May 2015 Quotations (61)

"A great democracy does not make it harder to vote than to buy an assault weapon."
~~ Bill Clinton

“It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing [that] he was never reasoned into.”
~~ Jonathan Swift [1667-1745]

"The true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals."
~~ Barack Obama

"Nothing will work unless you do."
~~ Dr. Maya Angelou [1928-2014]

"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"[T]he preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country."
~~ John Adams [1735-1826], in "A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law" (1765)

“You think You're frightening me with your hell, don't You? You think your hell is worse than mine.”
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

"To see both sides of a quarrel / is to judge without hate or alarm."
~~ song lyric by Richard Thompson

“All you ever needed to know about this [2000] election, you’ve learned from driving. If you want to go backward, you put it in R. But if you want to go forward, you put it in D.”
~~ former Senator Tom Harkin [D-Iowa 1985-2014]

"The real power is in the hands of small groups of people and I don't think they have titles."
~~ Bob Dylan

"And it feels like I'm livin' in the wasteland of the free."
~~ folk singer Iris DeMent, in 1996

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible."
~~ Frank Zappa [1940-93]

“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.”
~~ Charles Darwin [1809-82]

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"There are two types of republicans, the rich and the stupid. The rich ones strive to keep the stupid ones stupid and the stupid ones strive to keep the rich ones rich."
~~ David Seltzer

"I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]

"You don't have to be a man to fight for freedom. All you have to do is to be an intelligent human being."
~~ Malcolm X [1925-65]

"Rudeness is a weak imitation of strength."
~~ Eric Hoffer [1902-83]

"If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age."
~~ Jacques Barzun [1907-2012]

"Love is a friendship set to music."
~~ marketing expert E. Joseph Cossman [1918-2002]

“Home is the nicest word there is.”
~~ Laura Ingalls Wilder [1867-1957]

"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live, remember that."
~~ character Albus Dumbledore, as written by J.K. Rowling

"We can't command our love, but we can our actions."
~~ Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [1859-1930] Page

"A friend is someone who knows all about you and still loves you."
~~ Elbert Hubbard [1856-1915]

"Be obscure clearly."
~~ E.B. White [1899-1985]

"But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly.”
~~ Barry Goldwater [1909-98]

"We are no longer nourished but somehow consumed by what we have created [on the internet]."
~~ psychologist Sherry Turkle (of M.I.T.)

“Women’s rights are human rights.”
~~ Hillary Clinton

"If we made an income pyramid out of a child's blocks, with each layer portraying $1000 of income, the peak would be higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground."
~~ economist Paul Samuelson [1915-2009]

"Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears."
~~ motivational speaker Leslie C. 'Les' Brown

"It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action."
~~ Honoré de Balzac [1799-1850]

"For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows."
~~ Xian Bible, 1 Timothy 6:10

"If I have a thousand ideas and only one of them turns out to be good, I am satisfied."
~~ Alfred Nobel [1833-96]

"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"Life is simple when you ignore the complicated parts."
~~ cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, in 2015

"Patriotism may be the last refuge of scoundrels, but religion is assuredly the first."
~~ Rick Cass of Florida

"No country can be both ignorant and free."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"A half truth is a whole lie."
~~ Yiddish proverb

"Those who can make you believe absurdities will get you to commit atrocities."
~~ Voltaire [1694-1778]

"The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. [1922-2007], in "Player Piano" [1952]

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"There are never enough I Love Yous."
~~ Lenny Bruce [1925-66]

"I tell this to my girls all the time: This journey we're on is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
~~ Michelle Obama

"Why be extraordinary . . . when you can be ordinary?"
~~ Alan Dapre

"A wise person knows that there is something to be learned from everyone."
~~ anonymous (appeared in 2006)

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold."
~~ Zelda Fitzgerald [1900-48]

"My books are water; those of the great geniuses [are] wine. Everybody drinks water."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"I know but one freedom, and that is the freedom of the mind."
~~ writer-aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry [1900-1944]

"We all place ourselves in danger to one degree or another when we stand up, but we place our children and grandchildren in even greater danger when we don't."
~~ popular poster on Pinterest

"Acknowledging reality is a do-it-yourself project."
~~ Margo Howard

"Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it."
~~ Ernest Holmes [1887-1960]

"The heart is the best reflective thinker."
~~ Wendell Phillips [1811-84]

"All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage."
~~ William Bradford [1599-1657]

"The thinker dies, but his thoughts are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are immortal."
~~ English clergyman Richard Adams [1626-98]

"A new thinker, when studied closely, is merely a man who does not know what other people have thought."
~~ Frank Moore Colby [1865-1925]

"Take away paradox from a thinker and you have a professor."
~~ Søren Kierkegaard [1813-55]

"In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god's blessing, but because I am enlightened by my intelligence."
~~ Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
~~ John Adams [1735-1826]

"Don't calm down. It is perfectly alright to give a sh*t."
~~ Cheryl Hunter

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who haven't got it."
~~ George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

"Your self image is so powerful [that] it unwittingly becomes your destiny."
~~ Oscar Micheaux [1884-1951]

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