April 2011 Quotations

"You may think [that] your actions are meaningless and that they won't help, but that is no excuse, you must still act."
~~ Mahatma Gandhi [1869-1948]

"The deterioration of a government begins almost always by a decay of its principles."
~~ Montesquieu [1689-1755]

“The desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption."
~~ William James [1842-1910]

"Self-made men are most always apt to be a little too proud of the job."
~~ Josh Billings [1818-85]

"The last Christian died on the cross."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"Be kind to dumb people."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

“The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.”
~~ William Gilmore Simms [1806-70]

“At the end of the game, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.”
~~ Italian Proverb

“At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.”
~~ Aldous Huxley [1894-1963]

“He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious.”
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
~~ Galileo Galilei [1564-1642]

“An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
~~ Orlando A. Battista [1917-95]

“You cannot fashion a wit out of two half-wits.”
~~ Baron Neil Gordon Kinnock

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.”
~~ Plato [428?-327? B.C.E.]

“The intelligence of the world is a constant. The population is increasing.”
~~ Unknown

“We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.”
~~ Vince Lombardi [1913-70]

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
~~ Franz Kafka [1883-1924]

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”
~~ rock legend Jimi Hendrix [1942-70]

(When asked if fascism could come to America) “Yeah, but it’ll come calling itself anti-fascist.”
~~ Huey Pierce Long, Jr. [1893-1935]

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.”
~~ Georg Lichtenberg [1742-99]

“I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”
~~ comedian Emo Phillips

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”
~~ R. Buckminster Fuller [1895-1983]

“When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist.”
~~ Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara [1909-99]

“Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.”
~~ Abba Eban [1915-2002]

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”
~~ Sun Tzu [544?-496? B.C.E.]

“Fascism: The conservative notion that killing people makes them work harder.”
~~ Anonymous

"[The U.S.A.] is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the über-rich. Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people ... now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined."
~~ filmmaker Michael Moore, March 2011 speech in Madison, Wisconsin

"[Social Security ] is not in crisis at this stage. Leave Social Security alone. We have a lot of other places we can look that is in crisis. But Social Security is not."
~~ U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [Dem=NV] in March 2011

"Give me a woman who loves beer and I'll conquer the world"
~~ Kaiser Wilhelm I [1797-1888]

"Any salaried employee who works more that forty hours per week is anti-labor and a willing victim of corporate greed."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“If you obey all the rules you miss all the fun.”
~~ Katharine Hepburn [1907-2003]

“Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.“
~~ John Lennon [1940-80]

"Foreign aid might be defined as a transfer from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries." ~~ economist Douglas Casey

"It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."
~~ Robert H. Jackson [1892-1954], U.S. Supreme Court Justice 1941-54

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}