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The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.
Author: Ludwig Von Mises
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[They say] "We do not know how this is, but we know that God can do it." You poor fools! God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so.
Author: William Of Conches
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We believe at once in evil, we only believe in good upon reflection. Is this not sad?.
Author: Madame Dorothé Deluzy
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The real death of America will come when everyone is alike.
Author: James T. Ellison
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Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.
Author: Orville Dewey
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Take your work seriously, but never yourself.
Author: Dame Margot Fonteyn
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Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.
Author: Brendan Gill
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Quite often the social doctors become part of the disease.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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You can shoot the tiger, or stay out of his way, but you cannot pronounce him a vegetarian.
Author: Richard Mitchell
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...each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.
Author: Walter Bagehot
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You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.
Author: John Buchan
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Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns.
Author: Bertrand De Jouvenal
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The process of evolution may be described as differentiation of structure and integration of function. The more differentiated and specialized the parts, the more elaborate co-ordination is needed to create a well-balanced whole. The ultimate criterion of the value of a functional whole is the degree of its internal harmony or integratedness, whether the "functional whole" is a biological species or a civilization or an individual. A whole is defined by the pattern of relations between its parts, not by the sum of its parts; and a civilization is not defined by the sum of its science, technology, art and social organization, but by the total pattern which they form, and the degree of harmonious integration in that pattern.
Author: Arthur Koestler
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When grubbing for necessities man is still an animal. He becomes uniquely human when he reaches out for the superfluous and extravagant.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say.
Author: Leo Gomes
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Conservatism is sometimes a symptom of sterility. Those who have nothing in them that can grow and develop must cling to what they have in beliefs, ideas and possessions. The sterile radical, too, is basically conservative. He is afraid to let go of the ideas and beliefs he picked up in his youth lest his life be seen as empty and wasted.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
Author: Thomas Sowell
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Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.
Author: James Henry Breasted
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Literacy is not, as it is considered in our schools, a PORTION of education. It IS education. It is at once the ability AND the inclination of the mind to find knowledge, to pursue understanding, and out of knowledge and understanding, not out of received attitudes and values or emotional responses, however "worthy," to make judgments.
Author: Richard Mitchell
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It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
Author: Alan Perlis
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Positive self-esteem operates as, in effect, the immune system of the consciousness, providing resistance, strength, and a capacity for regeneration. When self-esteem is low, our resilience in the face of life's adversities is diminished. We crumble before vicissitudes that a healthier sense of self could vanquish. We tend to be more influenced by the desire to avoid pain than to experience joy. Negatives have more power over us than positives.
Author: Nathaniel Branden
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Civilized man has always had a great inclination to read his conceptions and feelings into the mind of primitive man; but he has only a limited capacity for understanding the latter's undeveloped mental life and for interpreting, as it were, his nature.
Author: Carl Bucher
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There are plenty of people to whom the crucial problem of their lives never get presented in terms that they can understand.
Author: John Jay Chapman
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Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to publick opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem the true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong the right.
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
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The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
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Mutation is random; natural selection is the very opposite of random.
Author: Richard Dawkins
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There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
Author: Daniel C. Dennett
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Scientists often have a naive faith that if only they could discover enough facts about a problem, these facts would somehow arrange themselves in a compelling and true solution.
Author: Theodosius Dobzhansky
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A man that would expect to train lobsters to fly in a year is called a lunatic; but a man that thinks men can be turned into angels by an election is a reformer and remains at large.
Author: Finley Peter Dunne
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The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death...
Author: Paul Ehrlich
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Without an element of the obscene there can be no true and deep aesthetic or moral conception of life...It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene they could never have dared to be great.
Author: Havelock Ellis
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K is for KENGHIS KHAN. _He_ was a very _nice_ person. History has no record of him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
Author: Harlan Ellison
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The fanatic is not really a stickler to principle. He embraces a cause not primarily because of its justness or holiness but because of his desperate need for something to hold onto.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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A doctrine insulates the devout not only against the realities around them but also against their own selves. The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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...mammalian embryos, regardless of their sex chromosome constitutions, have an inherent tendency to develop the female phenotype; the mammalian male is essentially a female that has been exposed to androgenic steroid hormones.
Author: S. Ohno
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It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
Author: Edward Gibbon
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Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut.
Author: Daniel Greenberg
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The best way to turn a woman's head is to tell her she has a beautiful profile.
Author: Sacha Guitry
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The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.
Author: Lord Hailshan
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Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The unpredictability inherent in human affairs is due largely to the fact that the by-products of a human process are more fateful than the product.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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The smashing of idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not be many idols left to smash.
Author: Walter Lippmann
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The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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What the intellectual craves above all else is to be taken seriously, to be treated as a decisive force in shaping history. He is far more at home in a society that weighs his every word and keeps close watch on his attitudes then in a society that cares not what he says or does. He would rather be persecuted than ignored.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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We know that words cannot move mountains, but they can move the multitude; and men are more ready to fight and die for a word than for anything else. Words shape thought, stir feeling, and beget action; they kill and revive, corrupt and cure. The "men-of-words"- priests, prophets, intellectuals- have played a more decisive role in history than military leaders, statesmen, and businessmen.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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