More of my favorite quotes

I've been collecting quotes for decades, and you can find hundreds of my favorites here. Here are a few that I discovered recently: "My country is the world, and my religion is to do good." —Thomas Paine "Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." —Nelson Mandela "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. " —Bertrand Russell “Every time we witness an injustice and do not act, we train our character to be passive in its presence and thereby eventually lose all ability to defend ourselves and those we love. In a modern economy it is impossible to seal oneself off from injustice. -Julian Assange If we have brains or courage, then we are blessed and called on not to frit these qualities away, standing agape at the ideas of others, winning pissing contests, improving the efficiencies of the neocorporate state, or immersing ourselves in obscuranta, but rather to prove the vigor of our talents against the strongest opponents of love we can find. -Julian Assange If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whose hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. -Julian Assange The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering. -Julian Assange Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions are tasked to act on them.” -Julian Assange Every Organization rests upon a mountain of secrets. -Julian Assange If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth." Julian Assange “The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.” -Mark Twain No man is rich enough to buy back his past. -Oscar Wilde "Science dies without the free flow of information. The same can be said of democracy." -Charles Pierce, of Esquire. “Noah’s Ark: Because the largest and most thorough act of genocide in history makes a great children’s story.” - On Facebook

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Another batch of thought-provoking quotes

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.

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George Orwell quotes

I decided to spend an hour collecting some of my favorite quotes of George Orwell. It's amazing how timeless he was, which is another way of saying that he understood human beings extremely well. Here are some of his quotes:

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up. People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot. Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore. The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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