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Gore Vidal: Generations
“Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.” —Gore Vidal.
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Henri Frederic Amiel: Make use of suffering
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.” —Henri Frederic Amiel.
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T S Eliot: Half the harm
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them.” —T S Eliot.
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Bruce Springsteen: Blind faith
“Blind faith in your leaders, or in anything, will get you killed.” —Bruce Springsteen.
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Lord Chesterfield: Wrongs and contempt
“Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever.” —-Lord Chesterfield.
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Will Durrant: History
“History as usually written is quite different from history as usually lived. The historian records the exceptional because it is interesting.” —Will Durant.
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Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Vain
“We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.” —Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.
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H L Mencken: Moral standards
“Whenever ‘A’ attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon ‘B’, ‘A’ is most likely a scoundrel.” —H.L. Mencken.
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Bertrand Russell: Cars and humans
“No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behavior to sin; he does not say, ‘You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.’ He attempts to find out what…
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Robert A Heinlein: Spoiled child
“Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”—Robert A. Heinlein. —Robert A. Heinlein.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Torch of truth
“It is almost impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.
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Czeslaw Milosz: Pistol shot
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” — -Czeslaw Milosz.
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Thomas Paine: Accountability
“A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.” —Thomas Paine.
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Lillian Hellman: People change
“People change and forget to tell each other.” —-Lillian Hellman.
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Lorraine Hansberry: Exceptionally lonely
“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” —-Lorraine Hansberry.
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Bertrand Russell: Sin is geographical
“Sin is geographical.” —Bertrand Russell.
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Sigmund Freud: Matters, big and small
“In small matters trust the mind, in large ones the heart.” —-Sigmund Freud.
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Christopher Morley: Pretend a parade
“Lots of times you have to pretend to join a parade in which you’re not really interested in order to get where you’re going.” -Christopher Morley.
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Horace Mann: Differing from yourself
“Do not think of knocking out another person’s brains because he differs in opinion from you. It would be as rational to knock yourself on the head because you differ from yourself ten years ago.” —Horace Mann.
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Benjamin Spock: Man
“Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he’s potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of…
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Henry Fielding: Hear reason
“Neither great poverty nor great riches will hear reason.”—Henry Fielding.
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Henry Clay: Compatible with liberty
“All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.” —-Henry Clay.
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William Wordsworth: Best portion
“The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” —-William Wordsworth.
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Booker T Washington: Place responsibility
“Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him.” —Booker T. Washington.
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Maya Angelou: We may even become friends
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” -Maya Angelou.
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Andrew Marvell: No crime
“Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” —-Andrew Marvell.
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John Updike: Bearings
“We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.” —John Updike.
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Robert Blatchford: Religions
“Religions are not revealed: they are evolved. If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practice. There has never been a religion that fulfills those conditions.” —-Robert Blatchford.
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A K Ramanujan: Trees and oranges
“You can sometimes count every orange on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange.” —-A.K. Ramanujan.
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Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Fight in a way that others join you
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” —-Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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Luther Burbank: Nature’s laws
“Nature’s laws affirm instead of prohibit. If you violate her laws, you are your own prosecuting attorney, judge, jury, and hangman.” —-Luther Burbank.
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Alexander Graham Bell: Work at hand
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” —Alexander Graham Bell.
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Michel de Montaigne: I govern myself
“Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.” —-Michel de Montaigne.
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George Harrison: My guitar gently weeps
“I look at the world and I notice it’s turning / While my guitar gently weeps / With every mistake we must surely be learning / Still my guitar gently weeps.” —George Harrison.
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Hans Asperger: Dash of autism
“It seems that for success, in science or art, a dash of autism is essential. For success the necessary ingredients may be an ability to turn away from the everyday world, from the simple practical, an ability to rethink a subject with originality so as to create in new untrodden ways.” -Hans Asperger.
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Simon Sinek: Creativity
“The opportunity for creativity begins the moment we don’t know what we’re doing.” —Simon Sinek.
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Douglas Hofstadter: Hofstadter’s law
“Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” —Douglas Hofstadter.
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Simon Sinek: It just has to be done
“It doesn’t have to be beautiful, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be done.” —Simon Sinek.
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Richard Powers: Tree falls and planting
“Trees fall with spectacular crashes. Planting is silent and growth invisible.” —Richard Powers.
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Thomas Michael Disch: Jobs
“Jobs are like going to church: it’s nice once or twice a year to sing along and eat something and all that, but unless you really believe there’s something holy going on, it gets to be a drag going in every single week.” —-Thomas Michael Disch.
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Langston Hughes: Tomorrow’s bread
“I tire so of hearing people say, / Let things take their course. / Tomorrow is another day. / I do not need my freedom when I’m dead. / I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.” —Langston Hughes.
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Simon Sinek: Thank you
“When was the last time you said thank you to your friends for being your friends? Good friends are a gift. It’s just polite to say thank you.” —-Simon Sinek.
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Billings Learned Hand: Loyalty to truth
“I will remember that what has brought us up from savagery is a loyalty to truth, and truth cannot emerge unless it is subjected to the utmost scrutiny — will you not agree that a society which has lost sight of that, cannot survive?” —Billings Learned Hand.
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Ellen DeGeneres: Through the eyes of others
“Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others.” —-Ellen DeGeneres.
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Simon Sinek: Responsibility
“We take responsibility for our actions at the time we perform our actions, not at the time we get caught.” —-Simon Sinek.
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William Somerset Maugham: Success
“The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic and self-complacent is erroneous; on the contrary it makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind.” -William Somerset Maugham.
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William J Bernstein: Delusional crowds
“What separates delusional crowds from wise ones is the extent of their members’ interactions with each other…. The more a group interacts, the more it behaves like a real crowd, and the less accurate its assessments become. Occasionally, crowd interaction becomes so intense that madness results. As put most succinctly by Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Madness is…
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Edith Wharton: Little healing in its touch
“As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.” —–Edith Wharton.
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Simon Sinek: Metrics and people
All managers of metrics have an opportunity to become leaders of people.—–Simon Sinek.
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Bill Maher: Intolerance
“Don’t get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.” —-Bill Maher.
