Random quotes

Quotes in
Sorted by
Author
Subject
Text
Show as list
2718 quotes    

The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choices of action.
 
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
 
The topic of compassion is not at all religious business; it is important to know it is human business, it is a question of human survival.
 
Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our instituitions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our instituitions. And so it goes, on and on.
 
The goal is not to be better than the other man, but your previous self.
 
The truth is so precious that it must be guarded by a vast bodyguard of lies.
 
The individual has to awaken his intelligence, not through any form of discipline, resistance, compulsion, coercion, but through freedom.
 
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
 
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
 
Every increased possession loads us with new weariness.
 
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
 
If you disagree with yourself, you are always right.
 
We will leave this world stupid and evil as we have found it upon our arrival.
 
PROFESSOR: A person whose job is to tell students how to solve the problems of life he avoided by becoming a professor.
 
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
 
The earth is not my home, I'm just passing by
 
Capitalism' is a dirty word for many intellectuals, but there are a number of studies showing that open economies and free trade are negatively correlated with genocide and war.
 
The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.
 
We social scientists would do well to hold back our eagerness to control that world which we so imperfectly understand. The fact of our imperfect understanding should not be allowed to feed our anxiety and so increase the need to control. Rather our studies could be inspired by a more ancient, but today less honoured, motive: a curiosity about the world of which we are part. The rewards of such work are not power but beauty.
 
If you have to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be "it's complicated".
 
2718 quotes