In the past, I've posted some of the most interesting quotes I've encountered. I haven't done that for awhile, but today seems like a good day for another batch of quotes from my collection. Here they are:

“If I were rich, I would have a plaque made up, and sent to every judge in America, bearing a statement made by Adam Smith more than two and a half centuries ago: ‘Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.’” — Thomas Sowell

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it." - H.L. Mencken

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” - Galileo

"Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught." -Balzac

"You are not a traveler on this path, you are the path itself, unfolding with every step." ~ Rumi

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” — Mark Twain

“We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.” ― Quintilian

"The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please." - Hannah Arendt

“The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly.” ― George Carlin

“Under peaceful conditions, the warlike man attacks himself.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

"I look upon indolence as a sort of suicide; for the man is effectually destroyed, though the appetites of the brute may survive." Lord Chesterfield

“Do not interfere with an enemy that is in the process of destroying itself.” -Sun Tzu

“Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he invariably got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed: always the reference was to slips, errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.” - George Orwell, 1984

“I find it truly surreal to read academics denying the existence of intelligence. Academics are obsessed with intelligence. They discuss it endlessly in considering student admissions, in hiring faculty and staff, and especially in their gossip about one another. Nor can citizens or policymakers ignore the concept, regardless of their politics. People who say that IQ is meaningless will quickly invoke it when the discussion turns to executing a murderer with an IQ of 64 [or] removing lead paint that lowers a child’s IQ by five points.” - Steven Pinker

“The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.”

― Aldous Huxley