I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose Government is influenced by shopkeepers.”
-- Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) - “What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?”
-- Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) - “What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
-- Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) - “A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.”
-- Albert Camus (The Fall) - “Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction: therefore it destroys freedom.”
-- Albert Camus (The Rebel) - “Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: 'You shall think as I do or you shall die'; but he says: 'You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people.”
-- Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America) - “Money does not pay for anything, never has, never will. It is an economic axiom as old as the hills that goods and services can be paid for only with goods and services.”
-- Alfred Nock (Memoirs of a Superfluous Man) - “The defense of morals is the battle-cry which best rallies stupidity against change.”
-- Alfred North Whitehead (Adventures of Ideas) - “What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.”
-- Alfred North Whitehead (Dialogues) - “Originality implies being bold enough to go beyond accepted norms. Sometimes it involves being misunderstood or rejected by one's peers. Those who are not too dependent upon, or too closely involved with, others, find it easier to ignore convention. Primitive societies find it difficult to allow for individual decisions or varieties of opinion. When the maintenance of group solidarity is a prime consideration, originality may be stifled.”
-- Anthony Storr (Solitude) - “A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.”
-- Aristotle (Politics) - “Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.”
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (Parerga and Paralipomena) - “Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”
-- Benedict Spinoza (Ethics) - “We run the risk, in fact, that the whole humanistic enterprise of trying to understand ourselves is coming to seem peculiar. For various reasons, education is being driven towards an increasing concentration on the technical and the commercial, to a point at which any more reflective inquiry may come to seem unnecessary and archaic, something that at best is preserved as part of the heritage industry.”
-- Bernard Williams (Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline) - “The violence in the world comes about because we human beings are forever creating barriers between men who are like us and men who are not like us.”
-- Edmund Leach (A Runaway World) - “One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.”
-- Elias Canetti (The Secret Heart of the Clock) - “Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.”
-- Emma Goldman (Anarchism and Other Essays) - “There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as "moral indignation," which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”
-- Erich Fromm (Man For Himself) - “Persons who find themselves disenchanted with the whole system of situational obligations in society may seek out those places where reverie is likely to be tolerated.”
-- Erving Goffman (Behavior in Public Places) - “The State is not 'abolished', it withers away.”
-- Friedrich Engels (Anti-Duhring) - “...the poet is the only true human being, and the best philosopher is only a caricature in comparison.”
-- Friedrich Schiller (Goethe-Schiller Letters) - “One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it.”
-- Gustave Le Bon (Opinions And Beliefs) - “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment.”
-- Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man) - “The way in which the man of genius rules is by persuading an efficient minority to coerce an indifferent and self-indulgent majority.”
-- James Fitzjames Stephen (Liberty, Equality and Fraternity) - “Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business.”
-- Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories)