Quotes

Ideas in a nutshell

I will be constantly adding more quotes, because there are so many good ones out there for me to find yet!

Types of quotes contained within: POLITICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, WITTY/CLEVER, TRUISMS, INSIGHTS, CONTEMPORARY COMMENTARY, DYSTOPIAN

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.
- Christian Nestell Bovee

All our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
- William Shakespeare (Macbeth, Macbeth)

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
- Nietzsche

In them was not the savage blankness of the reptile species. Instead there was something far worse - burning, unquenchable rage mixed with the self-mocking irony of great intelligence.
- Whitley Streiber (The Night Church)

Where is the life we lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we lost in information?
-T.S. Eliot

There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
-Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)

Satanists are more aware than anyone of how humanity - including ourselves - have a finger on the miraculous and the monstrous, and most poignantly it's sometimes difficult to define the one from the other.
- Brian Courtemanch

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.
-Lily Tomlin

Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of intelligence at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future... cease to be perceived as opposites.
In close proximity.
- Anonymous

Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.
- Ray Bradbury (Faber, Fahrenheit 451)

When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are infinite.
- William Blake

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.
-Bertrand Russel (The Problems of Philosophy)

Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.
- Thomas Nagel (Mortal Questions)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
- T.S. Eliot (The Hollow Men)

If we tried to rely entirely on reason, and pressed it hard, our lives and beliefs would collapse - a form of madness that may actually occur if the inertial force of taking the world and life for granted is somehow lost. If we lose our grip on that, reason will not give it back to us.
- Thomas Nagel (The Absurd)

Such people are not only unable to admit that what is morally degraded can be aesthetically right, but their real demand of every artist is that he shall pat them on the back and tell them that thought is unnecessary.
- George Orwell (Benefit of Clergy)

Genius... is the transcendent capacity for taking trouble first of all.
-Thomas Carlyle

Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
-Havelock Ellis

...of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age...
- George Orwell (Benefit of Clergy)

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.
- George Orwell (Wells, Hitler and the World State)

The mind has a thousand eyes, And the heart but one,
Yet the light of a whole life dies, when love is gone.
- Francis William Bourdillon

You're talking a lot
but you're not saying anything
- Talking Heads (Psycho Killer)

History is a set of lies agreed upon.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Peeping through my behold I see within the range of only about 30 percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: 'This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.'
- Annie Dillard

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but *minds* alive on the shelves.
- Gilbert Highet

From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
- Aldous Huxley

Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
- Aldous Huxley

Custom is often only the antiquity of error.
- Cyprian of Carthage

Still the mind smiles at its own rebellions.
- (John) Robinson Jeffers

I teach you the Superman. Man is something to be surpassed.
- Nietzsche

[Man found a solitary existence tedious.] There are no limits to God's compassion with Paradises over their one universally felt want: he immediately created other animals besides. God's first blunder: Man didn't find the animals amusing, - he dominated them and didn't even want to be an 'animal.'
- Nietzsche

Master-morality and Slave-morality.
-Nietzsche

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.
- George Orwell

Great intellects are skeptical.
-Nietzsche

Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms.
- Aldous Huxley

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
- Aldous Leonard Huxley

Ignorance is prolonged infancy, only deprived of its charm.
- Marquis Catherine Stanislas Boufflers

As if anything were so common as ignorance! The multitude of fools is a protection to the wise.
- Cicero

The narrower the mind, the broader the statement.
- Proctor Fyffe (Ted) Cook

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.
- Aldous Huxley

"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...
- Henry Louis Mencken

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.
- Henry Louis Mencken

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable."
- Henry Louis Mencken

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...
-H.L. Mencken

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
-Aldous Huxley

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
-Will Rogers

A person with a watch knows what time it is. Someone with two watches is never sure.
-Segal’s Law

Absurdity: a statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion.
-Ambrose Bierce

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
-Albert Einstein

Many students treat knowledge as a liquid to be swallowed rather than as a solid to be chewed, and then wonder why it provides so little nourishment.
-Sidney Harris

Do not follow where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
-Unknown

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
-T.S.Eliot

I passionately hate the idea of being ‘with it,’ I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
-Orson Welles

Doing more things faster is no substiture for doing the right things.
-Stephen R.Covey

In absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily acts of trivia.
-Unknown

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself a fool.
-William Shakespeare

A government is like fire: a handy servant, but a dangerous master.
-George Washington

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.
-Derek Bok

Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
-W.H.Auden

The ultimate aim of government is... to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security... In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.
-Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza

All existence is senseless and there is no possibility of an objective basis for truth.
-William Jameson

Savages we call them, because their Manners differ from ours, which we think the Perfection of Civility; they think the same of theirs.
-Benjamin Franklin, 1784

Wherever Christians have passed, conquering and discovering, it seems as though a fire has gone, consuming everything.
-Pedro de Cieza de Léon, c.1550

Chacun appelle barbarie ce qui n’est pas de son usage.
-Montaigne, c.1588

If science produces no better fruits than tyranny... I would rather wish our country to be ignorant, honest and estimable as our neighbouring savages are.
-Thomas Jefferson, 1812

Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?... A gang is a group of men... in which the plunder is divided according to an agreed convention. If this villainy... acquires territory, establishes a base, captures cities and subdues people, it then openly arrogates to itself the title of kingdom.
-Saint Augustine, CITY OF GOD, c.420

Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble questions.
-Henry Brooks Adams

Philosophy, when superficially studied, excites doubt; when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
-Francis Bacon

True philosophy invents nothing, it merely establishes and describes what is.
-Victor Cousin

The greatest gift is not being afraid to question.
-Ruby Dee (actress, b.1923)

We turn not older with years, but newer every day.
-Emily Dickinson (poet, 1830-1886)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-George Santayana

Cynicism is the precipitate of any experiment in human nature.
-The Wiles of Venus

I believe that this country’s policies should be heavily biased in favor of non-discrimination.
-Bill Clinton

In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and in brief, all that is rare for the rare.
-Nietzsche

Science is a belief, a theory. But it is most accepted because of its testibility... or it passes the test we make for it to pass.
-Brandi (aka H.P.Lovecraft; aka Nietzsche)

Lend our voices only to sounds of freedom
No longer lend our strength to that which we wish to be free from
Fill your lives with love and bravery
And we shall lead a life uncommon
-Jewel Kilcher

more quotes will always be arriving

Back to my homepage

To Aldous Huxley quote page
To Nietzsche page
To Jack Nichols page

You are guest number

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page