Famous Quotes & Sayings

Barbara Kingsolver

The truth needs so little rehearsal.

Baruch Spinoza

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

Ayn Rand

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

Bertrand Russell

In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.

Kate Winslet

It's very easy to be judgmental until you know someone's truth.

Clarice Lispector

The only truth is that I live. Sincerely, I live. Who am I? Well, that's a bit much.

Bob Dylan

All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.

Boris Pasternak

In every generation there has to be some fool who will speak the truth as he sees it.

Blaise Pascal

Unless we love the truth we cannot know it.

Benito Mussolini

Silence is the only answer you should give to the fools. Where ignorance speaks, intelligence should not give advices.

Jane Goodall

So long as we continued to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the 'global village' we would propagate prejudice and ignorance. There was absolutely no harm in being part of a small group - indeed, with our hunter-gatherer band mentality it gave comfort, provided us with an inner circle of friends who could be utterly trusted, who were absolutely reliable. It helped give us peace of mind. The danger came only from drawing that sharp line, digging that ditch, laying that minefield, between our own group and any other group that thought differently.

Calvin Coolidge

Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.

Alain Badiou

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television, but more subtly the written press, are quite spectacular powers of unreason and ignorance.

Charles Darwin

Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

Vandana Shiva

The people who see the population explosion in the Malthusian way - as a geometric progression - forget that population growth is not a biological issue. People are not increasing in numbers out of stupidity and ignorance. Population growth is an ecological phenomenon linked very intimately to other issues, such as the usurpation of the resources which allow people to live.

Jared Diamond

The past was still a Golden Age, of ignorance, while the present is an Iron Age of willful bliss.

Bret Easton Ellis

She sits before me, sullen but hopeful, characterless, about to dissolve into tears. I squeeze her hand back, moved, no, touched by her ignorance of evil. She has one more test to pass. Do you own a briefcase?” I ask her, swallowing.

Blaise Pascal

The consciousness of the falsity of present pleasures, and the ignorance of the vanity of absent pleasures, cause inconstancy.

Ashley Scott

I know what's like to be young and have atrocious spelling, spelling words all backwards, mixing up numbers, addresses. and things like that.

Jane Addams

That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.

Edward Snowden

There are proxies, proxy servers on the internet, and this is very typical for hackers to use. They create what are called proxy chains where they gain access to a number of different systems around the world, sometimes by hacking these, and they use them as sort of relay boxes.

Brian Greene

The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

Ehud Olmert

The formula for the parameters of a unilateral solution are: To maximize the number of Jews; to minimize the number of Palestinians; not to withdraw to the 1967 border and not to divide Jerusalem.

Dirk Benedict

In their arrogance, ABC wanted a number-one show. They wouldnt accept losing that time slot.

David Bowie

I don't profess to have music as my big wheel and there are a number of other things as important to me apart from music. Theatre and mime, for instance.

Doris Lessing

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

Alfred North Whitehead

You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.