Favorite quotes

Simple is as simple does; post yours. [spoiler]“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” Isaac Asimov "A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer." Bruce Lee "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." Charles Darwin "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a prettier shell, or a smoother pebble than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Isaac Newton "Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read black where I read white." William Blake "Broad-mindedness is related to tolerance; open-mindedness is the sibling of peace." Salman Rushdie "A writer? What do you have to write about? You're not oppressed. You're not gay." Orange County "'Politics' is made up of two words; 'poli,' which is Greek for 'many,' and 'tics,' which are bloodsucking insects." Gore Vidal "A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please or, worse, to avoid trouble." Mohandas Gandhi “The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed during war.” Chinese proverb "A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition." John Adams "Zeus does not bring all men's plans to fulfillment." Homer "My intention is to portray a truly beautiful soul." Fyodor Dostoevsky "Your trust in rationality makes you irrational." Orson Scott Card "Oops, I thought. Oops is an all-purpose word standing for every bit of profanity, blasphemy, and pornographic and scatological execration I could think of." Orson Scott Card "Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood." Friedrich Nietzsche "Above all, it is through music that the tragic spectator is overcome by an assured premonition of a highest pleasure attained through destruction and negation, so he feels as if the innermost abyss of things spoke to him perceptibly." Friedrich Nietzsche "When you're thinking, please remember this: Excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility." Ken Follett "If you can approach the world's complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater scheme of things." Daniel C. Dennett "All the gold which is under or upon the earth is not enough to give in exchange for virtue." Plato "And what, Socrates, is the food of the soul? Surely, I said, knowledge is the food of the soul." Plato “Let us describe the education of our men. What then is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic, for the body, and music for the mind.” Plato "By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one you'll become a philosopher." Socrates "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." Soren Kierkegaard "People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something." Soren Kierkegaard "The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in; becoming narcissistic." Rod Serling "Act that your principle of action might safely be made a universal law of nature." Immanuel Kant "If man makes himself into a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on." Immanuel Kant "All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three questions What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope?" Immanuel Kant "It is not necessary that whilst I live I live happily; but it is necessary that so long as I live I should live honorably." Immanuel Kant "In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it." St. Augustine "People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering." St. Augustine “To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than Death or night; To defy power which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; To hope till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change nor falter nor repent; This, like Thy glory, Titan! is to be good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone life, joy, empire and victory." Percy Bysshe Shelley "I do not question the laws of God, but I question the wisdom of some of the men who interpret those laws." Leon Uris "Nothing was allowed to interfere with the pursuit of wisdom." Leon Uris "I depart from the rules set down by others. But since it is my intention to write something of use..., I deem it best to stick to the practical truth of things rather than to fancies." Niccolo Machiavelli "If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences." H.P. Lovecraft "Infernal engines of eternity, for rationalizing the insanity of infinity." Unknown "My head is connected to a cord and the cord is connected to heaven." Josiah Johnson "When I joined the corps, we didn't have any fancy shamncy tanks, we had sticks. Two sticks and a rock for the whole damn platoon! So buck up boy, you're one very lucky Marine!" Sergeant Johnson "Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise: Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer; coneys are creatures of little power, yet they make their home in the crags; locusts have no king, yet they advance together in ranks; a lizard can be caught with the hand, yet it is found in kings' palaces." Proverbs 30:24-28 "Consider the work of God, for who is able to straighten what He has bent?" Ecclesiastes 7:13 "Whether it be Jesus talking about eternal damnation or masses of ancient chinese warriors killing themselves in order to guide their fallen emperor through the after-life, theology's enough to send anyone down to the bar. It's no wonder people reach for the bottle and the pill and the dope." Michael Savage "Ima kill you! Like robocop at a renaissance festival!" Ingame Counterstrike conversations "Inside every cynical person, is a disappointed idealist." George Carlin[/spoiler]