Quotations Set 30

1. There are years that ask questions and years that answer. - Zora Neale Hurston, folklorist and writer (1891-1960)

2. The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change. - Richard Bach, writer (1936- )

3. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy. - Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

4. Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales. - Byron J. Langenfeld

5. If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison, fourth US president (1751-1836)

6. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. - Joseph Roux, priest and writer (1834-1886)

7. Once upon a time a man whose ax was missing suspected his neighbor's son. The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief. But the man found his ax while digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor's son, the boy walked, looked and spoke like any other child. - Lao-tzu, philosopher (6th century BCE)

8. I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., writer (1922- )

9. Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place. - William Strunk and E.B. White, authors of The Elements of Style

10. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. - Herbert Alexander Simon, economist, Nobel laureate (1916-2001)

11. Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary. - Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

12. It came to me that reform should begin at home, and since that day I have not had time to remake the world. - Will Durant, historian (1885-1981)

13. Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race. - Jacques Barzun, professor and writer (1907- )

14. A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free. - Nikos Kazantzakis, writer (1883-1957)

15. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. - Abraham Lincoln, 16th US president (1809-1865)

16. War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off. - Karl Kraus, writer (1874-1936)

17. Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws. - John Adams, 2nd US president (1735-1826)

18. Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

19. As the State is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence. - Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

20. It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. - Janos Arany, poet (1817-1882)

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