidity" (Piero Scaruffi)
"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)
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement - The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth" (Niels Bohr)
"La lor cieca vita e` tanto bassa, che invidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte - Fama di loro esser non lassa; misericordia e giustizia li sdegna - Non ti curar di lor, ma guarda e passa/ Their pointless life is so low that all other lots they envy - Fame of them the world hath none; Mercy and Justice scorn them both - Ignore them, look ahead and pass them by" (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III)
"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time - And all our yesterdays have lighted fools, The way to dusty death - Out, out brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more - It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing" (William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5)
"Envy is blind, and she has no other quality than that of detracting from virtue" (Titus Livius)
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject" (Winston Churchill)
"There are known knowns: there are things we know we know - We also know there are known unknowns: we know there are some things we do not know - But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know that we don't know" (Donald Rumsfeld)
"When the impossible happens, everybody has a very simple explanation for why it was inevitable" (Piero Scaruffi)
"Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?" (Groucho Marx)
"The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine" (Charles Townes)
"Time is the substance of which we are made" (Borges)
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist - Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew - Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant - Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me" (Reverend Martin Niemoller, 1945)
"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think" (Adolf Hitler)
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)
"Karl Radek: Vladimir Ilyich, where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie? Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: They will sell it to us themselves
"It is reasonable to expect that, with the favourable effects of time, and of European arts and sciences, [America] will become the most formidable power in the world" (the Venetian ambassador to Paris, 1783)
"Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together" (Gandhi)
"A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends" (Charles De Gaulle)
"Life is not a journey, it is a destination" (Piero Scaruffi)
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies" (Groucho Marx)
"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we achieved neither" (Condoleeza Rice)
"We are not shooting enough professors" (Lenin)
"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist" (George Orwell)
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" (Mahatma Gandhi)
"I thank my parents for the greatest gift of all: poverty" (Robert Benigni)
"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it" (Winston Churchill)
"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking" (Martin Heidegger)
"You were born with wings - Why prefer to crawl through life?" (Jalal ad-Din Rumi)
"Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians" (Charles De Gaulle)
"You must be the change you wish to see in the world" (Mahatma Gandhi)
"This whole world Is one big prison yard - Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards" (Bob Dylan)
"The past is not dead - it isn't even past" (Christa Wolf, 1976)
"I think it would be a good idea" (Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization)
"God is dead - Nietzsche/ Nietzsche is dead - God" (Graffiti on Nietzsche's tomb)
"Philosophy has only interpreted the world - The real challenge is to change it" (Epigraph on Karl Marx tomb)
"It will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the Pacific" ( Thomas Jefferson)
"A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere" (Groucho Marx)
"Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created" (John Ralston Saul, 1992)
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten" (Burrhus Skinner)
"Humankind is rapidly becoming a footnote in the history of technology " (Piero Scaruffi)
"The Army causes Taxes; Taxes cause Discontents; and Discontents make an Army necessary" (Lord Bath, 1749)
"To do is to be - Descartes; To be is to do - Voltaire; Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra" (Men'w Restrooms, Greasewood Flats, Scottsdale)
"I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words" (Woody Allen)
"I play the notes, in order, as they are written - It is God who makes the music" (Johan Sebastian Bach)
"The first thing that we do let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI, II/4, Shakespeare)
"The difference between a psychiatric patient and a psychiatric doctor is that the former gets better" (paraphrasing a line in Vincent Minnelli's "Cobweb")
"Under no circumstances should a true Christian draw the sword" (Tertullian, 2nd century AD)
"The basis of government is jugglery - If it lasts and works, it becomes policy" (Caliph Al Mansur of Baghdad)
"The worst things are those that are novelties - Every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hell" (Prophet Mohammed, The Neglected Duty)
"shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi = the master is fond of licking lion spittle" (Chinese tonguetwister)
"I am who I am" (God to Moses)
"Jesus: I came into the world to bear witness to the truth - Pilate: What is truth?" (John 18:3438)
"What is the sound of one hand clapping?" (Hakuin)
"Four blind men gave four altogether contradictory descriptions of an elephant because one had been able to touch only its tail, the other its legs, the third its belly and the fourth its ears only" (Ancient Arab proverb)
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty" (Winston Churchill)
"There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world" (Piero Scaruffi)
"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy" (Jorge-Luis Borges)
"Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets" (Napoleon Bonaparte)
"Quote me as saying that I was mis-quoted" (Groucho Marx)