"Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true."

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

"My self-esteem is more valuable than any short-term rewards for its betrayal."

Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

"If one is to love oneself one must behave in ways that one can admire."

Irvin Yalom

"Men who accept as an ideal an irrational goal which they cannot achieve, never lift their heads thereafter--and never discover that their bowed heads were the only goal to be achieved."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."

Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

"An intellect does not function on the premise of its own impotence."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be interdependent."

1899 John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools.

"Independent self-reliant people would be a counterproductive anachronism in the collective society of the future where people will be defined by their associations."

1896 John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools.

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

Albert Einstein

"Existentialism, in essence, consists of pointing to modern philosophy and declaring: 'Since this is reason, to hell with it!'"

Ayn Rand, The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution

"Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question."

Thomas Jefferson

"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good."

George D. Herron

"What luck for the rulers that men do not think."

Adolf Hitler

"If the average man is made in God's image, then a man such as Beethoven or Aristotle is plainly superior to God, and so God may be jealous of him, and eager to see his superiority perish with his bodily frame. All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers"

HL Mencken

"Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."

G.K. Chesterton

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

Ayn Rand as Francisco D'Anconia in Atlas Shrugged

"The Pacific Yew can be cut down and processed to produce a potent chemical, taxol, which offers some promise of curing certain forms of lung, breast and ovarian cancer in patients who would otherwise quickly die... It seems an easy choice -- sacrifice the tree for a human life -- until one learns that three trees must be destroyed for each patient treated."

Al Gore

"One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

Plato

"I am interested in politics so that one day I will not have to be interested in politics."

Ayn Rand

"Regulation - which is based on force and fear - undermines the moral base of business dealings. It becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction. A fly-by-night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public. In an unregulated economy, the operator would have had to spend a number of years in reputable dealings before he could earn a position of trust sufficient to induce a number of investors to place funds with him. Protection of the consumer by regulation is thus illusory."

Alan Greenspan

"Minimum wage rates, whether enforced by government decree or by labor union pressure and compulsion, are useless if they fix wage rates at the market level. But if they try to raise wage rates above the level which the unhampered labour market would have determined, they result in permanent unemployment of a great part of the potential labour force."

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p486

"Minimum wage laws tragically generate unemployment, especially among the poorest and least skilled or educated workers... Because a minimum wage, of course, does not guarantee any worker's employment; it only prohibits, by force of law, anyone from being hired at the wage which would pay his employer to hire him."

Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty

"See, when the Government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of Taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs."

Dave Barry

"A government with the policy to rob Peter to pay Paul can be assured of the support of Paul"

George Bernard Shaw

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship."

Alexander Fraser Tyler, The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

Winston Churchill

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone."

Frederick Bastiat

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"The idea that 'the public interest' supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others."

Ayn Rand

"When individual rights are abrogated, there is no way to determine who is entitled to what; there is the no way to determine the justice of anyone's claims, desires, or interests. The criterion, therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one's wishes are limited only by the power of one's gang."

Ayn Rand

"The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"Christmas is a time when kids tell Santa what they want and adults pay for it. Deficits are when adults tell the government what they want and their kids pay for it."

Richard Lamm

"Majority rule only works if you're also considering individual rights. Because you can't have five wolves and one sheep voting on what to have for supper."

Larry Flynt

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."

Joseph Stalin

"Ideas are to our evolving mind what mutations are to our species."

Leroy Jack Syrop

"...You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer..."

attributed to Abraham Lincoln by Ronald Reagan

"Motion pictures are of course a different medium of expression than the public speech, the radio, the stage, the novel, or the magazine. But the First Amendment draws no distinction between the various methods of communicating ideas."

William O. Douglas, Supreme Court Justice, 1953

"Let the people decide through the marketplace mechanism what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for Time magazine?"

Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman

"Our liberty depends on freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."

Thomas Jefferson

"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."

David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35

"It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence."

Charles Austin Beard, historian

"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't serve the State."

Heinrich Himmler

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Thomas Jefferson

"The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner."

Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 97th Congress, Second Session (February 1982)

"The usual road to slavery is that first they take away your guns, then they take away your property, then last of all they tell you to shut up and say you are enjoying it."

James A. Donald

"In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with the suppression of a given right's least attractive practitioners."

Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It

"The cure for 1984 is 1776."

Seen on slashdot

"The U.S. Constitution may be flawed, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now."

Unknown

"The government was set to protect man from criminals--and the Constitution was written to protect man from the government. The Bill of Rights was not directed against private citizens, but against the government--as an explicit declaration that individual rights supersede any public or social power."

Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. And then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up."

Daniel B. Baker, Political Quotations ed. Rev. Martin Niemoeller, a Protestant minister in Nazi Germany, in 1945

"No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible."

Stanislaw Jerzy Lee

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in time of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality."

Dante Alighieri

"In the field of morality, compromise is surrender to evil."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Barry Goldwater (1964)

"I would rather live in a society which treated children as adults than one which treated adults as children."

Lizard

"Useless laws weaken the necessary laws."

Montesquieu

"The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this."

Albert Einstein, My First Impression of the U.S.A., 1921

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? ... We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted--and you create a nation of law-breakers--and then you cash in on guilt."

Ayn Rand as Dr. Floyd Ferris, Atlas Shrugged, 406

"Alcohol didn't cause the high crime rates of the '20s and '30s, Prohibition did. And drugs do not cause today's alarming crime rates, but drug prohibition does."

US District Judge James C. Paine, addressing the Federal Bar Association in Miami, November, 1991

"America needs fewer laws, not more prisons."

James Bovard

"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize-winning economist

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

Abraham Maslow

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."

H. L. Mencken

"Most people are far too much occupied with themselves to be malicious."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."

Nick Diamos

"We only acknowledge small faults in order to make it appear that we are free from great ones."

La Rouchefoucauld

"He who despises himself esteems himself as a self-despiser."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There is luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel no one else has a right to blame us."

Oscar Wilde

"He who makes a beast of himself, gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Samuel Johnson

"Suppose Alfred justifiably believed the proposition 'p', and justifiably believed 'if p, then q'. He also believes 'q'. Is he justified in doing so? A Justified True Belief-er would quickly say yes - it's classic Modus Ponens. But what if Alfred didn't believe in 'q' for this deductive reason? What if he believed in 'q' because he liked the sound of it, or it was a comforting thought to him, unaware that it was also logically demanded by his other beliefs? This is not knowledge; it is merely a lucky accident."

Ranald Clouston

"The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."

Albert Einstein

"I could not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. It always seemed that the solution had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at danger, rather you learned how to handle it safely."

Isaac Asimov

"If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them."

Isaac Asimov

"The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them."

Albert Einstein

"The primitive thinker always sees things as having been organized from outside, never as having grown themselves, organically."

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p262

"It is the merit of psychoanalysis that it has demonstrated that even the behavior of neurotics and psychopaths is meaningful, that they too act and aim at ends, although we who consider ourselves normal and sane call the reasoning determining their choice of ends nonsensical and the means they choose for the attainment of these ends contrary to purpose."

Ludwig von Mises

"There is no psychology, only biography and autobiography."

Thomas Szasz

"Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise."

Sigmund Freud

"Self-criticism, in the sense of an introspective, discriminating activity, is indispensable in any attempt to understand your own psychology. If you have done something that puzzles you and you ask yourself what could have prompted you to such an action, you need the string of bad conscience and its discriminating faculty in order to discover the real motive of your behavior."

Carl Gustav Jung, "Dogma and Natural Symbols"

"Science is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that is not the reason we are doing it"

Richard Feynman

"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

John Quincy Adams

"Tariffs, quotas and other import restrictions protect the business of the rich at the expense of high cost of living for the poor. Their intent is to deprive you of the right to choose, and to force you to buy the high-priced inferior products of politically favored companies."

Alan Burris, A Liberty Primer

"The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy."

