Alexis de Tocqueville

A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it.

As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.

Laws are always unstable unless they are founded on the manners of a nation; and manners are the only durable and resisting power in a people.

We are sleeping on a volcano... A wind of revolution blows, the storm is on the horizon.

Tennessee Williams

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.

I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

In memory everything seems to happen to music.

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

There is a time for departure even when there's no certain place to go.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

Life is an unanswered question, but let's still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

Aldous Huxley

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.

To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

If human beings were shown what they're really like, they'd either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Arthur Eddington

The law that entropy always increases, holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature.

The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown.

The idealistic tinge in my conception of the physical world arose out of mathematical researches on the relativity theory. In so far as I had any earlier philosophical views, they were of an entirely different complexion.

From the beginning I have been doubtful whether it was desirable for a scientist to venture so far into extra-scientific territory. The primary justification for such an expedition is that it may afford a better view of his own scientific domain.

W. Somerset Maugham

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.

I made up my mind long ago that life was too short to do anything for myself that I could pay others to do for me.

Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant and kind.

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom, and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too.

The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned.

It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent.

Umberto Eco

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Steve Jobs

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

I want to put a ding in the universe.

You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'l want something new.

I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Robert Frost

What we live by we die by.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Sinclair Lewis

Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment, damn the men with careful smiles oh, damn their measured merriment.

When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

The grateful savants had accepted, and they were spending the rest of their lives reading fifteenth-hand opinions, taking pleasant naps, and drooling out to yawning students the anemic and wordy bookishness which they called learning.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn "reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed are the final quarter keep you alive.

He fretted that he did not know anything. He sighed, 'I have sought the Kingdom of God a little, the Squire has sought it terribly, but we haven't even a map, and after what I saw this afternoon, I know the Sioux are as barbarous as we are. Is it possible that nobody has ever known— that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won't be for another thousand years?

Christopher Hitchens

The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has — from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness.

My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either. It happens to be my view, but it doesn't challenge any of the findings of Darwin or Huxley or Einstein or Hawking.

 If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?

Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.

The museums of medieval Europe, from Holland to Tuscany, are crammed with instruments and devices upon which the holy men labored devoutly, in order to see how long they could keep someone alive while being roasted. It is not needful to go into further details, but there were also religious books of instruction in this art, and guides for the detection of heresy by pain.

Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins.

Europeans think Americans are fat, vulgar, greedy, stupid, ambitious and ignorant and so on. And they've taken as their own, as their representative American, someone (Michael Moore) who actually embodies all of those qualities.