Reason

• Reason is a biological product -- a tool whose power is inherently and substantially restricted. It has improved how we do things; it has not changed why we do things. Reason has generated knowledge enabling us to fly around the world in less than two days. Yet we still travel for the same purposes that drove our ancient ancestors -- commerce, conquest, religion, romance, curiosity, or escape from overcrowding, poverty, and persecution. To deny that reason has a role in setting our goals seems, at first, rather odd. A personal decision to go on a diet or take more exercise appears to be based upon reason. The same might be said for a government decision to raise taxes or sign a trade treaty. But reason is only contributing to the 'how' portion of these decisions; the more fundamental 'why' element, for all of these examples, is driven by instinctive self-preservation, emotional needs, and cultural attitudes. We are usually reluctant to admit the extent to which these forces govern our behavior, and accordingly we often recruit reason to explain and justify our actions.
  - Donald B. Calne, "Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior."
   
  
• The error of youth is to believe that intelligence is a substitute for experience, while the error of age is to believe experience is a substitute for intelligence.
  - Lyman Bryson
   
  
• I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
  - Albert Einstein
   
  
• The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
  - Robert Heinlein
   
  
• That's why the "love of money" is often named as a root of "all sorts of evil". Confusing a proxy for wealth, with wealth, is bound to lead to many actions that look effective but are totally misguided.
  - Kenneth 'Bessarion' Boyd
   
  
• "What if you make a mistake?" [She] leaned forward, concentrating. "What if you think that one thing is most important, but then you find out that something else is, instead?"
  "Then you need to adjust your thinking. If you discover that you have mistakenly attached your loyalties, or that you have put something into a priority that it does not deserve, then you need to take the time to meditate and consider where your priorities rightly lie. Then you simply follow the correct way, since now you know what it is.
  Really, the only times you should have trouble are if you are acting on incorrect information or if you yourself are mistaken in what you think to be important. The first simply requires you to react to the correct information when you realize that the information you were previously acting on was in error.
  The second is more difficult, because you have to know yourself well enough to know what you really value. This is a matter of sorting out what your soul values; which, of course, is easier if your soul is tranquil, so it all circles back on itself, really."
  - Eric Hallstrom
   
  
• Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
  - Edsger Dijkstra

Religion

• Some people wonder why a perfect God would create a universe with so much evil in it. These people miss the greater conundrum: Why would a perfect God create a universe at all?
  - Terry L. Smith
   
  
• I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
  - Galileo Galilei
   
  
• 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
   
  
• Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
  Then he is not omnipotent.
  Is he able, but not willing?
  Then he is malevolent.
  Is he both able and willing?
  Then whence cometh evil?
  Is he neither able nor willing?
  Then why call him God?
  - Epicurus

Anger and Patience

• "If I get mad at you, I don't think there's anything wrong with shouting and slamming doors. Throwing things, if I get mad enough. But that doesn't mean I don't love you. And that doesn't make any sense to you, does it?"
  "None. There's no problem we can't solve with calm, rational discussion. When we disagree, what's wrong with saying, 'Leslie, I disagree, and these are my reasons?' ..."
  - Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever
   
  
• Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
  - Seneca (B.C. 3-65 A.D.)
   
  
• Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.
  - Leonardo da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (1452-1519)
   
  
• "The priests walk until sundown. They make camp, start a fire, and eat a small meal. They're about to go to sleep when one of the two priests, the other one, not the one who got the girl, finally breaks the silence. He says, 'Why did you pick up that lady back at the creek today? You know we're not supposed to even touch ladies, let alone carry them anywhere. Not to mention that she was so completely full of herself, for imposing on us--a couple of monks--to do whatever it was that she wanted.' So without even rolling over, the other priest says, 'I left that young lady back by the side of the stream. Why are you still carrying her with you?'"
  - Daniel Synder
   
  
• War doesn't determine who is right, it determines who is left.
  - Anonymous
   
  
• Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle--be Thou near them! With them--in spirit--we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it--for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
  - Mark Twain, The War Prayer (excerpt)
   
