Quotes and Conundrums


"There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh


"Maturity begins when we're content to feel we're right about something without feeling the necessity to prove someone else is wrong."

Sydney J. Harris


"The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse - that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it."

H.L. Mencken


"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

Thomas Jefferson


"I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him."

Mark Twain


"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate, and the mind has closed, the leader will have no trouble in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar."

Julius Caesar


"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

"Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods."

H.L. Mencken


"When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth."

George Bernard Shaw


"Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future."

Simone de Beauvoir


"Those wars are unjust which are undertaken without provocation. For only a war waged for revenge or defense can be just."

Cicero


"The difference between genius and stupidity is: genius has its limits."

Albert Einstein



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