Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to un-know.

We have no assurance that half-truth will make us free.

If you cannot be the master of your language, you must be its slave. If you cannot examine your thoughts, you have no choice but to think them, however silly they may be.

Laugh and the world laughs with you; snore and you sleep alone.

The mind cannot foresee its own advance.

There is no other way to judge the work of a mind except through its words.

Collective judgement of new ideas is so often wrong that it is arguable that progress depends on individuals being free to back their own judgement despite collective disapproval.

Opposition to the truth is inevitable, especially if it takes the form of a new idea, but the degree of resistance can be diminished- by giving thought not only to the aim but to the method of approach. Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. But, in any such indirect approach, take care not to diverge from the truth- for nothing is more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse into untruth.

Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

A great man is he who has not lost the heart of a child.

It is characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top.

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.

Nothing has an uglier look to us than reason, when it is not on our side.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

Reason is the main resource of man in his struggle for survival.

Who speaks reason to his fellow man bestows it upon them.

Because they know not the forces of nature, and in order that they may have comrades in their ignorance, they suffer not that others should search out anything, and would have us believe like rustics and ask no reason...But we ask in all things a reason must be sought.

He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.

Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.

A healthy appetite for righteousness, kept in due control by good manners, is an excellent thing; but to "hunger and thirst" after it is often merely a symptom of spiritual diabetes.