May 2011 Quotations

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
~~ Marshall McLuhan [1911-80]

"Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing."
~~ Bernard Baruch [1870-65]

"The best form of communication – the most powerful – is Action; the second best form of communication is Telling The Truth; the third best form of communication is Listening."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"The world is governed by far different personages than what is imagined by those not behind the scenes."
~~ Benjamin Disraeli [1804-81]

"For every action there is an equal, and opposite, government program."
~~ David Veal

"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the world – no longer a government of free opinion, no longer a government of conviction and vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of small groups of dominant men."
~~ Woodrow Wilson [1856-1924]

"Politics is a strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles."
~~ Ambrose Bierce [1842-1914]

"Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks."
~~ Henri Bergson [1859-1941]

"The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious."
~~ Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly . . . it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
~~ Joseph Goebbels [1897-1945], Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]
in "Henry VI", Act IV, Scene II: spoken by Dick the Butcher

"Obviously, a man's judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process, and make him something less than a man."
~~ Arthur Hays Sulzberger [1891-1968], American newspaper publisher

"If you wish the sympathy of the broad masses, then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things."
~~ Adolf Hitler [1889-1945], in "Mein Kampf" [1925-26]

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."
~~ Bertrand Russell [1872-1970]

"Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them."
~~ Montesquieu [1689-1755]

"Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired."
~~ Jules Renard [1864-1910]

"Whenever there's chaos, there's ambiguity, and where there's ambiguity, there's fear. And fear gets manipulated."
~~ Robert Redford

Napier's Maxim: "When you have a bottle of champagne, you will have something to celebrate."

"The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."
~~ Michelangelo [1475-1564]

"Is there no place safe from the white man?"
~~ Western author Tabor Evans {real name Harry Whittington} [1915–89]

"To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth."
~~ H.P. Lovecraft [1890-1937]

"God must have loved the plain people, he made so many of them."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."
~~ Abraham Lincoln [1809-65]

"Where all think alike, no one thinks very much."
~~ Walter Lippmann [1889-1974]

"It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong."
~~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [1807-82]

"I am a believer in punctuality, though it makes me very lonely."
~~ Edward Verrall Lucas [1868-1938]

"The free flow of information is the oxygen of democracy."
~~ Walter Isaacson

"The job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time."
~~ David Foster Wallace [1962-2008]

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"To succeed in this world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"Maturity of mind is the capacity to endure uncertainty."
~~ John Finley

"Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty."
~~ Jacob Bronowski [1908-74]

"The true engines of economic growth [are] human ingenuity and productivity."
~~ economist George Horwich

"Those who say [that] they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it."
~~ T.S. Eliot [1888-1965]

"The worst possible outlook is indifference... Behaving like that deprives you of one of the essentials of being human: the capacity and the freedom to be outraged."
~~ Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]

"To create is to resist. To resist is to create."
~~ Stéphane Hessel [b. 1917]

"Truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is."
~~ Nadine Gordimer

"In quantum mechanics, the Universe, at its most elemental level, is random, an idea that tends to upset people."
~~ Rivka Galchen

"Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but to comprehend those things which ARE there."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

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