I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “All of us are watchers - of television, of time clocks, of traffic on the freeway - but few are observers. Everyone is looking, not many are seeing.”
-- Peter M. Leschak - “Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be the average man.”
-- Dean William R. Inge - “Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons.”
-- George Bernard Shaw - “Lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.”
-- William James - “Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson - “It takes a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.”
-- Alfred North Whitehead - “Here is the beginning of philosophy: a recognition of the conflicts between men, a search for their cause, a condemnation of mere opinion...and the discovery of a standard of judgment.”
-- Epictetus - “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.”
-- Bertrand Russell - “All I know is that I'm not a Marxist.”
-- Karl Marx - “Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.”
-- George Jean Nathan - “Politics...has always been the systematic organization of hatred.”
-- Henry Adams - “If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches, they will take sandwiches.”
-- Lord Boyd-Orr - “Once a man would spend a week patiently waiting if he missed a stage coach, but now he rages if he misses the first section of a revolving door.”
-- Simeon Strunsky - “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
-- Edward Abbey - “Zen is a way of liberation, concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous, but what is.”
-- Alan Watts - “When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
-- Mark Twain - “Technology is the knack of arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.”
-- Max Frisch - “The true definition of a snob is one who craves what separates men rather than for what united them.”
-- John Buchan - “Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in the eyes of most people, is for a man to go about unlabeled. The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog.”
-- Thomas Huxley - “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.”
-- Robert Frost - “They intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are.”
-- Aldous Huxley - “Because it is less structured than work, leisure time leaves workaholics at a loss for what to do. Workaholics practically climb the walls when they can't work.”
-- Marilyn Machlowitz - “Knowing full well that [people] are not equal in natural powers, [nor in] artificial advantages; one of the falsest maxims which ever pandered to human selfishness under the name of political wisdom [is that] civil society ought to leave its members alone, each to look after their several interests, provided they do not employ direct fraud or force against their neighbour.”
-- Thomas Arnold - “We rarely think people have good sense unless they agree with us.”
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
-- Philip K. Dick