On some positions, cowardice asks the question, “is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “is it politic?” Vanity asks the question, “is it popular?” But conscience asks the question, “is it right?”
Author: Martin Luther King Jr. | Subjects: Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Personal Improvement, Principles, Psychology | Behavior
Freedom is not the absence of rigor, it’s the absence of restraints imposed by others.
Author: George Will | Subject: Freedom | Liberty
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Author: Albert Einstein | Subject: Intelligence | Knowledge
I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: First, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can … [ Read more ]
Author: Joseph Epstein | Subjects: Literature | Arts, Miscellaneous
Every right comes with a responsibility. Every opportunity comes with an obligation. Every possession comes with a duty.
Author: John D. Rockefeller | Subject: Responsibility
It’s safe to say that if everyone thinks you’re normal in every area of your life, you are probably not on the path to extraordinary achievement.
Often, a better barometer of your potential success would be those who criticize you as opposed to those who applaud your normality. Extraordinary and unusual effort is very popular after you achieve greatness, but while you’re on the road, average … [ Read more ]
Author: Jim Stovall | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
If you are carrying strong feelings about something that happened in your past, they may hinder your ability to live in the present.
Author: Les Brown | Subjects: Experience, Psychology | Behavior
One sure sign that farming is not congenial is that people throughout history have been determined to get other people to do it. Slavery does not exist among hunter-gatherers and apparently never did; it comes in with gardens and farms.
Indeed, it is now conventional wisdom among scholars that, as the physiologist Jared Diamond wrote some years ago in Discover magazine, “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly … [ Read more ]
Author: David Berreby | Subjects: Culture, History
People who for some reason find it impossible to think about themselves, and so really be themselves, try to make up for not thinking with doing. They try to pretend that doing is thinking. –
Author: Tony Kushner | Subjects: Action | Accomplishment, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast, ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
Author: James Madison | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Aesthetic judgment involves the appreciation of objects that are inherently beautiful, while taste involves the appreciation of objects in relation to ourselves.
There’s a paradox in all of this, Gurstein notes: “In the quarrel over forgeries, those who love beauty for its own sake are sophisticated aesthetes and those who care more for the work’s pedigree than its aesthetic qualities are philistines.” But in today’s culture … [ Read more ]
Author: Rochelle Gurstein | Subjects: Art, Beauty | Aesthetics
You see, each country has a color, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it’s arrogance, and in the United States it’s ignorance.
Author: George Will | Subjects: America, International
A famous psychiatrist said, the most useful concept he had discovered for helping people turn their lives around was what he called his “four little words.” The first two were if only. “Many of my patients have spent their lives living in the past, anguishing about what they should have done in various situations. ‘If only I had stayed in school…’ ‘If only I had … [ Read more ]
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The most dynamic economic and political institutions right now are those that have abandoned the goal of redistributing wealth, in favor of increasing wealth for the total society.
I’ll give you three examples. One is the shift from a conscripted army to an all-volunteer force. A draft is based on the notion of equality; everyone serves. To be sure, there are draft dodgers and deferments; but … [ Read more ]
Author: Philip Bobbitt | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
There are several simultaneous and related events already on the horizon that indicate the severe stresses to the nation-state in fulfilling its promises to steadily improve the material well-being of the nation.
First, nation-states are trying to protect their national cultures against the Internet, against international communications media, and against electronic links that can’t really be barricaded out.
Second, they are trying to protect their national currencies … [ Read more ]
Author: Philip Bobbitt | Subjects: International, Politics & Public Policy
Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.
Author: James Madison | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Freedom | Liberty
A blank piece of paper is an opportunity to find out what you think.
Author: Unknown | Source: Dylan Thomas? (I had that in my notes but I cannot find this quotation online so leaving unattributed for now) | Subject: Thought | Inquiry
The brain is wider than the sky,
For put them side by side,
The one the other will include,
With ease, and you beside…I dwell in possibility,
A fairer house than Prose,
More numerous of windows,
Superior of Doors…,The souls unto itself,
Is an imperial friend,
Or the most agonizing spy,
An enemy could send…
Author: Emily Dickinson | Subjects: Poetry, Possibility
I like very much the idea of being serious; it invites people to feel more and I think one of the things about the modern world where we are so overwhelmed by useless information and trivial stimulation is that people turn off and they don’t feel as much.
Author: Susan Sontag | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation
We must never forget that essentially we shall always live in a world of people rather than in a world of things, and that others can do for us more than we can do for ourselves.
Author: Paul G. Blazer | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Miscellaneous