Sigmund Freud

A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.

America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success.

Analogies, it is true, decide nothing, but they can make one feel more at home.

Analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible, but to give the patient's ego freedom to decide one way or another.

Anatomy is destiny.

Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise.

Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them.

Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.

Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another.

Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.

Every normal person, in fact, is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.

Flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotions nor conflicts.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

Ansel Adams

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into.

A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words.

I tried to keep both arts alive, but the camera won. I found that while the camera does not express the soul, perhaps a photograph can!

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.

It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and often the supreme disappointment.

Millions of men have lived to fight, build palaces and boundaries, shape destinies and societies; but the compelling force of all times has been the force of originality and creation profoundly affecting the roots of human spirit.

No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Some photographers take reality... and impose the domination of their own thought and spirit. Others come before reality more tenderly and a photograph to them is an instrument of love and revelation.

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

Robert Kennedy 

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

I thought they'd get one of us, but Jack, after all he's been through, never worried about it I thought it would be me.

I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.

It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Ernst Mach

A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.

A movement that we will to execute is never more than a represented movement, and appears in a different domain from that of the executed movement, which always takes place when the image is vivid enough.

Bodies do not produce sensations, but complexes of elements (complexes of sensations) make up bodies.

My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.

Ordinarily pleasure and pain are regarded as different from sensations.

Physics is experience, arranged in economical order.

Science always has its origin in the adaptation of thought to some definite field of experience.

Similarly, many a young man, hearing for the first time of the refraction of stellar light, has thought that doubt was cast on the whole of astronomy, whereas nothing is required but an easily effected and unimportant correction to put everything right again.

The ego is as little absolutely permanent as are bodies.

The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind.

The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.

Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes.

When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories.

 

Alvin Toffler

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

The great growling engine of change - technology.

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.

Paul Gauguin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

Civilization is what makes you sick.

Concentrate your strengths against your competitor's relative weaknesses.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

It is the eye of ignorance that assigns a fixed and unchangeable color to every object; beware of this stumbling block.

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Many excellent cooks are spoilt by going into the arts.

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.

Sylvia Plath

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

Louis Leakey

Although we followed that hyena for the best part of half an hour, we never caught up with it.

Far too often animals are put to sleep when they could be saved through proper care and nursing.

I felt that in time simple stone tools would be found in early Pleistocene in England.

I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

I put a bullet into the back of the crocodile's neck just behind the head, thus killing it. If a crocodile is hit in any other part of its anatomy it disappears into the water and is irrecoverable.

I saw what looked like another fallen tree in front of me and put my foot on it to cross over. At that moment it reared up in front of me-the biggest python I had ever seen!

Sometime during the many millions of years that have elapsed since mammalian faunas came into existence, some sort of island crossed from West Africa to South America.

Sometimes string figures were used to illustrate stories, as in the case of an Eskimo example that depicts a man catching a salmon. Sometimes they had magic or religious significance.

South Africa had a long record of studies in prehistory, going back to the end of the last century.

The Dalmatian breed of dog has many primitive characteristics.

The trip I made to Angola to study the prehistoric contents of the gravel beds as a means of deciding the age of the deposits and their economic potential was the first time prehistory had ever been used for such a purpose.

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

To save an animal's life in order that it may suffer indefinitely is something I would never condone.

We set up the promised clinic for the sick and wounded Masai.

When my father arrived in Kenya, he had found the Kikuyu way of life similar to that of the British at the time the Romans invaded England 2,000 years ago.

Thomas Paine

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

An army of principles can penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot.

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.

Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

I prefer peace. But if trouble must come, let it come in my time, so that my children can live in peace.

If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.

Simon Wiesenthal

Discovering witnesses is just as important as catching criminals.

For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.

For your benefit, learn from our tragedy. It is not a written law that the next victims must be Jews. It can also be other people.

God must have been on leave during the Holocaust.

Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed to smile at the situation that pains them.

I know I am not only the bad conscience of the Nazis. I am also the bad conscience of the Jews. Because what I have taken up as my duty was everybody's duty.

Justice for crimes against humanity must have no limitations.

Survival is a privilege which entails obligations. I am forever asking myself what I can do for those who have not survived.

The combination of hatred and technology is the greatest danger threatening mankind.

The end was surely near. The Nazis killed you only when you were naked, because they knew, psychologically, that naked people never resist.

The history of man is the history of crimes, and history can repeat. So information is a defence. Through this we can build, we must build, a defence against repetition.

The schools would fail through their silence, the Church through its forgiveness, and the home through the denial and silence of the parents. The new generation has to hear what the older generation refuses to tell it.

There is no denying that Hitler and Stalin are alive today... they are waiting for us to forget, because this is what makes possible the resurrection of these two monsters.

Violence is like a weed - it does not die even in the greatest drought.

We know that we are not collectively guilty, so how can we accuse any other nation, no matter what some of its people have done, of being collectively guilty?