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A quotation from Henry Commager

A nation which, in the name of loyalty or of patriotism or of a sincere and high-sounding idea, discourages criticism and dissent, and puts a premium on acquiescence and conformity, is headed for disaster.

Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998) American historian, writer, activist
Essay (1949-11-05), “What Ideas Are Safe?” Saturday Review

Henry Commager quote


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A quotation from Hyman Rickover

Always use the chain of command to issue orders, but if you use the chain of command for information, you’re dead.

Hyman Rickover (1900-1986) Polish-American naval engineer, admiral [b. Chaim Gdala Rykower]
(Attributed)


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A quotation from Victor Hugo

At the hour of civilization through which we are now passing, and which is still so sombre, the miserable’s name is MAN; he is agonizing in all climes, and he is groaning in all languages.
 
[À l’heure, si sombre encore, de la civilisation où nous sommes, le misérable s’appelle L’HOMME; il agonise sous tous les climats, et il gémit dans toutes les langues.]

Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
Letter (1862-10-18) to M. Daelli


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A quotation from Wendell Berry

There is, thank God, no teacher-meter, and there is never going to be one. A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild. A teacher, finally, has nothing to go on but faith, a student nothing to offer in return but testimony.

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
Essay (1985), “Wallace Stegner and the Great Community,” What Are People For? (1990)


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A quotation from Joseph Addison

When Men are easy in their Circumstances, they are naturally Enemies to Innovations.

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, statesman
Essay (1716-05-16), The Freeholder, No. 42


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A quotation from Russell Shorto

Death is the event in life. It is our chief organizing principle. It’s why we rush and why we dawdle, why we butter up our bosses and fawn over our children, why we like both fast cars and fading flowers, why we write poetry, why sex thrills us. It’s why we wonder why we are here.

Russell Shorto (b. 1959) American author, historian, journalist
Descartes’ Bones, ch. 2 “Banquet of Bones” (2008)


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A quotation from Shakespeare

PERICLES: Kings are Earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will;
   And if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill?

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English dramatist and poet
Pericles, Act 1, sc. 1, l. 108ff (1.1.108-109) (1607) [with George Wilkins]


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A quotation from Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) American novelist
Crossing to Safety, ch. 13 (1987)


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A quotation from Ben Edlund

THE TICK: And isn’t sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean, all of you get is one trick, rational thinking. But when you’re good and crazy, oohoo-hoo-hoo-hoo, the sky’s the limit!

Ben Edlund (b. 1968) American cartoonist, writer, producer
The Tick (cartoon), 02×09 “Ants in the Pants!” (1995-11-18) [w. Ralph Soll]


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A quotation from John Quincy Adams

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) US President (1825-29)
Letter (1809-06-22) to William Eustis


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A quotation from Garry Wills

This is always the danger with propaganda, that it becomes at last more credible to its disseminators than to its targets.

Garry Wills (b. 1934) American author, journalist, historian
The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, ch. 18 (1981)


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A quotation from Mark Twain

A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditch-digging.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) American writer [pseud. of Samuel Clemens]
Dictation (1907-07-30)


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A quotation from Samuel Johnson

To put every man in possession of his own time, and rescue the day from the succession of usurpers, is beyond my power, and beyond my hope. Yet perhaps, some stop might be put to this unmerciful persecution, if all would seriously reflect, that whoever pays a visit that is not desired, or talks longer than the hearer is willing to attend, is guilty of an injury which he cannot repair, and takes away that which he cannot give.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
Essay (1758-07-15), The Idler, No. 14


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A quotation from Robert Ingersoll

The doctrine of eternal pain is my trouble with this Christian religion. I reject it on account of its infinite heartlessness.

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) American lawyer, freethinker, orator
Lecture (1884-01-20), “Orthodoxy,” Tabor Opera House, Denver, Colorado


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A quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson

If you adopt an art to be your trade, weed your mind at the outset of all desire of money. What you may decently expect, if you have some talent and much industry, is such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. Nor have you the right to look for more; in the wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, lies your reward; the work is here the wages.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet
Essay (1888-09), “A Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art,” Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 3


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A quotation from Bertrand Russell

I think the gist of the matter is that a saint can live without politeness, and indeed that politeness is incompatible with a saintly character. But the man who is always to be sincere must be free from spite and envy and malice and pettiness. Most of us have a dose of these vices in our composition and therefore have to excerise tact to avoid giving offence. We cannot all be saints, and if saintliness is impossible, we may at least try not to be too disagreeable.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Essay (1933-02-01) “On Tact,” New York American


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A quotation from Eric Hoffer

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American writer, philosopher, longshoreman
Passionate State of Mind, Aphorism 280 (1955)


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A quotation from Lord Acton

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

John Dalberg, Lord Acton (1834-1902) British historian, politician, writer
Letter (1887-04-05) to Mandell Creighton

Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. -- Lord Acton


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A quotation from Josh Billings

It iz one ov the hardest things on earth for a man to learn,—that he plays a third rate game ov whist.
 
