Quotes We Just Happen to Like

For yesterday he is but a dream
And tomorrow but a vision
But today, well lived
Forms each yesterday
Into a memory/dream of happiness
And each tomorrow
Into a vision of hope/realization of trust.
Thus, live this day with honor/confidence.

From Idylls from the Sanskrit

Winston Churchill

“Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs.”

Roger Ebert, Life Itself

The result of not being involved in politics is being governed by one's inferiors.

Plato

Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary.

One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected, and to whom is it responsible?

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

How many ideas have there been in the history of mankind which were unthinkable ten years before and which, when their mysterious hour struck suddenly appeared, and spread all over the earth?

Dostoyevsky

When motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become a new race.

Margaret Sanger (1883-1966)

What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.

Sir Francis Galton (1905)

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

"General impressions are never to be trusted. Unfortunately when they are of long standing they become fixed rules of life, and presume a prescriptive right not to be questioned. Consequently, those who are not accustomed to original inquiry entertain hatred and a horror of statistics. They cannot endure the idea of submitting their sacred impressions to cold-blooded verification."

Sir Francis Galton

"Where the government fears the people there is liberty; where the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Thomas Jefferson

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."

Thomas Jefferson

All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed,
and third, it is accepted as self-evident.

Arthur Schopenhauer,1788-1860

Ram, ass, and horse, my Kyrnos, we look over
With care, and seek good stock for good to cover;
And yet the best men make no argument,
But wed, for money, runts of poor descent.
So too a woman will demean her state
And spurn the better for the richer mate.
Money's the cry. Good stock to bad is wed
And bad to good, till all the world's cross-bred.
No wonder if the country's breed declines-
Mixed metal, Kyrnos, that but dimly shines.

Theognis of Megara on eugenics and dysgenics, circa 520 B.C.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell

(Examples: eugenics, racist, anti-Semite, hater.)

Nature is the art of God.

Dante

The dangerous things ain't what we know that is so,
it's what we know that ain't.

(Author unknown, but frequently attributed to Mark Twain.)

'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World:
Science as a Candle in the Dark

Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.

Wynn Cotlin

"Naturam non vinces nisi parendo."
(You will not master [conquer] nature unless you obey it.)

Roger Bacon

The greatest threats to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal -- well-meaning but without understanding.

US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1928

You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.

Robert Darwin, to his son Charles

If you sit by the river long enough, the bodies
of your enemies will float by.

Taoist saying

Goodie-goodies are the thieves of virtue.

Lao-tzu

When cosmic energy became life a new dimension was added to the drama of time and space. For the first time in forever, there would be pain and pleasure. For the first time in forever, there could be hope, faith, and love. Forever would never be the same again.

from "The Human Factor," by R.L. Hart

The heresy of heresies is common sense.

George Orwell

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is "not done" to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.

George Orwell, 1945, Introduction to Animal Farm

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I've got to hold up for a moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

I have pledged upon the altar of God Almighty eternal hostility to tyranny over the minds of men.

Thomas Jefferson

If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Samuel Adams

Evolution is the development of the energy of the universe in such a way that it has an increasing ability to consciously control itself and the universe around it. It is a progressive change from the unconscious to the conscious. We are the universe trying to comprehend itself. Man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to control its own destiny. Man is God in the process of coming into existence.

James Hart
Eugenic Manifesto

The fact itself, of causing the existence of a human being, is one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life. To undertake the responsibility--to bestow a life which my be either a curse or a blessing--unless the being on whom it is bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being.

John Stuart Mill, essay On Liberty

There is no permanent status quo in nature; all is the process of adjustment and readjustment, or else eventual failure. But man is the first being yet evolved on earth which has the power to note this changefulness, and, if he will, to turn it to his own advantage, to work out genetic methods, eugenic ideas, yes, to invent new characteristics, organs, and biological systems that will work out to further the interests, the happiness, the glory of the God-like being whose meager foreshadowings we the present ailing creatures are.

Herrman J. Muller, 1935
From R. M. Sonneborn, 1968, eMuller, crusader for human betterment,e Science, 162, 772-776

To know [how a civilization comes into being] you must be aware of two prerequisites . . . namely leadership and problem-solving ability on the part of the general public. They are necessary not only as preludes to a civilization but as a continuing requirement for its survival.

