John Tukey

An approximate answer to the right problem is worth a good deal more than an exact answer to an approximate problem.

Martin Luther King Jr

One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Bob Dylan

I said, you know they refused Jesus, too. He said, you're not him.

Ronald Reagan

The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

Theodore Roosevelt

The reason fat men are good natured is they can neither fight nor run.

Robert Hanlon

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. And as for him who lacks the courage to defend even his own soul: Let him not brag of his progressive views, boast of his status as an academician or a recognized artist, a distinguished citizen or general. Let him say to himself plainly: I am cattle, I am a coward, I seek only warmth and to eat my fill.

C. S. Lewis

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

All studies end in doubts.

— Studies in Words by C. S. Lewis

Martin Buber

...there is a hierarchy of deceptions. Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.

Herman Wouk

When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout.

George Orwell

Some ideas are so stupid only intellectuals believe them.

G.K. Chesterton 

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected.

Chuck Swindoll

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.

Christopher Hitchens

That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Augusta, Lady Gregory

What are prophecies? Don't we hear them every day of the week? And if one comes true there may be seven blind and come to nothing.

Voltaire

If you want to know who controls you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

The best is the enemy of the good.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

Scott Adams

Albert Camus (The Plague)

To simply say what we learn in the midst of plagues : there are more things to admire in men than to despise. 

Rowan Williams

The denial of emotion is a terrible thing; [but] what takes time is learning that the positive path is the education of emotion, not its uncritical indulgence, which actually locks us far more firmly in our mutual isolation.

Friedrich Hayek

There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal. While the first is the condition of a free society, the second means, as De Tocqueville described it, ‘a new form of servitude.’

John Stuart Mill (On the Subjection of Women)

Just because the opposing view is strongly rooted in feelings, it is psychologically strengthened rather than weakened by having the weight of argument go against it. If it were accepted as a result of argument, counter-arguments might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, arguments against it don’t shake it at all: the worse it fares in the clash of arguments, the more convinced its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper basis that the arguments don’t reach! And while the feeling remains, it keeps erecting fresh walls of argument to repair the gaps that have been made in the old ones. And there are so many factors giving intensity and deep roots to the feelings connected with our present subject—making them more intense and deeper-rooted than the feelings that gather protectively around other old institutions and customs—that we shouldn’t be surprised to find those feelings to be less undermined and loosened than any of the others by the progress of the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor should we suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbaric than the ones they shake off earlier.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that...But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion...

Ram Emmanuel

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

Camille Paglia (VT 1994)

Everyone should be free to ogle everyone else, as long as looks don’t cross over to touch. Similarly, everyone should be free to insult everyone else, as long as words don’t escalate into violence.

Hannah Arendt

When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing. 

Thomas Sowell

"When you compare women and men in the same occupations with the same skills, education, hours of work, and many other factors that go into determining pay, the differences in incomes shrink to the vanishing point — and, in some cases, the women earn more than comparable men." 

"Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God."

"The political left has never understood that, if you give the government enough power to create 'social justice,' you have given it enough power to create despotism. Millions of people around the world have paid with their lives for overlooking that simple fact." 

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

Chris Edwards

People should plan ahead for life’s contingencies and inevitabilities. Young people should learn to restrain their consumption and save so that they are prepared for costs down the road, including the costs of family leave, unemployment, and retirement.

Malcolm X

The worst enemy that the Negro have is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal, and it is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn't taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems. Our problems will never be solved by the white man.

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses. The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make the criminal look like he’s a the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press. It will make the criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

Sophie Tucker or Mae West

I've been rich and I've been poor. Rich is better.

Stephen Stills

Paranoia runs deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you're always afraid
Step out of line, the man come to take you away.

Dan O'Neill

Life can be a picnic... Only if you accept the ants.