Albert Einstein

"Schematization and classification per se have no cognitive value. The scientific significance of a concept arises out of its function in the theories to which it belongs; outside the context of these theories it is no more than intellectual plaything."

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, p293

"All sentient beings are created unequal. The best society provides each with equal opportunity to float at his own level."

Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

"Taxing people who work, for the benefit of those who don't, stimulates sloth, not output."

Richard Salsman

"Feeding the starving poor only increases their number."

Ben Bova

"For every new mouth to feed, there are two hands to produce."

Peter T. Bauer

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both."

James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

"There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me."

John Erskine

"Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference."

Aristotle

"...relaxation [is] attractive only in those for whom it [is] an unnatural state."

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell, 1984

"The victor will never be asked if he told the truth."

Adolf Hitler

"Creeds are codified and dogmatized forms of original religious experience."

Carl Gustav Jung, "The Autonomy of the Unconscious"

"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."

Ambrose Redmoon

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self."

Aristotle

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

Aristotle

"I suppose every scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there; but no one else has ever read it, nor can he find it again."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"No steel can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a period at the right moment."

Isaac Babel

"Phrasing is like salt on scrambled eggs. It is plain if there is not enough, and if it can be noticed, there is too much."

Stevens Hewitt

"That is the sort of nonsense up with which I refuse to put."

Winston Churchill (attributed), after having been
criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition.

"True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary."

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"The secret of being tiresome is to tell everything."

Voltaire

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

"There are only two places in our world where time takes precedence over the job to be done: school and prison."

William Glasser

"When someone does a foolish thing, you should tell them it is a foolish thing. They can continue to do it, but at least the truth is where it needs to be."

Dukaht

"The following statement of the Heisenberg Certainty Principle is dedicated to the U.S. Congress: If your position is everywhere, your momentum is zero."

William Lipscomb, 1976 Chemistry Nobel Laureate

"If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Sir Isaac Newton

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

Albert Einstein

"No one lies so boldly as the man who is indignant."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The worst tempered people I have ever met were those who knew that they were wrong."

Wilson Mizner

"I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life, nor to any part of my energy, nor to any achievement of mine, no matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need."

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

"Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion."

Oscar Wilde

"What is the nature of the guilt [called] Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state [considered] perfection? [The] myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge - he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil - he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor - he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire - he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which [he is damned] are reason, morality, creativeness, joy - all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that the myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that [are held] as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man."

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

"Absence lessens mediocre passions but augments great ones, just as the wind blows out candles but starts conflagrations."

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity."

Francois De La Rochefoucauld

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

Isaac Asimov, Foundation

"Academism results when the reasons for the rule change, but not the rule."

Igor Stravinsky

"When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learnt in seven years."

Mark Twain

"Our senses don't deceive us: our judgment does."

Goethe

"Abstainer, n. A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Frequently a big advantage can be gained by knowing how to give in at the right moment."

Fenelon

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."

Austin O'Malley

"You seek problems because you need their gifts."

Richard Bach

"Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then."

Samuel Johnson

"I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers."

Kahlil Gibran, Sand and Foam, 1926

"Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues"

Aristotle

"The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names."

Chinese proverb

"No mind is better than the precision of its concepts."

Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

"The first thing that intellect does with an object is to class it with something else."

William James

"Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems."

Rene Descartes (1596-1650), Discourse on Method

"Whoever thinks much and to good purpose easily forgets his own experiences, but not the thoughts which these experiences have called forth."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who 'love Nature' while deploring the 'artificialities' with which 'Man has spoiled "Nature".' The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of 'Nature'--but beavers and their dams are..."

Lazarus Long

"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded--here and there, now and then--are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'."

Lazarus Long

"In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind."

Louis Pasteur

"The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators."

Edward Gibbon

"Every organization is a perfect design to achieve the results it has achieved"

Unknown

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."

Eric Hoffer

"Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes."

Antisthenes

"No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character."

Ralph Waldo Emmerson

"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Krishnamarti

"They call you heartless: but you have a heart, and I love you for being ashamed to show it. You are ashamed of your flood, while others are ashamed of their ebb."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Among the emotion-driven, neither love nor any other emotion has any meaning."