Where whole segments of population, either geographic segments or classes within an area, are bungling their problems, the chances are not only that the leaders are inadequate as leaders, but that the masses are mostly composed of far-down specimens of humanity, biologically incapable of producing wise leaders. Essential to wise leadership are high quality brains. The only source of brains is heredity . . .

Problem-makers reproduce in greater percentage than problem-solvers, and in so doing cause the decline of civilization.

Since civilization is an accumulation it must necessarily lag behind the concentration of brain power on which it depends . . . [Since] the manifestations of a civilization, its visible structures, are an accumulation, they may linger on for decades after the average intellect, the inherited brain power, has declined below the level that would have been necessary to initiate it.

In short, if capable, intelligent people had most babies, society would see its problems and solve them.

Elmer Pendell, from Sex Versus Civilization, 1967

Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many ki
nds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective. This is precisely the aim of eugenics.

It has now become a serious necessity to better the breed of the human race. The average citizen is too base for the everyday work of a modern civilization. Civilized man has become possessed of vaster powers than in old times for good or ill, but has made no corresponding advance in wits and goodness to enable him to direct his conduct rightly.

[Man has] already furthered evolution very considerably, half unconsciously and for his own personal advantages, but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is his religious duty to do so deliberately and systematically. . . . The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavour to further evolution, especially that of the human race.

Those who enjoy a sense of communion with God can dwell on the undoubted fact that there exists a solidarity between themselves and what surrounds them, through the endless reaction of physical laws among which the hereditary influences are to be included. They know that they are descended from an endless past, that they have a brotherhood with all that is, and have each his own share of responsibility in parentage of an endless future.

Francis Galton (quoted in C.P. Blackeras Eugenics: Galton and After, 1952)

The process of change is like a children's slide. One climbs laboriously to the top, but once over the edge, the downward movement is quick, abrupt, inevitable, and complete.

D.C. Lau

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through...all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Eugenics and evolutionary ethics involves much more than merely the mechanics of selective breeding like we human beings were merely a new breed of cattle or a new strain of wheat. Evolutionary ethics is an entirely new understanding of man and his relationship to the universe.

Good and evil are not myths, although many myths have been written about them: they are biological laws no more arbitrary or subjective than any of the laws of mathematics or chemistry. Morality is not some superstitious fairy tale: it is the mathematics of survival.

Man is the real miracle, the real God, and he has proven it for a thousand generations. All that is science or religion comes from him and is less than him. The purpose of life is the evolution of man toward perfection.

Our fathers endured starvation, glaciers, jungles, monsters through the struggles of eons of evolution so that we might be veritable Gods today. If you do not have the courage to carry on the sacred flame of life, then die, but do not encourage others in your ignominious anti-life, anti-child cowardice.

Dysgenic suicide is only possible in a society that refuses to accept the moral responsibility for what it does. . . . Ironically, we are using the intellectual capacity that made us great in order to destroy that capacity itself.

It is not a question of beginning or initiating a eugenic program. It is a matter of recognizing that we have already begun an anti-eugenic program which is a suicidal and disastrous one because it selects the inferior for survival and eliminates the superior. We are practicing eugenics in reverse. We are causing the reversal of evolution. Since we are already manipulating genetics, we should be made conscious of our responsibility for the results of our actions on future generations. We are responsible for what our children will be. We can no longer plead ignorance. We have a voluntary choice to make between superior and inferior, between prosperity and starvation, between evolution and devolution. Doing nothing is a choice and a disastrous one.

The cause of our suffering is within us. The source of our salvation is also within us.

Evolution is the systematic and progressive development of life toward perfection. Evolution is the development of the energy of the universe in such a way that it has an increasing ability to consciously control itself and the universe around it. It is a progressive change from the unconscious to the conscious. We are the universe trying to comprehend itself. Man is the corporeal manifestation of the universe trying to control its own destiny. Man is God in the process of coming into existence.

James Hart, Eugenic Manifesto

Eugenic techniques like gene splicing and selective breeding are considered good when applied to plants and animals to produce advances in medicine and food production, but should anyone have the temerity to suggest that these eugenic techniques be used to protect our children, he risks being labeled as a Nazi or racist. One actually hears the argument: eugenics is evil because Hitler believed in eugenics. Is everything Hitler believed in wrong ipso facto because he believed in it? If Galileo had been a mass murderer, would that prove the world was flat? Eugenics is a moral commitment, not a racial affiliation.

