Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

The integrative tendencies of the individual operate through the mechanisms of empathy, sympathy, projection, introjection, identification, worship- all of which make him feel that he is a part of some larger entity which transcends the boundaries of the individual self. This psychological urge to belong, to participate, to commune is as primary and real as its opposite. The all-important question is the nature of that higher entity of which the individual feels himself a part.

Some tribes have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.

...one of the tests of a theory is that, once grasped, it appears self-evident.

Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.

Progress cannot be organized.

The avowed aim of all utopian movements is to put an end to history and to establish a final and permanent calm.

Historical knowledge is indispensable for those who want to build a better world.

There is in the universe something for the description and analysis of which the natural sciences cannot contribute anything. There are events beyond the range of those events that the procedures of the natural sciences are fit to observe and describe. There is human action.

The methods of the natural sciences cannot be applied to human behavior because this behavior...lacks the peculiarity that characterizes events in the field of the natural sciences, viz., regularity.

Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative. Scientific progress consists in pushing further back this ultimately given.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

"We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it." You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.

We believe at once in evil, we only believe in good upon reflection. Is this not sad?.

The real death of America will come when everyone is alike.

Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.

Take your work seriously, but never yourself.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.

The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.

You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.