[It is one of the hardest things on earth for a man to learn — that he plays a third-rate game of whist.]

Josh Billings (1818-1885) American humorist, aphorist [pseud. of Henry Wheeler Shaw]
Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax, 1871-09 (1871 ed.)


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A quotation from Thomas Carlyle

Dupes indeed are many: but, of all dupes, there is none so fatally situated as he who lives in undue terror of being duped.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish essayist and historian
Lecture (1840-05-22), “The Hero as King,” Home House, Portman Square, London


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A quotation from Melville

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) American writer
Story (1854-06), “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “Picture First,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 9


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A quotation from James Thurber

By definition, humor is gentle. The savage, the cruel, the harsh would fall under the heading of wit and/or satire, as the lawyers say. Now, my definitions are these: The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people — that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.

James Thurber (1894-1961) American humorist, cartoonist, writer
Interview (1959-03-24) by Edward R. Murrow, Small World, CBS-TV


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A quotation from James Howell

He that gropes in the dark, finds that which he would not.

James Howell (c. 1594–1666) Welsh historian and writer
Paroimiographia [Παροιμιογραφία]: Proverbs, or, Old Sayed Sawes & Adages, “English Proverbs” (1659)
[compiler]


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A quotation from Einstein

A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) German-American physicist
Letter (1946-05-25), quoted in “Atomic Education Urged by Einstein,” New York Times


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A quotation from Robert Hogan

There’s a reason narcissists don’t learn from mistakes and that’s because they never get past the first step, which is admitting that they made one. It’s always an assistant’s fault, an adviser’s fault, a lawyer’s fault. Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they’ll say, “What mistake?”

Robert Hogan (b. 1937) American psychologist
Quoted in Jeffrey Kluger, The Narcissist Next Door, ch. 6 (2014)


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A quotation from William Godwin

As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.

William Godwin (1756-1836) English journalist, political philosopher, novelist
Essay (1797, rev. 1823), “Of Choice in Reading,” The Enquirer, Part 1, No. 15


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A quotation from Ambrose Bierce

BOOK-LEARNING, n. The dunce’s derisive term for all knowledge that transcends his own impenitent ignorance.

Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) American writer and journalist
“Book-learning,” “Devil’s Dictionary” column, San Francisco Wasp (1881-05-14)


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A quotation (probably) from Hannah Arendt

The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German-American philosopher, political theorist
(Attributed)


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A quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt

One thing life has taught me: if you are interested, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. They will gravitate as automatically as the needle to the north. Somehow, it is unnecessary, in any cold-blooded sense, to sit down and put your head in your hands and plan them. All you need to do is to be curious, receptive, eager for experience. And there’s one strange thing: when you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else.

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) First Lady of the US (1933–1945), politician, diplomat, activist
You Learn by Living, ch. 1 “Learning to Learn” (1960)


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A quotation from The Bible

The wicked flee when no man pursueth ….
 
[נָ֣סוּ וְאֵין־רֹדֵ֣ף רָשָׁ֑ע]


The Bible (The Old Testament) (14th - 2nd C BC) Judeo-Christian sacred scripture [Tanakh, Hebrew Bible], incl. the Apocrypha (Deuterocanonicals)
Book 20. Proverbs 28: 1 (Prov 28:1) [KJV (1611)]


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A quotation from Madeleine L'Engle

When I find myself hotly defending something, when I am, in fact, zealous, it is time for me to step back and examine whatever it is that has me so hot under the collar. Do I think it’s going to threaten my comfortable rut? Make me change and grow? — and growing always causes growing pains. Am I afraid to ask questions?

Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) American writer
Speech (1983-11-16), “Dare To Be Creative,” Lecture, Library of Congress, Washington, DC


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A quotation from Christopher Hitchens

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) English intellectual, polemicist, socio-political critic
Essay (2004-02), “I Fought the Law,” Vanity Fair


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