  
• I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.
  - Aristotle

Liberty

• Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
  - Abraham Lincoln
   
  
• The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
  - Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)
   
  
• They say they support the Constitution, but just want to make this one small exception. Making a small exception to a fundamental liberty is like being a little bit pregnant. Freedom of speech either protects unpopular speech, or it protects nothing at all.
  - Roger Ebert
   
  
• Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.
  - Patrick Henry, speech of June 5 1788
   
  
• They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
  - Benjamin Franklin, 1759
   
  
• Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of Justice is no virtue.
  - Barry Goldwater
   
  
• I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
  - Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1791. ME 8:276
   
  
• Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.
  - John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

National Government

• We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
  - John Adams, October 11, 1798 Address to the military
   
  
• What else is this thing we call government? Is it anything else but organized violence? The law orders you to do this or not to do that, and if you fail to obey it, it will compel you by force ... all government, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or the fear of punishment.
  - Alexander Berkman
   
  
• Patriotism is an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
  - George Jean Nathan
   
  
• If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of criminal acts reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime.
  - Senator Orrin Hatch, in a 1982 Senate Report
   
  
• 'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
  - GK Chesterton
   
  
• To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
  - Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States
   
  
• An evil exists that threatens every man, woman and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.
  - Adolf Hitler, on creating the Gestapo
   
  
• A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
  - George Bernard Shaw

Relationships

• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
  - Anna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) in "This Is My Story" (1937)
   
  
• Monogamy has nothing to do with morality. If sexual exclusivity were an ethical issue, it would be an individual choice. Has anybody ever said to you, "I'm monogamous, and my lover isn't, so we both do what we feel is right?" Of course not, because monogamy is about controlling the other person's behavior--social control, not self-control.
  - Pat Califa
   
  
• You cannot be lonely if you like the person you're alone with.
  - Wayne Dyer
   
  
• But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.
  - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet: Good & Evil
   
  
• My lady, I thought, she'll need to have found on her own the same answers that I've found, ... we'll never get along unless ... I blinked. She'll have to be exactly the same as me!
  - Richard Bach, The Bridge Across Forever
   
  
• And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
  - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet: Clothing
   
  
• Professor Higgins: "...If you come back, you will be treated as you have always been treated. I can't change my manners and I don't intend to. MY MANNERS are the same as Colonel Pickering's!"
  Eliza: "That's not true. He treats a flower girl as if she were a duchess."
  Higgins: "Well I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl."
  Eliza: "Oh I see, the same for everybody."
  Higgins: "Yes so. You see, the great secret Eliza, is not the question of good manners or bad manners or any particular sort of manner, but having the same manner for all human souls. The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you have ever heard me treat anyone else better."
  - My Fair Lady
   
  
• When the glamour [of one's marriage] wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only - . Hence divorce, to provide the 'if only'. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstances do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances).
  - J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #43
   
  
• She said unsteadily: "Talking to you is like -- like talking to an eel!"
  "No, is it? I've never tried to talk to an eel. Isn't that a waste of time?"
  She choked. "Not such a waste of time as talking to you!"
  "You're surely not going to tell me that eels find you more entertaining than I do?" he said incredulously.
  - Georgette Heyer, Black Sheep

Virtue

• ...there can be no public or private virtue unless the foundation of action is the practice of truth.
  - George Jacob Holyoake
   
  
• If there be no nobility of descent, all the more indispensable is it that there should be nobility of ascent, a character in them that bear rule so fine and high and pure that as men come within the circle of its influence they involuntarily pay homage to that which is the one pre-eminent distinction, the royalty of virtue.
  - Bishop Henry C. Potter
   
  
• Aye, and he falls for those ahead of him, who, though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.
  - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet: Crime & Punishment
   
  
• It is not the critic who counts, not the one who points out how the strong man stumbled or how the doer of deeds might have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with sweat and dust and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, if he wins, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
  - Carlos Hathcock, Man In The Arena
   
  
• And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.
  - Plato, Republic, book 2 (Benjamin Jowett trans.)
   
  
• Take the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well.
  - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
   
  
• Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
  - Carl Sandburg