QOTD category archive

Malcolm X:

You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong no matter who does it or who says it.

Isaac Asimov:

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right.

Ogden Nash:

Certainly there are things in life that money can’t buy, but it’s very funny – Did you ever try buying then without money?

Frederick Douglass:

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

Afterthought:

As long as you don’t have to pay teachers a living wage.

David Lloyd George:

We are muddled into war.

Godfrey Reggio:

I think it’s naive to pray for world peace if we’re not going to change the form in which we live.

Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Edmund Burke:

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.

Upton Sinclair, via the BooMan:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

William Faulkner:

If I were reincarnated, I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.

James Madison, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

In framing a system, which we wish to last for ages, we should not lose sight of the changes which ages will produce.

Aside:

So much for originalism.

Eric Hoffer:

The savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Winston Churchill:

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

Plautus, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!

Epicurus:

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

John Dewey:

To me faith means not worrying.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

A man is usually more careful of his money than he is of his principles.

William James:

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

The aim of the law is not to punish sins.

Bertrand Russell, from the Quotemaster (subscribe here):

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.