Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.

In a society in which it is a moral offense to be different from your neighbor your only escape is never to let them find out.

Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error.

People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

It is appropriate here to recall that the so-called Dark Ages began with the flight of the individuals into the protection of lords or chapters and came to an end when the individual again found it to his advantage to set forth on his own. We live at a time when everything conspires to push the individual into the fold.

...everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.

The theory of evolution must be considered as a scientific theory, as theory, that is, proposed to explain or systemize a set of facts, and that no one has any claim to be considered as a serious rival to Darwin in the "discovery" of this theory who did not conduct his evolutionary studies upon a reasonably wide basis of facts. To have ideas, apercus, is not enough, and it is the overevalutation of such clever but uncontrolled guesses which is apt to produce the ludicrous fallacy of combination, in which fragments of the final theory are collected from widely scattered sources and are combined in such a way as to impugn the originality of him who was the first to see how such a synthesis was possible.

You cannot criticize the New Testament. It criticizes you.

You can only cure retail but you can prevent wholesale.

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.

The Darwinian theory is in principle capable of explaining life. No other theory that has ever been suggested is in principle capable of explaining life.

The only meaning of life worth caring about is one that can withstand our best efforts to examine it.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies.

A touchstone to determine the actual worth of an "intellectual"- find out how he feels about astrology.

If anything were FULLY explained, everything would be explained.

Anyone can see a forest fire. Skill lies in sniffing the first smoke.