Famous Quotes and Aphorisms
A
"What are the eyes? Two holes in the mask of life."
- Ada
"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
-John Allston
B
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
- James Baldwin
"When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us."
- Alexander Graham Bel
"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
-Hector Berlioz
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmunde Burke
C
"The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."
- James B. Cabell
"Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life."
- Sandra Carey
"Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so."
- Lord Chesterfiel
"He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever."
- Chinese proverb
"He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."
- Tao Teh Ching
"Politicians should read science-fiction, not westerns and detective stories."
-Arthur C. Clark
"When you have nothing to say, say nothing."
- Charles Caleb Colto
"Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
- Henry Steele Commager
"I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. I do and I understand."
- Confucius
D
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow."
- James Dean
"Minds are like parachutes, they only function when open."
-Thomas Dewar
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
-Justice William O. Douglas
E
"The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children."
-Edward VII
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds"
- Albert Einstein
"Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
- Albert Einstein
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
-Albert Einstein
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
- Albert Einstein
"It's all mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
-Albert Einstein
"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."
-George Eliot
"Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance."
- Ralph Ellison
"Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whosoever would be a man must be a nonconformist."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Millions long for immortality but do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
- Susan Ertz
"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
- Euripides
F
"Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
- Benjamin Franklin
"The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."
- Robert Frost
"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
- Robert Frost
G
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. Always."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"An eye for an eye leaves the world blind."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Silence is an argument carried on by other means."
- Ernesto Guevara
H
"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
- Heinrich Heine
"I'm gonna live forever, or die trying."
- Joseph Heller (Catch 22)
"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."
- Ernest Hemingway
"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
-Herbert Hoover
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
- Aldous Huxley
"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."
- Aldous Huxley
I
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ibsen
J
"Many people say it is insane to resist the system but it is actually insane not to."
- Mumia Abu Jamal
"The first casualty when war comes is truth."
-Hiram Johnson
K
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy
"Forgive, but never forget."
- John F. Kennedy
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
- Robert F. Kennedy
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use."
-Kierkegaard
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If you haven't found anything you are willing to die for, you aren't fit to live."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
- Akiro Kurosawa
L
"Happiness is not something you experience, it is something you remember."
- Oscar Levant
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."
-John Locke
"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
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
-Clare Booth Luce
M
"Don't gain the world for the price of your soul, wisdom is better than silver and gold."
- Bob Marley
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds."
- Bob Marley
"Die Religion... ist das Opium des Volkes." [Religion...is the opium of the people]
- Karl Marx
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
- Karl Marx
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form."
-Karl Marx
"Misery motivates, not utopia."
-Karl Marx
"You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do."
-Olin Miller
"There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees."
-Michael de Montaigne
"No man, however great, is known to everybody and no man, however solitary, is known to nobody."
- Moore
"Always question the authority."
- Tom Morello
"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
- John Morley
N
"Stop the world. I want to get to off."
-Anthony Newly
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesn't become a monster."
-Frederick Wilhelm Nietsche
O
"The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
"Who controls the past controls the future; Who controls the present controls the past."
-George Orwell, 1984
P
"Its not what I had feared, but what I had not thought to fear"
-Edgar Allan Poe
R
"The classroom is the last room to get the truth."
- Rage Against the Machine
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."
- Ambrose Redmoon
"Diplomacy is the art of saying »nice doggy« until you can find a rock."
- Will Roger
"Yes, I know my enemies, they're the teachers who taught me to fight me: Compromise, Conformity, Assimilation, Submission, Ignorance, Hypocrisy, Brutality, the Elite, all of which are American Dreams."
- Zack de la Rocha
"Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
- Eleanor Roosevelt.
"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
S
"Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives."
- Sachs
"You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a revolution."
- Afeni Shakur
"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!"
- Socrates
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."
-Dr. Suess
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not."
- Dr. Suess
T
"It is not what you look at, but what you see."
-Thoreau
"If you can't convince them, confuse them."
- Harry S. Truman
U
"If you do not understand my words, you will not understand my silence."
-Unknown
V
"Each of us bears his own Hell."
- Virgil
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Voltaire
"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
-Voltaire
W
"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
- Booker T. Washington
"It is better to be looked over than overlooked."
- Mae West
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world it's own shame."
-Oscar Wilde
Z
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
-Emiliano Zappata
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