851 Quotations Found

The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

Author: Abbie Hoffman | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

Author: Albert Einstein | Subjects: Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.

Author: Mark Twain | Subjects: Desires, Life & Society

The United States Army says, “Our soldiers are our credentials.” As a society, can we say, “Our children are our credentials?”

Author: Frances Hesselbein | Subjects: Culture, Politics & Public Policy

There are people who get exactly what they want. You think they’re the lucky ones, but they’re not. The lucky ones are those who do what they are meant to do.

Author: Neem Karoli Baba | Subjects: Life & Society, Meaning, Wisdom

To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep – no more and by a sleep to say we end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir … [ Read more ]

Author: William Shakespeare | Subject: Life & Society

We can be complete, conscious beings only when we have known ourselves through the eyes of another.

Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Source: paraphrased from The Phenomenology of Mind | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Philosophy, Psychology | Behavior

We are all angels with only one wing; we can only fly while embracing one another.

Author: Luciano de Crescanzo | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships

A woman will always bend toward a strong man just as the vine stretches toward the wall.

A woman is always on the verge of abandoning herself anyhow; it only takes one firm push.

Author: Sarah Kernochan | Source: Marie D’Agoult (played by Bernadette Peters) in the movie Impromptu (1991) | Subjects: Feminism, Love, Psychology | Behavior

[M]y friends, will you not agree that any society which begins to be doubtful of itself; in which one man looks at another and says: “He may be a traitor,” in which that spirit has disappeared which says: “I will not accept that, I will not believe that—I will demand proof. I will not say of my brother that he may be a traitor,” but … [ Read more ]

Author: Learned Hand | Subjects: Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

“What does it all mean?” is the wrong question. We are not looking for the meaning of life, we are looking for the experience of being alive, which the quest for meaning wipes out. The quest for meaning is what removes us from life.

Author: Joseph Campbell | Subjects: Life & Society, Philosophy

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Author: George Santayana | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

I wish to mourn perpetually the absence of what I love or might love. Isn’t that what religious people call the love of God?

Author: George Santayana | Subjects: Love, Religion

They drew a circle that shut me out,
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took them in.

Author: Edwin Markham | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Poetry

We think, and with those thoughts, we create. We create the world we live in […] We harvest in life, only and exactly, what we sow in our minds.

Author: Dr. Dennis R. Deaton | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Author: T.E. Lawrence | Note(s): Lawrence of Arabia | Subjects: Dreams, Psychology | Behavior

A condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something that you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, things that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you … [ Read more ]

Author: Martha Craven Nussbaum | Subjects: Good & Evil, Life & Society, Philosophy, Trust

It is said that since the invention of the steam engine we live in a new era, an era so different from all preceding ages that the cultural tradition is no longer relevant, is in fact misleading. I submit to you that this is a rationalization, that this is a pretended reason for the education void which we now call education. The real reason, I … [ Read more ]

Author: Walter Lippmann | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society

Life is short,
Art long,
Occasion sudden and dangerous,
Experience deceitful,
and Judgment difficult.

Author: Hippocrates | Subjects: Art, Experience, Life & Society

A young man without power or money is completely free. He has nothing, but he also has everything. He can travel, he can drift. He can make new acquaintances every day, and try to soak up the infinite variety of life. He can seduce and be seduced, start an enterprise and abandon it, join an army or flee a nation, fight to preserve an existing … [ Read more ]

Author: Mark Bowden | Subjects: Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Power