I don’t write them; I merely collect them.  There’s no particular topic. These are some of the quotes I’ve enjoyed and collected over the past couple of months:

“I like rice. Rice is great if you’re hungry and want 2000 of something.”
Mitch Hedberg (1968 – 2005)

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair (1878 – 1968)

“Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
George Carlin

“First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. Then they build monuments to you.”
— Nicholas Klein
Trade Union Address for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1918

“A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.”
Jerry Seinfeld (1954 – )

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005)

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
John Steinbeck

“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”
Hermann Hesse (1877 – 1962)

“Be careful who you pick as your enemies as you have a tendency to become like them”.
Bill Russell/Boston Celtics

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Ray Bradbury

“The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
Albert Einstein

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”
Ben Franklin

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an
evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.”
—Buckminster Fuller

“Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
― Jon Stewart

“Freedom isn’t free. It shouldn’t be a bragging point that “Oh, I don’t get involved in politics,” as if that makes you somehow cleaner. No, that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liar s and panderers The government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn’t insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.”
Bill Maher

“We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”
Teddy Roosevelt

“It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Frederick Douglass

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”
Gore Vidal (1925 – )

“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”
Olin Miller

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
― Howard Zinn

“That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
Christopher Hitchens.