Ayn Rand

"In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion."

Arthur Koestler

"Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is."

Rollo May

"Silence is the best resolve for him who distrusts himself."

Francois De La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Moderation is made a virtue to limit the ambition of the great; to console ordinary people for their small fortune and equally small ability."

Francois De La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680

"A man is very apt to complain of the ingratitude of those who have risen far above him."

James Boswell, Life of Johnson, March 28, 1776

"The higher our self-esteem, the more open, honest, and appropriate our communications are likely to be, because we believe our thoughts have value and thefore we welcome rather than fear clarity."

Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

"Men of profound thought appear to themselves in intercourse with others like comedians, for in order to be understood they must always simulate superficiality."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect."

Edward Gibbon

"To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason is like administering medicine to the dead."

Thomas Paine

"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends"

Martin Luther King Jr.

"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 (1856-1950)

"I find television very educational. Every time someone turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book."

Groucho Marx

"Manufacturers have declared that KY jelly is now Year 2000 compliant. It is now called Y2KY jelly and apparently allows you to insert 4 digits into your date where previously you could only fit 2."

Unknown

"Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams."

Mary Ellen Kelly

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying."

Woody Allen (b. 1935)

"Pray: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly worthless."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"Pride is the emotional reward of achievement. It is not a vice to be overcome but a virtue to be attained."

Nathaniel Branden, The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem

"Virtue would not go far did not vanity escort her."

Francois De La Rochefoucauld, 1613-1680, Reflexions and Moral Maxims (1678)

"Attempts to escape nihilism without revaluating our values so far: they produce the opposite, make the problem more acute."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."

H. L. Mencken

"One is always a long way from solving a problem until one actually has the answer."

Stephen Hawking

"Religion, n. A daughter of hope and fear explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"An aphorism in never exactly true. It is either a half-truth or a truth and a half."

Karl Kraus, Spruche und Widerspruche, 1909

"The worst readers of aphorisms are the writer's friends if they are intent to guess back from the general to the particular instance to which the aphorism owes its origin: for with this pot-peeking they reduce the author's whole effort to nothing."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"One does not write a love story while making love."

Collete (d. 1954), Lettre au petit Corsaire

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."

Aldous Huxley

"We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts."

Patrick Moynihan

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

Stephen Roberts

"To wonder where the mind goes after the brain decays is as silly as asking where the 70-miles-per-hour have gone after a speeding auto has crashed into a tree."

Frank R. Zindler

"I have sworn eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Thomas Jefferson

"We do not want to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those we love thoroughly."

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

Stalin

"When choosing between two evils I always like to take the one I've never tried before."

Mae West

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."

Irving Caesar

"Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world."

Joel Barker

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

Peter F. Drucker

"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum."

Arthur C. Clarke

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Arthur C. Clarke

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."

Albert Einstein

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

"Miracles arise from our ignorance of nature, not from nature itself."

Montaigne

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Finally I was forced to conclude that the alleged existence of god is but a myth, born of fear. That all gods including the Christian god are but figments of the imagination or outright inventions of the mind. I reasoned that the environment of primitive man which lacked a scientific explanation of nature's torments had every reason to be permeated with superstition but that we with our advanced scientific knowledge have no reason to appease imaginary gods. As I continued boring into my books the searchlight of knowledge was thrown upon my long cherished beliefs. I saw them for what they were worth. Reluctantly I shed them one by one. I did not label myself right away. I hardly knew what label to use. At first I called myself a Humanist. Sometimes an agnostic. Sometimes a Rationalist. Sometimes a Secularist. After many years of study and thought and assimilation I prefer a term that states my position clearly and positively. That is why I today declare myself an atheist. I evolved into an atheist not because I wanted to but because the evidence in all my books overwhelmingly pointed to a materialistic universe and against the plausible existence of supernatural beings or gods of any description."

G. Vincent Runyon, Why I Left The Ministry And Became An Atheist