Quotes

On Quotes

I think the best quotes are those that achieve a lot of "truth mileage" from the skillful use of  relatively few words. Anything more than one or two sentences should be developed into a coherent paragraph and not be considered a "quote" as such.  The purpose of a quote, as opposed to a paragraph,  is to hit you hard and fast over both your intellectual and emotional heads...to get you thinking now, without the burden of trying to first muddle through verbal clutter for this meaning or that context. A good quote is no less a complete entity than say, a novel, short story or essay;  its major difference is that it imports intelligible meaning in very few words. If the message or meaning is not crystal either immediately or, at most, after a moment's reflection, the effectiveness of a quote is lost.

Consider:  "Pax vobiscum!" : Peace be with you   or   "veni, vidi, vici" : I came, I saw, I conquered. (The laconic despatch in which Julius Ceasar announced to the Senate his victory over Pharnaces.)

I have tried to follow a brevity policy with the quotes I have included below.  Like all things in this  world, however, there are exceptions. Notably, the first quote by W. Lippman below is a little lengthy but this is more than compensated for because of the quote's profundity.

...fwg

General

A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

---Margaret Attwood

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Political / Social Philosophy

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.

   --- John Adams

*

“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”

--- Plato

*

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

--- George Orwell

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

---George Orwell
 

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Educational Philosophy

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
---Aristotle

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An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.
---Russell Baker

*

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.
---Will Durant

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Humour

A wedding is just like a funeral except that you get to smell your own flowers.
---Grace Hansen

*
“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men, the other 999 follow women”

--- Groucho Marx

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Logic/Rational Thinking

If 50 million people say (or think) a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.

---Bertrand Russell

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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.

---Walter Lippman

Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much.
 

--- Walter Lippman

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