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"Every blade of grass is a study; and to produce two, where there was but one, is both a profit and a pleasure."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"The leading rule for the lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence. Leave nothing for to-morrow which can be done to-day."
-- Abraham Lincoln
"A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you."
-- Adlai Stevenson
"Vote early and vote often."
-- Al Capone
"You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone."
-- Al Capone
"When I sell liquor, it's called bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake Shore Drive, it's called hospitality."
-- Al Capone
"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
-- Albert Einstein
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
-- Albert Einstein
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds."
-- Albert Einstein
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
-- Albert Einstein
"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
-- Albert Einstein
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
-- Albert Einstein
"The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility."
-- Albert Einstein
"The only real valuable thing is intuition."
-- Albert Einstein
"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
-- Albert Einstein
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the former. "
-- Albert Einstein
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
-- Albert Einstein
"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder. "
-- Albert Einstein
"Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism--how passionately I hate them! "
-- Albert Einstein
"I have never belonged wholeheartedly to country or State, to my circle of friends or even to my own family... Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men. I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others, and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations."
-- Albert Einstein
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."
-- Albert Schweitzer
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
-- Aldous Huxley
"A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it."
-- Aldous Huxley
"Every man's memory is his private literature."
-- Aldous Huxley
"In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country."
-- Aldous Huxley
"Several excuses are always less convincing than one."
-- Aldous Huxley
"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self."
-- Aldous Huxley
"We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look."
-- Aldous Huxley
"How wrong it is for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself."
-- Anaïs Nin
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."
-- Anaïs Nin
"Man is what he believes."
-- Anton Chekov
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
-- Aristotle
"Wit is educated insolence."
-- Aristotle
"The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards."
-- Arthur Koestler
"To know one's own desires, their meaning and their costs requires the highest human virtue: rationality."
-- Ayn Rand
"Civilization is the process of setting man free from men."
-- Ayn Rand
"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
-- Bertrand Russell
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
-- Bertrand Russell
"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt."
-- Bertrand Russell
"You don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows."
-- Bob Dylan
"I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy."
-- C.S. Lewis
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
-- Carl Sagan
"Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well."
-- Chesterfield
"How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone."
-- Coco Chanel
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
-- Confucius
"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself."
-- D.H. Lawrence
"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."
-- D.H. Lawrence
"We have to hate our immediate predecessors to get free of their authority."
-- D.H. Lawrence
"The fox has many tricks. The hedgehog has but one. But that is the best of all."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Strong words are required for weak principles."
-- Doug Horton
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
-- Douglas Adams
"God gave us our relatives; thank God we can choose our friends."
-- Ethel Watts Mumford
"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called 'Ego'."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"Woman was God's second mistake."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
-- Gandhi
"There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread."
-- Gandhi
"A policy is a temporary creed liable to be changed, but while it holds good it has got to be pursued with apostolic zeal."
-- Gandhi
"It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business."
-- Gandhi
"Morality is contraband in war."
-- Gandhi
"Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up."
-- Gandhi
"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"A world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet."
-- George Orwell
"It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
-- George Orwell
"Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings."
-- George Orwell
"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."
-- George Orwell
"Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
-- George Orwell
"All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green."
-- Goethe
"Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world, for he knows how to introduce the former at fit place in conversation."
-- Goethe
"Correction does much, but encouragement does more."
-- Goethe
"Enjoy what you can, endure what you must."
-- Goethe
"Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow."
-- Goethe
"For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is."
-- Goethe
"If you must tell me your opinions, tell me what you believe in. I have plenty of doubts of my own."
-- Goethe
"The man of understanding finds everything laughable."
-- Goethe
"We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise we harden."
-- Goethe
"What is not fully understood is not possessed."
-- Goethe
"When ideas fail, words come in very handy."
-- Goethe
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
-- H. G. Wells
"Most of the problems a president has to face have their roots in the past."
-- Harry Truman
"If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em."
-- Harry Truman
"It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit."
-- Harry Truman
"We must build a new world, a far better world--one in which the eternal dignity of man is respected."
-- Harry Truman
"We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are."
-- Harry Truman
"You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don't believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can't possibly foresee now."
-- Harry Truman
"No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean."
-- Henry Brooks Adams
"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right."
-- Henry Ford
"Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats."
-- Howard Aiken
"In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?"
-- Igor Stravinsky
"All that is gold does not glitter."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
"Not all those who wander are lost."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken."
-- James Joyce
"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America."
-- James Joyce
"The only thing you take with you when you're gone is what you leave behind."
-- John Allston
"Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would like to be treated, as one would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated."
-- John F. Kennedy
"In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true today than ever that knowledge is power."
-- John F. Kennedy
"It is time for a new generation of leadership, to cope with new problems and new opportunities. For there is a new world to be run."
-- John F. Kennedy
"The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men."
