Quotations Set 25

1. A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. - Paul Dudley White, physician (1886-1973)

2. The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion. - Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

3. Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man. - Thomas Wolfe, novelist (1900-1938)

4. Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. - Graham Greene, novelist and journalist (1904-1991)

5. Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government. - Jeremy Bentham, jurist and philosopher (1748-1832)

6. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. -Thomas Pynchon, writer (1937- )

7. The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. - Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

8. Life is short. Be swift to love! Make haste to be kind! - Henri Frederic Amiel philosopher and writer (1821-1881)

9. Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy. - H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

10. Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. - Thomas Szasz, author, professor of psychiatry (1920- )

11. The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away. - Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer and philosopher (1803-1882)

12. All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest days of Hitler. I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about such a thing. - Dwight Eisenhower - Source: Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, Bush and America's Willing Executioners would be Guilty at Nuremberg, The Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), 3/2/03

13. The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them. - Albert Einstein, letter to Sigmund Freud, 30 July 1932

14. A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an abundant source of gain. - Anatole France, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924)

15. One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters. - English Proverb

16. Readers may be divided into four classes:
    1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
    2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
    3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
    4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.
    - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, critic (1772-1834)

17. Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation. Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. - Jean Arp, artist and poet (1887-1948)

18. I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. - Marcus Aurelius, philosopher (121-180)

19. I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time. - Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

20. In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate. - Rene Descartes, philosopher and mathematician (1596-1650)

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