Quotations

S to Z

George Santayana

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Jean Paul Sartre

• Hell is other people.

Arthur Schopenhauer

• Every nation ridicules other nations—and all are right.
• To conceal a want of real ideas, many make for themselves an imposing apparatus of long compound words, intricate flourishes and phrases, new and unheard-of expressions, all of which together furnish an extremely difficult jargon that sounds very learned. Yet with all this they say—precisely nothing.
• Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

Erwin Schrõdinger

• Our perceiving self is nowhere to be found in the world-picture, because it itself is the world-picture.
• The essential feature of statistics is a prudent and systematic ignoring of details. [in Science, Theory, and Man]

Pete Seeger

• Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.

Seneca

• He who injured you was either stronger or weaker. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

• Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
• If you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they'll kill you.
• It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
• 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.
• The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything and that all the pains I have taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
• The power of acccurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
• Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
• We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

John A. Shedd

• A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.

Richard Simmons

• If you don’t love your mother you go straight to hell. [3/15/99, a week after his mother died, on the Jay Leno show]

Herbert Simon

• What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

Socrates

• Once made equal to man, woman becomes superior.
• The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be.
• The unexamined life is not worth living.

Sovereign

• In all things there are three choices: yes, no and no choice, except in this—I either choose the truth or I am deceit.

Francis Cardinal Spellman

• Pray as if everything depended on God, and work as if everything depended on man.

John Steinbeck

• The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

Ralph W. Stockman

• The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority.

Theodore Sturgeon

• Ninety percent of everything is crud. (Sturgeon's Law)
  Note: Sturgeon's Law is usually misquoted, "Ninety percent of everything is crap." I met Theodore Sturgeon through science fiction fandom and when I first heard of the law around 1960 people in fandom were still quoting it correctly. I guess "crud" isn't "grown-up" enough for the folks who heard about it later.

Harry Stack Sullivan

• [O]ne of the greatest difficulties encountered in bringing about favorable change is this almost inescapable illusion that there is a perduring, unique, simple existent self, [which is] in some strange fashion, the patient’s, or the subject person’s, private property.

Baroness Edith Summerskill

• Nagging is the repetition of unpalatable truths.

Shunryu Suzuki

• In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few.

Jonathan Swift

• When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
• You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.

Peter Szasz

• Two can live as cheaply as one—for half as long.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

• A discovery is an accident meeting a prepared mind.

The Gospel According to Thomas

• Know what is in thy sight, and what is hidden from thee will be revealed to thee.
• Whoever knows the All but fails to know himself lacks everything.

Henry David Thoreau

• Any man more right than his neighbor constitutes a majority of one.
• If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
• There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
• We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
• What I need to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.

James Thurber

• You can fool too many of the people too much of the time.

Harry Truman

• I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.
• Make no little plans. Make the biggest one you can think of, and spend the rest of your life carrying it out.

Mark Twain

• Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
• Faith is believing in something you know ain’t so.
• Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
• Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish.
• Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
• History may not repeat iself, but it sure does rhyme.
• I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.
• I can live for two months on a good compliment.
• If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
• It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
• Nothing is so in need of reforming as other people’s habits.
• One of the striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
• Strange is the man who practices his religion.
• There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him--early. [Notebook, 1898 ]
• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Lao Tzu

• It is wisdom to know others; it is enlightenment to know one’s self.

Paul Valery

• Seeing is forgetting the name of what one sees.

Leonardo da Vinci

• If you are alone you belong entirely to yourself. If you are accompanied by even another companion you belong only half to yourself, or even less.

Voltaire

• Anything too stupid to be spoken is sung.
• A slave to everything that surrounds me, chained to a single point, and surrounded with immensity, I begin by searching into myself.
• If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.
• I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
• Illusion is the first of all the pleasures.
• In the midst of all the doubts which we have discussed for over four thousand years in four thousand ways, the safest course is still to do nothing against one’s conscience.
• To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid, you must also be well-mannered.

Wernher von Braun

• Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi

• Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Izaak Walton

• If you can't be content with what you have received, be thankful for what you have escaped.

John Wayne

• Life is hard. It's harder if you're stupid.

Simone Weil

• The difference between more or less intelligent men is like the difference between criminals condemned to life imprisonment in smaller or larger cells. The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Steven Weinberg

• Good people will do good things. Evil people will do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
• The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

George Weinreich

• A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Alfred North Whitehead

• A clash of doctrines is not a disaster—it is an opportunity.
• Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.
• Seek simplicity and distrust it.
• The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in detail is admitted; fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure.

Oscar Wilde

• A true friend stabs you in the front.
• I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.
• The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.

Woodrow Wilson

• Never murder a man while he’s busy committing suicide.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

• The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
• Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.

Stevie Wonder

• When you believe in things that you don’t understand then you suffer. [in “Superstition”]

Frank Lloyd Wright

• Love of an idea is the love of God.
• The truth is more important than the facts.

Lin Yutang

• Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
  

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