Quotes · Skopia

81 quotes

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The Forgotten Man... Delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school... But he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide. Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays-but his chief business in life is to pay... Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?

William Graham Sumner

1883

★ 0.9

If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

Joshua Reynolds

1769

★ 1.0

When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind: it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.

William Thomson, Lord Kelvin

1883

★ 1.0

The experience of the irrationality of the world has been the driving force of all religious revolution.

1917

★ 1.0

If laws are needed, Islam has established them all. There is no need... After establishing a government, to sit down and draw up laws.

Ayatollah Khomeini

1970

★ 1.1

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

1990

★ 1.1

These times of ours are serious and full of calamity, but all times are essentially alike. As soon as there is life there is danger.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1864

★ 1.2

The mind is but a barren soil; is a soil which is soon exhausted, and will produce no crop, or only one, unless it be continually fertilized and enriched with foreign matter.

Joshua Reynolds

1774

★ 1.8

We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake... The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

1818

★ 1.8

The opinion seems to have got abroad, that, in a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry on these measurements to another place of decimals.

James Clerk Maxwell

1871

★ 1.8

I say you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich... Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it! You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it.

Russell H. Conwell

1882

★ 1.8

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

Reinhold Niebuhr

1952

★ 1.8

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms-little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed and into one another.

Richard Feynman

1961

★ 1.8

I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Friedrich Hayek

1973

★ 1.8

It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price.

Richard Whately

Introductory Lectures on Political Economy · 1831

★ 1.9

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.

1881

★ 1.9

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals... This is the belief that somewhere, in the past or in the future, in divine revelation or in the mind of an individual thinker, in the pronouncements of history or science, or in the simple heart of an uncorrupted good man, there is a final solution.

1958

★ 1.9

Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.

1967

★ 1.9

With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.

Milton Friedman

1983

★ 1.9

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

Vladimir Nabokov

★ 1.9

Lecture · Philosophical literature

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things are either what they appear to be; or they are neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

Discourses · 108

★ 1.9

Lecture · Philosophical literature

What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

Discourses · 108

★ 1.9

Lecture · Philosophical literature

Shall I show you the sinews of a philosopher? "What sinews are those?"-A will undisappointed; evils avoided; powers daily exercised; careful resolution; unerring decisions.

Discourses · 108

★ 1.9

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 1.9

Every increased possession loads us with a new weariness.

The Eagle's Nest · 1872

★ 1.9

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

The History of Freedom in Antiquity · 1877

★ 1.9

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

1877

★ 1.9

War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.

1887

★ 1.9

Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.

1957

★ 1.9

Lecture · Philosophical literature

It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical arsenal of old Europe.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

1830

★ 2.0

One life; a little gleam of time between two eternities.

1840

★ 2.0

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Conservative · 1841

★ 2.0

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Henry David Thoreau

Walking (Thoreau) · 1851

★ 2.0

Chance favors only the prepared mind.

1854

★ 2.0

The State is an instrument in the hands of the ruling class, used to break the resistance of the adversaries of that class.

1924

★ 2.0

Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.

1938

★ 2.2

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.

Albert A. Michelson

1899

★ 2.6

I ask you to look both ways. For the road to a knowledge of the stars leads through the atom; and important knowledge of the atom has been reached through the stars.

Arthur Eddington

1926

★ 3.4

It is the very same taste which relishes a demonstration in geometry, that is pleased with the resemblance of a picture to an original, and touched with the harmony of music.

Joshua Reynolds

1776

★ 3.5

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; So strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps, no longer exists.

1786

★ 3.5

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