February Quotations

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"You can have your own opinion, but you can't have your own facts."
~~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan [1927-2003]

“As long as men are not free – in their lives and their opinions, their speech and knowledge – that long will the American Revolution not be finished.”
~~ Robert F. Kennedy [1925-68], at Queens College in New York City (15 June 1965)

"In Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles."
~~ David Ben-Gurion [1886-1973]

"There's no difference between one's killing and making decisions that will send others to kill. It's exactly the same thing."
~~ Golda Meir [1898-1978]

"If {the U.S. Marines in Lebanon} have been put there to fight, there are far too few. If they've been put there to be killed, there are far too many."
~~ U.S. Senator Ernest Hollings (1983)

"Intellectuals solve problems, geniuses prevent them."
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."
~~ Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951]

"Intellect does not attain its full force until it attacks power."
~~ Madame de Stael [1766-1817]

"Consciousness is a disease."
~~ Miguel de Unamuno [1864-1936]

"Intellectual passion drives out sensuality."
~~ Leonardo Da Vinci [1452-1519]

"Our dignity is not in what we do but what we understand. The whole world is doing things."
~~ George Santayana [1863-1952]

"Only in show business could a guy with a C-minus average be considered an intellectual."
~~ Mort Sahl

"There are some things [that] only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe."
~~ George Orwell [1903-50]

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."
~~ Adolf Hitler

"In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom. Make no mistake, all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S."
~~ William S. Burroughs [1914-97]

"It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection."
~~ Antonio Tabucchi

"If this is a recession in the general economy, then it is a depression in the black community."
~~ Kevin Alexander Gray (2007)

"Let's get to work!"
~~ John Edwards (campaign withdrawal speech, 30 January 2008)

"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."
~~ Walter Bagehot [1826-77] (in 1853)

"Write it in your heart that every day is the best day of the year."
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"In the human heart, new passions are forever being born. The overthrow of one almost always means the rise of another."
~~ Francois de la Rochefoucauld [1613-80]

"It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way [that] you carry it."
~~ Lena Horne

"You don't get to be the best because you're the oldest, you get to be the oldest because you're the best."
~~ Bushmill's Whiskey ad

"Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough."
~~ George Washington Carver [1864-1943]

"The Democratic Party's biggest problem is we can't count, and the Republicans can."
~~ John Edwards campaign advisor David 'Mudcat' Saunders

"It is the characteristic of the most stringent censorships that they give credibility to the opinions [that] they attack."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you."
~~ Western saying

"To be young, really young, takes a long time."
~~ Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]

"Love sought is good, but given unsought is better."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare

"Old men start wars, young men fight them. And everyone in the middle gets killed. War is natural. Peace is an accident. We're animals."
~~ Sylvester Stallone (thesis of "Rambo" [2008], cut from the film)

"The only country which any man has a right to love is one where there is balanced judgment, justice founded on wisdom, a free spirit, and a temperate mind."
~~ Judge Learned Hand [1872-1961]

"There is not one Republican today who can be trusted."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated."
~~ Pericles [495–429 B.C.E.]

{previous quotations are posted
at the Working Minds website}