We have the moral understanding of an ignorant savage of 2000 years ago, but the science and power of a modern nuclear age. Mankind is like a five year old child playing with a loaded gun. Yet even in this preposterous predicament, foolish nihilists tell us that good and evil are myths. Good is what maintains and improves the consciousness of the universe. Evil is what destroys that consciousness.

Perhaps in light of our present situation, we should seriously re-examine conventional religion. Is conventional religion actually a religion at all, or is it rather superstition? If it is superstition, it is a threat to our survival, rather than an aid in securing it.

In astronomy, medicine, and biology, conventional religion has been the single greatest obstacle to advancement. By obstructing the advancement of knowledge, conventional religions have jeopardized the health, the well-being and the very survival of the human race. Indeed, it is a crime against humanity to obstruct the collection of knowledge. It is certain that whenever you circumscribe, distort, or restrict human knowledge, you reduce the human ability to control the environment and ultimately reduce the probability of human survival itself.

Science is not essentially the opposite of religion nor opposed to religion. In fact, science may be a part of religion. Properly understood, science is not a means to destroy religion, but rather a means to discover and build it.

Pe
rhaps the purpose of the universe is the creation of consciousness, and man . . . is that consciousness. Then man is at once the ethic of the universe and the means through which that ethic is fulfilled. . .

Every generation is one link in the chain of life that leads from the animals to the Gods.

James Hart, God

"The theory of democratic government is noble and the practise of it offers the greatest opportunities for human happiness, if only the mass of the human individuals within the democracy is sound in body and in mind, and consequently social and to some extent unselfish in behavior. Progressive biological deterioration of the people leads inevitably to anarchy and dictatorships.

More than ever, in the light of recent events, we have come to pin all of our faith for the future of civilization and of man on democracy. Like Noah we have builded an ark, the rains have come, and the deluge is upon us. Do we hope to take refuge in that ark of democracy, with our sons and our sons' wives, and survive the flood?

We can succeed in this hope only if we leave out some of the noxious animals who are boring from within and making that ark dangerously leaky. So it behooves us to learn our human parasitology and human entomology, to practise an artificial and scientific selection with intelligence, if we wish to save our skins."
(Hooten, 1939, Pp 397-398).

Hooten, E. A., (1939) Crime and the Man,. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but even greater from a practical point of view is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects, by lowering what Mr. Churchill calls an "iron curtain" between the masses and such facts or arguments as the local political bosses regard as undesirable, totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have done by the most eloquent denunciations, the most compelling of logical rebuttals."

Aldous Huxley,
Foreword to the 1946 edition of Brave New World

There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance ? that principle is contempt prior to investigation.

Herbert Spencer

Shared joy is a double joy.
Shared sorrow is half a sorrow.

Swedish proverb

I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia.

Mark Twain

Truth doesn't need laws to protect it - only lies or scams do.

Anonymous

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow as the night, the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Lord Burleigh, first prime minister to the queen of England (& distant ancestor of MVC), used by his ward, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford and real author of the sonnets and plays attributed to William Shakespeare (found in Hamlet).

Laugh and the world laughs with you.
Weep, and you weep alone.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

A Slave is he who cannot speak his thoughts.

Euripides

In every controversy, most people care much less for what the truth is than for which side it's safer and more respectable to take.

Joseph Sobran

Racism as a moral evil can only mean that someone asserts an untruth, known to them to be untrue, because of hatred of others.

Louis Andrews, 2004

"When things are investigated, knowledge is extended. When knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere. When the will is sincere, the mind is correct. When the mind is correct, the self is cultivated."

"Ability will never catch up with the demand for it."

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."

"The object of the superior man is truth."

"To see the right and not do it is cowardice."

"Beware of friends not equal to yourself."

Confucius

Hell is truth seen too late.

Thomas Hobbes

Do not squander time. That is the stuff life is made of.

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

The difference between the right word,
and the almost-right word, is the difference
between lightning, and lightning-bug.

Mark Twain

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