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#121

“It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learnt to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives' tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can't come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge

tags: knowledge, nationality, place

62 likes

#122

“You know, the Philistines have long since discarded the rack and stake as a means of suppressing the opinions they feared: they've discovered a much more deadly weapon of destruction -- the wisecrack.”
― W. Somerset maugham, The Razor’s Edge

tags: cynicism

23 likes

#123

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

tags: answers, man, questions, thinking

4650 likes

#124

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

tags: double-standards, ethics, governments, humor, irony, killing, law, mankind, morality, murder, nationalism, nations, war

4139 likes

#125

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings

813 likes

#126

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
― Frederick Douglass

tags: class, class-struggle, class-warfare, conspiracy, denial, ignorance, inequity, justice, oppression, society, society-denial

611 likes

#127

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy--to be followed by a dictatorship.”
― Alexander Fraser Tytler Woodhouselee

tags: freedom, law, taxes, welfare

94 likes

#128

“As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

tags: deficit, spending, taxes

50 likes

#129

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

tags: power

2135 likes

#130

“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
― George Orwell, 1984

1837 likes

#131

“Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
― George Orwell, 1984

tags: orthodoxy

909 likes

#132

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
― George Orwell, 1984

484 likes

#133

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
― Bertrand Russell

8045 likes

#134

“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
― Bertrand Russell

2418 likes

#135

“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

tags: certainty, perspective, presumption, questioning

859 likes

#136

“I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
― Bertrand Russell , Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

tags: babylon, belief, burden-of-proof, christian-god, egyptian, fiction, gods, hypothesis, knowledge, olympus, probability, proof, rational, reason, santa, satan, superstition

823 likes

#137

“To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”
― Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

tags: philosophy, truth

638 likes

#138

“Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.”
― Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays

443 likes

#139

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”
― Bertrand Russell

321 likes

#140

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

tags: inspirational

7931 likes

#141

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

tags: metaphysics, philosophy, science, sense-of-wonder, spirituality

2850 likes

#142

“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan

1479 likes

#143

“In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
― Carl Sagan

tags: politics, religion, science

1198 likes

#144

“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.”
― Carl Sagan

tags: imagination

1165 likes

#145

“Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”
― Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

tags: comedy, encouragement, humor, steve-martin

599 likes

#146

“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight,
but they, while their companions slept,
were toiling upward in the night.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

tags: encouragement, inspirational, work

314 likes

#147

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
― Maya Angelou, All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes

tags: acceptance, comfort, home, protection, safety, security

835 likes

#148

“There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”
― Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

tags: comfort, life, light, loneliness, pain, sorrow

226 likes

#149

“People like hurting each other but loving is not a waste.”
― Ai Yazawa, Nana, Vol. 1

tags: comfort, hurting, love

119 likes

#150

“One of the most important things you can do on this earth is to let people know they are not alone.”
― Shannon L. Alder

tags: alone, comfort, communication, community, community-service, compassion, empathy, encourage, encouragement, give, giving, help, helping-others, helping-out, kindness, letting-them-in, lonelyness, lost, love, missions, novels, reaching-out, selflessness, service, share, sharing, stories, tears-together, transparency, vulnerability

313 likes

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