Quotations Set 29

1. If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. - Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

2. I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than adore me for telling you lies. - Pietro Aretino, satirist and dramatist (1492-1556)

3. As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. - Gore Vidal, writer (1925- )

4. In the republic of mediocrity genius is dangerous. - Robert G. Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

5. Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship. - Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

6. If you wouldn't write it and sign it, don't say it. - Earl Wilson, columnist (1907-1987)

7. The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. - Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher (1889-1951)

8. A good scare is worth more to a man than good advice. - Edgar Watson Howe, novelist and editor (1853-1937)

9. Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. - Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

10. A king can stand people fighting but he can't last long if people start thinking. - Will Rogers, humorist (1879-1935)

11. Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? - Thomas Wolfe, novelist (1900-1938)

12. We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. - Dwight David Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

13. We perceive when love begins and when it declines by our embarrassment when alone together. - Jean de la Bruyere, essayist and moralist (1645-1696)

14. We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. - William Somerset Maugham, writer (1874-1965)

15. Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power. - John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

16. In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful. - Leo Tolstoy, author (1828-1910)

17. For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that. - Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

18. Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it. - Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)

19. These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. - Gilbert Highet, writer (1906-1978)

20. Extreme justice is extreme injustice. - Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator, writer (106-43 BCE)

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