Quotations of Wisdom

Ignorance is the act of ignoring the collateral damage of one's belief and an apathetic attempt to seek the truth.

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree.

To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic.

The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion.

Maybe our nation is longing to feel the sore muscles acquired from the labor of liberty.

The New Dealers have all left Washington to make way for the car dealers.

The concept of “democratizing the media” has no real meaning within the terms of political discourse in the United States. In fact, the phrase has a paradoxical or even vaguely subversive ring to it. Citizen participation would be considered an infringement on freedom of the press, a blow struck against the independence of the media that would distort the mission they have undertaken to inform the public without fear or favor... this is because the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive. -- Chapter 1: Democracy and the Media," Necessary Illusions

The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may think what we like and say what we think.

Our race into more and more business mergers is generally not healthy, thought in some instances it is. Our tax laws encourage these mergers. For example, when U.S. Steel (now USX Corporation) borrowed $5.6 billion to buy Marathon Oil, it did not increase steel productivity, it did not cause any more oil wells to be drilled, it added nothing to the nation's productivity. But the interest they paid on that purchase is tax deductible -- ultimately subsidized by you and me. It eats up money on the financial markets, increasing interest.

Always go along with the truth as you know it.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

Do not yield to misfortunes, but advance more boldly to meet them, as your fortune permits you.

Every idea is an incitement... Eloquence may set fire to reason.

In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

Faith... must be enforced by reason... when faith becomes blind it dies.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.

David and Julie, I was born in 1947. I am typing this email through tears of respect for Ike. After listening to you guys analyze the past and present with so much insight and knowledge. I'm inspired by my memories of the balance and wisdom of Ike. He lives on through you. More importantly you were willing to help us remember. Hopefully your efforts will throw more balance into the current political discussion. -- From Bob in Indianapolis who emailed the Diane Rehm episode, David and Julie Nixon Eisenhower: "Going Home to Glory"

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question "How?" but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question "Why?"

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.

Surrounded by military airplanes and warships from the world's most civilized and developed nations, we have been denied permission by friendly governments, for reasons of security, to land anywhere, but in the tiny, and still neutral, Republic of Djibouti.

Notice what no one else notice, and you'll see what no one else knows, What you get is what you get, what you do with what you get, that's more the point. -- City of Ember

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist.

Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovation must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should press the old ... Out of the strife ... comes a creative tensile strength.

God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. He is not something to be sought in the darkness with the light of reason. He is the light.

The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, conservatives often seem inclined to accept that tribute, voting for candidates who publicly espouse conservative moral principles whatever their personal behaviour.

We reach a point where there can be on more special interest or special cases. Nuclear arms threaten every person on the earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war was practical or if there was only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. -- Cosmos

The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.

You don't have to like a man to drink his liquor.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

There is no harm in repeating a good thing.

We cannot have peace if we are concerned only with war. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.

Before one can use one's reason, one should know the traps that are always awaiting the untutored mind. -- Nonsense, Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language.

One political party can’t fool all of the people all of the time, that’s why we have two political parties.

With such a peace, there will still be quarrels and conflicting interests, as there are with families and nations. World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor - it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Affluence creates poverty.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

Humans have learned scientifically that the exact truth can never be attained or told. We can reduce the degree of tolerated error, but we have learned physically, as Heisenberg discovered, that exactitude is prohibited, because most exquisite physical experiment has shown that "the act of measuring always alters that which is measured".

We must guard against the tenacity of arguments with hidden agendas.

No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country.

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.

I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.

When you cease to strive to understand then you will know without understanding.

Keep a watch also on the faults of the patients, which often make them lie about the taking of things prescribed.

Only the educated are free.

In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans living in California, Oregon, and Washington, none of whom had committed a crime, from their home. They had from one to three days to sell all of their property and put all their possessions into one suitcase before the federal government sent them to camps in Idaho and other inland states ... While the action of our government cannot be compared to Hitler's Holocaust, it is illustration of the reality that the passion of a nation can be aroused against a minority if leadership is irresponsible ... There needs to be restraining voices defending the rights of minorities or those expressing unpopular views.

I am astonished each time I come to the U.S. by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It's quite blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of the U.S.

O conscience, upright and stainless, how bitter a sting to thee is a little fault!

For example, we're on Sarah Palin's targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gun sight over our district. When people do that, they have to realize that there are consequences to that action.

Caine, "Beauty differs from being to being". Master Kan, "Beauty is constant as is the truth. Seek and find what is the truth". Caine, "What is the truth of man, Master". Master Kan, "It has been said that a man is three things, what he thinks he is, what others think he is, and what he really is. Which of these do you feel is the truth"? Caine, "What he really is, but if a man is wrong about himself, and others are wrong about him, who is left to say what he really is"? Master Kan, "At what point in time can a man be fixed from force if he is to live and grow". Caine, "He must change". Master Kan, "As the lowly caterpillar transforms itself into a finer and more beautiful creature". Kung Fu" 1973 Season 2, Episode 14

Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.

Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’. I dream things that never were and say ‘why not? -- In eulogy to his brother Robert Kennedy.

As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse.

Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.

It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world.

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so.

It is a fact that the much-boasted freedom of the British press is theoretical rather than actual. To begin with, the centralised ownership of the press means in practice that unpopular opinions can only be printed in books or in newspapers with small circulations.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

We live here in the United States of Amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning. Everything is a blank. We have no history.

Behind every argument is someone's ignorance.

Man is the only creature that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they could be.

My dear fellow citizens, For forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations on the same theme: how our country was flourishing, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us. I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

Hubris is no one’s friend, and irony is a nag. -- The Tea Fragger Party

Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.

Those who control the media have a monopoly in the debate.

Antipathy, dissimilarity of views, hate, contempt, can accompany true love.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

If your desire is stagnation, finding an argument which is 180 degrees opposed to yours will help. If your desire is to move your argument in a specified direction, finding a similar argument within 15 degrees of separation is a better pool to recruit from.

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. It's easy. All you need is love.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.

Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray, and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor, and your picture begins to lighten up.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Do not think me gentle because I speak in praise of gentleness, or elegant because I honor the grace that keeps this world. I am a man crude as any, gross of speech, intolerant, stubborn, angry, full of fits and furies. That I may have spoken well at times, is not natural. A wonder is what it is.

Sometimes I wonder if suicides aren't in fact sad guardians of the meaning of life.

The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.