Over 40,000 Famous Quotes Sorted By Topic and Author

Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.

A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death...

Without an element of the obscene there can be no true and deep aesthetic or moral conception of life...It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene they could never have dared to be great.

K is for KENGHIS KHAN. _He_ was a very _nice_ person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.

The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

...mammalian embryos, regardless of their sex chromosome constitutions, have an inherent tendency to develop the female phenotype; the mammalian male is essentially a female that has been exposed to androgenic steroid hormones.

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting.

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut.

The best way to turn a woman's head is to tell her she has a beautiful profile.

The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.

Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.

The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.

The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.

What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.

We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.