-- John F. Kennedy
"And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
-- John F. Kennedy
"No great intellectual thing was ever done by great effort."
-- John Ruskin
"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."
-- John Ruskin
"No one wants advice, only corroboration."
-- John Steinbeck
"To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot."
-- Joseph Conrad
"I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry."
-- Joseph Heller
"Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else."
-- Joseph Heller
"Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them."
-- Joseph Heller
"Every man has his follies--and often they are the most interesting thing he has got."
-- Josh Billings
"I love treason but hate a traitor."
-- Julius Ceasar
"It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious."
-- Kin Hubbard
"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center."
-- Kurt Vonnegut
"I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that."
-- Lauren Bacall
"Nietzsche was stupid and abnormal."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"If there is no higher reason--and there is none--then my own reason must be the supreme judge of my life."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"Joy can be real only if people look on their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"Only those live who do good."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"The chief difference between words and deeds is that words are always intended for men for their approbation, but deeds can be done only for God."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people."
-- Leo Tolstoy
"I have noted that persons with bad judgment are most insistent that we do what they think best."
-- Lionel Abel
"Man, if you gotta ask, you'll never know."
-- Louis Armstrong
"Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."
-- Mark Twain
"Few things are harder to put up with than a good example."
-- Mark Twain
"The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted."
-- Mark Twain
"Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with."
-- Mark Twain
"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run."
-- Mark Twain
"A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever."
-- Napolean Bonaparte
"It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."
-- Oscar Wilde
"A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Anything worth knowing can never be taught."
-- Oscar Wilde
"The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Attention to health is life greatest hindrance."
-- Plato
"States are as the men, they grow out of human characters."
-- Plato
"The beginning is the most important part of the work."
-- Plato
"They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth."
-- Plato
"Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A man is a god in ruins."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"People with great gifts are easy to find, but symmetrical and balanced ones never."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is a tendency for things to right themselves."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"There is creative reading as well as creative writing."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We do not count a man's years until he has nothing else to count."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Most people would rather be certain they're miserable than risk being happy."
-- Robert Anthony
"No rule is so general, which admits not some exception."
-- Robert Burton
"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day."
-- Robert Frost
"Montains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down."
-- Robert M. Pirsig
"One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous."
-- Robert M. Pirsig
"Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start."
-- Robert M. Pirsig
"The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing."
-- Sigmund Freud
"Thought is action in rehearsal."
-- Sigmund Freud
"Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant."
-- Socrates
"Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty."
-- Socrates
"Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love."
-- Socrates
"I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good."
-- Socrates
"I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my other senses I might blind my soul altogether."
-- Socrates
"See one promontory, one mountain, one sea, one river and see all."
-- Socrates
"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. "
-- Sun Tzu
"Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge."
-- Sun Tzu
"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."
-- Sun Tzu
"The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand."
-- Sun Tzu
"There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare."
-- Sun Tzu
"Therefore the skilful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field."
-- Sun Tzu
"To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence."
-- Sun Tzu
"The king is the man who can."
-- Thomas Carlyle
"The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest."
-- Thomas Moore
"By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity."
-- Vernon Howard
"Each time you consent to a loss you make a gain."
-- Vernon Howard
"Every virtue, every freedom exists because God exists."
-- Vernon Howard
"We are enslaved by anything we do not consciously see. We are freed by conscious perception."
-- Vernon Howard
"You discover who you really are by first understanding who you are not."
-- Vernon Howard
"Class discussion: letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know."
-- Vladimir Nabokov
"A witty saying proves nothing."
-- Voltaire
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
-- Voltaire
"Prejudices are what fools use for reason."
-- Voltaire
"Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel."
-- Voltaire
"Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung."
-- Voltaire
"He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise."
-- Voltaire
"It is as impossible to translate poetry as it is to translate music."
-- Voltaire
"No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking."
-- Voltaire
"The secret of being a bore is to tell everything."
-- Voltaire
"A conference is just an admission that you want somebody to join you in your troubles."
-- Will Rogers
"A country can get more real joy out of just hollering for their freedom than they can if they get it."
-- Will Rogers
"A difference of opinion is what makes horse racing and missionaries."
-- Will Rogers
"Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth."
-- Will Rogers
"Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else."
-- Will Rogers
"Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save."
-- Will Rogers
"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."
-- Will Rogers
"Income Tax has made more Liars out of the American people than Golf."
-- Will Rogers
"One way to solve the traffic problem would be to keep all the cars that aren't paid for off the streets."
-- Will Rogers
"Our public men are speaking every day on something, but they ain't saying anything."
-- Will Rogers
"The nation is prosperous on the whole, but how much prosperity is there in a hole?"
-- Will Rogers
"What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds."
-- Will Rogers
"Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday's omissions and regrets."
-- William Faulkner
"When my horse is running good, I don't stop to give him sugar."
-- William Faulkner
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."
-- Woody Allen
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