Sourced and curated.

I am condemned to be free.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Being and Nothingness · 1943

★ 8.5

Remember that Time is Money.

Benjamin Franklin

The American Instructor: or Young Man's Best Companion · 1748

★ 8.5

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

On Liberty · 1859

★ 7.9

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

Federalist 51 · 1788

★ 7.6

America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without.

Walt Whitman

Democratic Vistas · 1871

★ 7.6

Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.

A government of laws, and not of men.

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 7.5

Essay · Newspaper

John Adams

1775

★ 7.2

Always do what you are afraid to do.

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 7.2

A house is a machine for living in.

Le Corbusier

Toward an Architecture · 1923

★ 7.2

Essay · Historical literature · Political literature

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

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte · 1852

★ 7.1

In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 7.1

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Immanuel Kant

1784

★ 7.1

The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.

Plutarch

Moralia

★ 7.1

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Benjamin Franklin

1755

★ 7.1

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint.

What is a rebel? A man who says no.

Federalist 15 · 1787

★ 7.1

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

Albert Camus

The Rebel · 1951

★ 7.1

All rising to great place is by a winding stair.

A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for...is a miserable creature, who has no chance of being free.

1625

★ 7.0

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

1862

★ 7.0

Chiefly, the mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.

1625

★ 7.0

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.

James Baldwin

1961

★ 7.0

It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

Federalist 1 · 1787

★ 7.0

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

Federalist 10 · 1787

★ 7.0

It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

Federalist 51 · 1788

★ 7.0

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.

Federalist 51 · 1788

★ 7.0

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.

1625

★ 7.0

The fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of THE CONSENT OF THE PEOPLE. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority.

Federalist 22 · 1787

★ 7.0

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.

Federalist 1 · 1787

★ 7.0

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Federalist 47 · 1788

★ 7.0

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 7.0

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

George Orwell

Politics and the English Language · 1946

★ 7.0

Other people's words are the bridge you use to cross from where you were to wherever you're going.

Zadie Smith

2010

★ 7.0

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

1625

★ 6.9

God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.

1625

★ 6.9

Seeing is forgetting the name of the things one sees.

Paul Valery

1936

★ 6.9

Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.

Louis Brandeis

1913

★ 6.9

It was not the power of the Spaniards that destroyed the Aztec Empire but the disbelief of the Aztecs in themselves.

E.F. Schumacher

1962

★ 6.9

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy.

Francis Fukuyama

The End of History? · 1989

★ 6.9

Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen.

Leo Tolstoy

What Is Art? · 1897

★ 6.4

Essay · Historical literature · Political literature

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

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte · 1852

★ 6.3

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea.

The Utility of Religion · 1873

★ 6.2

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

1925

★ 6.1

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Albert Camus

The Myth of Sisyphus · 1942

★ 6.1

Knowing that certain nights whose sweetness lingers will keep returning to the earth and sea after we are gone, yes, this helps us die.

Albert Camus

The Sea Close By · 1953

★ 6.1

Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

1828

★ 6.0

When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can't be answered.

Ryszard Kapuscinski

A Warsaw Diary · 1985

★ 6.0

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful, is the cause of half their errors.

On Liberty · 1859

★ 5.5

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

On Liberty · 1859

★ 5.5

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.

Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.5

Essay · Satire

Jonathan Swift

Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting · 1745

★ 5.5

Essay · Philosophical literature · Political literature

An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer.

On Liberty · 1859

★ 5.5

Men are what their mothers made them.

Fate · 1860

★ 5.5

Our chief want in life is, somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Considerations by the Way · 1860

★ 5.5

Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgement on him.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.4

It happens as with the cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.4

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Oscar Wilde

Intentions · 1891

★ 5.4

For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.

Essays · 1580

★ 5.3

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and nothing comes out but what was put in. But the moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, anecdote, all flock to their aid.

Literary Ethics · 1838

★ 5.3

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down!

Henry David Thoreau

Life Without Principle · 1862

★ 5.3

Essay · Philosophical writing

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.

Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy · 1865

★ 5.3

The happy ending is our national belief.

Mary McCarthy

America the Beautiful · 1947

★ 5.3

Essay · Magazine · Political literature · Historical literature

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

★ 5.3

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise, they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a. M. Of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.

Joan Didion

On Keeping a Notebook · 1968

★ 5.3

Essay · Philosopical literature

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

Theodicy · 1710

★ 5.2

Essay · Newspaper

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.

William Lloyd Garrison

To the Public · 1831

★ 5.2

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

Henry James

1884

★ 5.2

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder's lack of rational conviction. Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.

Bertrand Russell

On the Value of Scepticism · 1928

★ 5.2

As long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Aldous Huxley

1937

★ 5.2

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Aldous Huxley

1956

★ 5.2

There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.

Gore Vidal

1956

★ 5.2

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Susan Sontag

Freak Show · 1973

★ 5.2

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.

Fran Lebowitz

1981

★ 5.2

Essay · Historical literature

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

The Significance of the Frontier in American History · 1893

★ 5.1

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.

Havelock Ellis

1922

★ 5.1

Suicide... Is about life, being in fact the sincerest form of criticism life gets.

Wilfrid Sheed

1978

★ 5.1

Essay · Newspaper

If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture you would be pretty much left with "Let's Make a Deal."

Fran Lebowitz

The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community · 1987

★ 5.1

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

Jonathan Franzen

1996

★ 5.1

Essay · Religious literature

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

The Portable Atheist · 2007

★ 5.1

Essay · Magazine · Scientific literature

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

Science and Linguistics · 1940

★ 5.0