Quotes · Skopia

610 quotes

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. — John Stuart Mill · 1859 Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. — James Madison · 1788 America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without. — Walt Whitman · 1871 Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. — James Madison · 1787 Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx · 1852 What is a rebel? A man who says no. — Albert Camus · 1951 All 143 quotes →

Philosophical literature73 quotes

I am condemned to be free. — Jean-Paul Sartre · 1943 He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. — John Stuart Mill · 1859 Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made. — Immanuel Kant · 1784 What is a rebel? A man who says no. — Albert Camus · 1951 A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free. — John Stuart Mill · 1862 Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea. — John Stuart Mill · 1873 All 73 quotes →

Economic literature10 quotes

There is no way of keeping profits up but by keeping wages down. — David Ricardo · 1822 Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married. — C. Northcote Parkinson · 1958 Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. — C. Northcote Parkinson · 1955 Marxian socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men and, through them, the events of history. — John Maynard Keynes · 1926 The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. — C. Northcote Parkinson · 1958 I believe that in many cases the ideal size for the unit of control and organisation lies somewhere between the individual and the modern State. I suggest, therefore, that progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State. — John Maynard Keynes · 1926 All 10 quotes →

Feminist literature10 quotes

Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women? — Virginia Woolf · 1929 Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named, and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action. — Audre Lorde · 1984 There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. — Virginia Woolf · 1929 The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. — Virginia Woolf · 1929 This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. — Virginia Woolf · 1929 It is the masculine values that prevail... This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room. — Virginia Woolf · 1929 All 10 quotes →

Scientific literature9 quotes

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds-and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. — Benjamin Lee Whorf · 1940 "Could a machine think?" my own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains... Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. — John R. Searle · 1980 Wonder... And not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to the study of Philosophy, of that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature. — Adam Smith · 1790 In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." — Stephen Jay Gould · 1983 Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth... Is that it is alive... Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, cleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos... It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun. — Lewis Thomas · 1973 Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. — Bertrand Russell · 1907 All 9 quotes →

Historical literature8 quotes

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. — Karl Marx · 1852 Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. — Karl Marx · 1852 It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil. — Hannah Arendt · 1963 What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. — Frederick Jackson Turner · 1893 Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists.... The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs. — George Orwell · 1943 History is the essence of innumerable Biographies. — Thomas Carlyle · 1830 All 8 quotes →

Satire8 quotes

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible. — Jonathan Swift · 1745 Every man desires to live long; but no man would be old. — Jonathan Swift · 1727 When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him. — Jonathan Swift · 1711 We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. — Jonathan Swift · 1711 Advertising may be described as the science of arresting human intelligence long enough to get money from it. — Stephen Leacock · 1924 Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards, and pretences to foretell events. — Jonathan Swift · 1727 All 8 quotes →

Travel writing6 quotes

Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof. — Thomas Fuller (churchman) · 1642 When a traveller returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath travelled altogether behind him. — Francis Bacon · 1625 Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. — Francis Bacon · 1625 Deceive not thyself by overexpecting happiness in the married estate... Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs. — Thomas Fuller (churchman) · 1642 Light (God's eldest daughter), is a principal beauty in a building. — Thomas Fuller (churchman) · 1642 It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well. — Aldous Huxley · 1925

Nature writing4 quotes

Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. — Aldo Leopold · 1949 Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. — John Muir · 1898 A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. — Aldo Leopold · 1949 We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. — Aldo Leopold · 1949

Sociology3 quotes

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed. — William Graham Sumner · 1881 He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men; which, both in affection and means, have married and endowed the public. — Francis Bacon · 1625 We are all of us, men and women both, the creatures of culture: We do and feel what our societies want us to do and feel, and the demands that they put upon us are not always either very consistent or very precisely correlated with biology. — Diana Trilling · 1970

Religious literature2 quotes

Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. — Christopher Hitchens · 2007 Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either. — G.K. Chesterton · 1926

Food writing1 quote

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly. — M.F.K. Fisher · 1949

Legal writing1 quote

Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men.... When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. — G.K. Chesterton · 1909

Philosophical writing1 quote

I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go. — John Stuart Mill · 1865

Philosopical literature1 quote

It may be said likewise in respect of perfect wisdom, which is no less orderly than mathematics, that if there were not the best among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any. — Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz · 1710

Sourced and curated.