2098 Quotations Found

Man’s capacity for evil makes democracy necessary and man’s capacity for good makes democracy possible.

Author: Reinhold Niebuhr | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy

It’s not enough to have lived. We should be determined to live for something. May I suggest that it be creating joy for others, sharing what we have for the betterment of personkind, bringing hope to the lost and love to the lonely.

Author: Leo Buscaglia | Subjects: Life & Society, Love

History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.

Author: Pierre Nora | Subjects: History, Memory

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.

Author: Charles W. Eliot | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Miscellaneous

Your children are not your children. …
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. …
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

Author: Kahlil Gibran | Subject: Family & Friends

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald | Subject: Intelligence | Knowledge

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

Author: Tom Stoppard | Subjects: Ability | Skill, Art, Imagination

Some people can walk around the world and see nothing while others can walk around the block and see the entire world.

Author: Unknown | Source: I have Tom T. Hall written down in my notes for this but not sure if that is accurate or not (cannot find online) | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior, Travel

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

Authors: 13th century sufi poet and mystic, Mevlana Rumi | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Religion

All inquiry, whatever its subject, has as its final object the matter of how to go about living.

Author: Mark Kingwell | Source: An old philosophical maxim | Subjects: Life & Society, Meaning, Thought | Inquiry

Our most basic choice, the one that grounds all the others, is this: Do we attend closely to the business of our choices, or do we flee from them, in arrogance, or fear, or boredom – or some combination of all three? That’s the only ultimate purpose or meaning that we can make sense of.

Author: Mark Kingwell | Subjects: Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior

It is a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation

The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.

Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Subject: Education | Scholarship

Our driving addiction, combined with single-use zoning, which separates homes from public spaces and services that are crucial to real neighborhoods, has created the barren “bedroom community,” designed not around human needs but around three-car garages, wide streets, and highway access to shopping malls.

Author: James Kunstler | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Over there [communist Eastern Europe] nothing goes and everything matters; over here everything goes and nothing matters. When everything is free and nothing is at risk, when all is blandly equal, who cares?

Author: Philip Roth | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Politics & Public Policy

Magazine and journal articles are usually the best forum for bold and original arguments […] most books […] tend to have (at best) a kernel of an important idea, padded with superfluous case studies and second-rate reporting.

Author: Benjamin Schwarz | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Journalism, Learning, Miscellaneous, Reading | Writing

Our greatest weakness is the habit of reducing the most complex issues to the most simplistic moralisms. About Communism. About Capitalism. About Crime. About Corruption […] It has made it difficult for Americans to think honestly and to some purpose about themselves and their problems. Moralism drives our thought.

‌[…]‌

We have acquired bad habits of speech and worse patterns of behavior, lurching from crisis to crisis … [ Read more ]

Author: Daniel Patrick Moynihan | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

Author: Winston Churchill | Subjects: Communication, Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

The war on drugs is one of the worst policies America has ever produced. It has put two million black men in jail—the worst incarceration of blacks in human history. California is spending more on new prisons than higher education, and it’s all being driven by the war on drugs. We’ve got the whole thing dead wrong. It hasn’t worked; it isn’t working; it will … [ Read more ]

Author: Peter Schwartz | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

Human psychology is such that what begins as a means may also become an end in itself, since time and again the emotional value we place on a goal is transferred to the means we use to obtain it […] since money is the ultimate means in a market economy, it is all too easy for people to get caught up in its pursuit and … [ Read more ]

Author: Jerry Z. Muller | Subjects: Material Possessions, Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior