"Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance."
~ Albert Einstein
"I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon. I seek opportunity to develop whatever talents God gave me -- not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia. I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any earthly master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations and to face the world boldly and say -- `This, with God's help, I have done.' All this is what it means to be an American."
~Dean Alfange
"I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do. What I can do, I should do. And what I should do, by the grace of God, I will do."
~ Edward Everett Hale
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
~ George Orwell
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident."
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
"Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your common sense."
~ Buddha
"great doubt: great awakening; little doubt: little awakening; no doubt: no awakening."
~ A Zen mantra
"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
~ Robertson Davies
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed."
~ Albert Einstein
Alas, how scant the sheaves for all the trouble,
The toil, the pain and the resolve sublime--
A few full ears; the rest but weeds and stubble,
And withered wild-flowers plucked before their time.
~ Alonzo B. Bragdon, The Old Campus
There is a cropping-time in the races of men, as in the fruits of the field; and sometimes, if the stock be good, there springs up for a time a succession of splendid men; and then comes a period of barrenness.
~ Aristotle, Rhetoric (II, 15, par. III)
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
~ Bible, Psalms (ch. CIII, v. 15 & 16)
No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
~ Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (pt. I, Of Man, ch. XVIII)
