2098 Quotations Found

Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever.

Author: Gandhi | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society

Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills – against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to … [ Read more ]

Author: Robert F. Kennedy | Subject: Action | Accomplishment

It is man’s destiny to ponder on the riddle of existence, and as a by-product of his wonderment, to create a new life on this earth.

Author: Charles Kettering | Subject: Life & Society

The great threats to the United States are self-righteousness and complacency.

Author: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. | Subject: America

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.

NOTE: the original source is unclear. I have seen it attributed to Matthew Bennett and Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Author: Unknown | Subject: Wisdom

Because human beings cannot function without their illusions, the vital truth lies in causation—the strands of perceptions and misperceptions that lead people to take the actions they do.

Author: Herodotus | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.

Author: Reba McEntire | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure, Wisdom

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Author: Gandhi | Subjects: Happiness, Wisdom

Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow | Subjects: Material Possessions, Miscellaneous

War is nothing about reason and everything about emotion. If it has logic, it is the mad logic of hell. All of us have some evil: deep in most, indulged by a few, universally released by war. Men sign away everything for this release, uncapping a pot they scarcely know is boiling, and then are haunted ever after.

Author: William Dietrich | Subjects: Life & Society, Military | War | Peace, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Under totalitarianism, it is said, many things are forbidden and the remaining things you must do; under authoritarianism, many things are forbidden and the remaining things you may do.

Author: Ross Terrill | Subjects: Freedom | Liberty, Politics & Public Policy

When societies first come to birth, it is the leader who produces the institutions. Later it is the institutions which produce the leaders.

Author: Montesquieu | Subjects: Culture, Leadership

Erich Fromm once wrote that the psychological dimension of freedom is loneliness; that the pure state of freedom means being utterly alone to act and think without being inhibited by concern for others. And he observed that the majority of human beings will always sacrifice freedom for group acceptance.

Authors: Erich Fromm, Lawrence Tyler | Subjects: Freedom | Liberty, Psychology | Behavior

I don’t know what it is that makes someone love you, but whatever it is, it’s the only thing that matters, and if it isn’t there you won’t create it by kindness, or generosity, or anything of that sort.

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subject: Love

It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic.

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subjects: Beauty | Aesthetics, Thought | Inquiry

He was intensely moved by the grandeur of the struggle for life, and the ethical rule which it suggested seemed to fit in with his predispositions. He said to himself that might was right. Society stood on one side, an organism with its own laws of growth and self-preservation, while the individual stood on the other. The actions which were to the advantage of society … [ Read more ]

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subject: Life & Society

But what is criticism? Criticism is purely destructive; anyone can destroy, but not everyone can build up.

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

You know, there are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action. In France you get freedom of action: you can do what you like and nobody bothers, but you must think like everybody else. In Germany you must do what everybody else does, but you may think as you choose. They’re both very good things. I personally prefer freedom of … [ Read more ]

Author: W. Somerset Maugham | Subjects: America, Freedom | Liberty, International, Life & Society

I think it [allowing foreign policy to be defined by the war on terrorism] would be tragically self-limiting. I think the U.S. has far bigger and larger issues in the world that it needs to be concerned with. I believe this issue remains vital. I believe that all the instruments of state that are being applied to prevent the next 9/11—and to take action against … [ Read more ]

Author: Shashi Tharoor | Subjects: America, Foreign Policy, International, Politics & Public Policy

Look, with all […] respect, there’s no Filipino dream, there’s no Japanese dream, there’s no Italian dream. But there is an American dream. And some guy standing on a street corner in Addis Ababa knows what it is about.

Author: Karl Rove | Subjects: America, International