These are mostly the quotes that I use to introduce
my class on History of Knowledge.
They are not necessarily quotes that I agree with (in fact, I strongly disagree
with many of them).
"Change has rarely ever changed things" (Walter Sorrell)
"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it" (Chinese proverb)
"There are no inevitabilities in history" (Paul Johnson)
"A junkie is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong" (Stella Adler)
"While I thought I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die" (Leonardo da Vinci)
"While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one" (Jorge Luis Borges)
"The difference between me and a madman is that i am not mad" (Salvador Dali)
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life" (Frank Zappa)
"Show me a sane man and I will cure him" (Carl Jung)
"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." (Friedrich Nietzsche)
"Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary" (Blaise Pascal)
"Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans" (Ralph Nader)
"Revolutions are always verbose" (Leon Trotsky)
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh" (Voltaire)
"Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something" (Anton Chekhov)
"You are mistaken if you think that your customer is paying you to have sex with him. He is also paying you to go away after the sex is over" (Anonymous prostitute quoted in a Leonard Shlain book)
"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it" (George Santayana)
"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect" (Mark Twain)
"Men have become the tools of their tools" (Henry Thoreau)
"If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment" (Voltaire)
"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading" (Lao Tzu)
"Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful" (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
Everything should be as simple as possible... but no simpler" (Albert Einstein)
"Most books are about aspects of human knowledge. Few people write books about human ignorance, despite the fact that there would be much more to write about." (Piero Scaruffi)
Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side: "Hey! how do I get across?". Nasrudin shouted back: "You are across!" (Popular Turkish tale)
"No amount of study of present forms [of life] would permit us to infer [the existence of] dinosaurs" (Max Delbruck)
"There is no substitute for victory" (Douglas MacArthur)
"Somewhere something incredible is waiting to happen" (John Wheeler)
"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known" (Carl Sagan)
"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" (PT Barnum)
"Ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti/ The one truth is called by different names by various learned men" (Rig Veda)
"God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him." (Paul Tillich)
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." (Wernher Von Braun)
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" (Lao Tzu)
"I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use" (Galileo Galilei)
"The Brain is wider than the Sky / For put them side by side / The one the other will contain" (Emily Dickinson)
"The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." (Frank Zappa)
"Congressmen are like diapers. You need to change them often, and for the same reason." (Pete McCloskey)
"I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it" (John Coltrane to Zita Carno on seeing one of his improvisations transcribed to music notation)
"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" (Josef Stalin)
"The foolish ask questions the wise cannot answer" (Oscar Wilde)
"No one really knows enough to be a pessimist" (Norman Cousins)
"Life is a question in the form of an answer" (Piero Scaruffi)
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended for us not to use them" (Galileo Galilei)
"Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught" (Oscar Wilde)
"I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous" (former USA defense secretary Robert McNamara)
"Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth" (Archimedes)
"We only had our brains to use as weapons against the Christians" (A Jewish friend, when i asked him why so many Jews became scientists and artists and writers. Contrast it with a very similar statement made by an Al Jazeera commentator regarding suicide bombers: "The Arabs only have their bodies to use as weapons against Israel and the USA")
"Sometimes the metaphors write themselves" (Eugene Robinson, 2006)
"All murderers are punished unless they kill in great numbers" (Voltaire)
"Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je d‚fendrai jusqu'… la mort le droit que vous avez de le dire/ I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (Voltaire)
"It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go." (Dolores Ibarruri "La Pasionaria", Spanish communist)
"There is a limit to human intelligence, but there is no limit to human stupidity" (Piero Scaruffi)
"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth" (Niels Bohr)
"La lor cieca vita e` tanto bassa, che invidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte. Fama di loro esser non lassa; misericordia e giustizia li sdegna. Non ti curar di lor, ma guarda e passa./ Their pointless life is so low that all other lots they envy. Fame of them the world hath none; Mercy and Justice scorn them both. Ignore them, look ahead and pass them by". (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III)
"Envy is blind, and she has no other quality than that of detracting from virtue" (Titus Livius)
"There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know that we don't know" (Donald Rumsfeld)
"A scientist is someone who learns more and more about less and less, and ultimately knows everything about nothing. A Philosopher is someone who learns less and less about more and more, and ultimately knows nothing about everything" (Anonymous joke)
"Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?" (Groucho Marx)
"The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine" (Charles Townes)
"Time is the substance of which we are made" (Borges)
"First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me." (Reverend Martin Niemoller, 1945)
"What good fortune for governments that the people do not think" (Adolf Hitler)
"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" (Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf")
Karl Radek: "Vladimir Ilyich, where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?" "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: "They will sell it to us themselves"
"There is nothing more dangerous than a philosopher who wants to change the world" (Piero Scaruffi)
"It is reasonable to expect that, with the favourable effects of time, and of European arts and sciences, [America] will become the most formidable power in the world." (the Venetian ambassador to Paris, 1783)
"Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together" (Gandhi)
"A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends." (Charles De Gaulle)
"Life is not a journey, it is a destination" (Piero Scaruffi)
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." (Groucho Marx)
"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we achieved neither" (Condoleeza Rice)
We are not shooting enough professors (Lenin's telegram)
"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist." (George Orwell, 1942)
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. (Mahatma Gandhi)
"I thank my parents for the greatest gift of all: poverty" (Robert Benigni, accepting an Oscar)
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. Winston Churchill
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. Winston Churchill
"The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking" (Martin Heidegger, 1951)
"Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians." Charles De Gaulle
You must be the change you wish to see in the world (Mahatma Gandhi)
This whole world Is one big prison yard. Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards. (Bob Dylan)
"The past is not dead - it isn't even past" (Christa Wolf, 1976)
I think it would be a good idea. (Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization)
God is dead - Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead - God. (Graffiti on Nietzsche's tomb)
Philosophy has only interpreted the world. The real challenge is to change it. (Epigraphe on Karl Marx tomb)
"It will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the Pacific" ( Thomas Jefferson)
"A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere." (Groucho Marx)
Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created (John Ralston Saul, 1992)
"The Army causes Taxes; Taxes cause Discontents; and Discontents make an Army necessary"Lord Bath, 1749)
To do is to be - Descartes; To be is to do - Voltaire; Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra (Men'w Restrooms, Greasewood Flats, Scottsdale)
"I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words" (Woody Allen)
I play the notes, in order, as they are written. It is God who makes the music. (Johan Sebastian Bach)
"The first thing that we do let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI, II.4, Shakespeare)
"Under no circumstances should a true Christian draw the sword" (Tertullian, 2nd century AD)
The basis of government is jugglery. If it lasts and works, it becomes policy. (Caliph Al Mansur of Baghdad)
The worst things are those that are novelties. Every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hell. (Prophet Mohammed, The Neglected Duty)
"shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi" = "the master is fond of licking lion spittle" (Chinese tonguetwister)
"I am who I am" (God to Moses)
Jesus: "I came into the world to bear witness to the truth". Pilate: "What is truth?" (John 18:3438)
What is the sound of one hand clapping? (Hakuin)
Four blind men gave four altogether contradictory descriptions of an elephant because one had been able to touch only its tail, the other its legs, the third its belly and the fourth its ears only. (Ancient Arab proverb)
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty" (Winston Churchill)
"Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." (Jorge-Luis Borges)
"Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets" (Napoleon Bonaparte)
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." (Groucho Marx)