I collect quotations, and keep them here for my own amusement. Here they are:
- “In a sense, the only purpose of life is the creation of a self and what matters is the sum total of all one's attempts.”
-- Gore Vidal (Two Sisters) - “Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor.”
-- Adam Smith (lecture given 1766) - “We stand for the maintenance of private property,... we shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.”
-- Adolf Hitler - “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
-- Adam Smith - “Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?”
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld - “Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
-- Albert Einstein - “Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.”
-- John Stuart Mill - “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”
-- Rene Descartes - “The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.”
-- Fran Lebowitz - “The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it.”
-- Francois de la Rochefoucauld - “Happiness is an imaginary condition, formerly attributed by the living to the dead, now usually attributed by adults to children, and by children to adults.”
-- Thomas Szasz (The Second Sin (1973) "Emotions") - “The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.”
-- Frank Zappa - “Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.”
-- Lee Simonson - “What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.”
-- George Dennison Prentice - “The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.”
-- Nicholas Butler - “There are three social classes in America: upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class.”
-- Judith Martin - “Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.”
-- Albert Einstein - “How much longer are we going to think it necessary to be ''American'' before (or in contradistinction to) being cultivated, being enlightened, being humane, and having the same intellectual discipline as other civilized countries?”
-- Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937) - “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826) (Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)) - “Criminal: A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.”
-- Howard Scott - “Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?”
-- Kelvin Throop III - “Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.”
-- G. M. Trevelyan (1876 - 1962) (English Social History (1942)) - “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
-- George Bernard Shaw - “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
-- George Bernard Shaw - “Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”
-- Daniel Webster