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We must beware of trying to build a society in which nobody counts for anything except a politician or an official, a society where enterprise gains no reward and thrift no privileges.
Author: Winston Churchill
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Society is like a lawn where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface.
Author: Washington Irving
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The nature of a society is largely determined by the direction in which talent and ambition flow--by the tilt of the social landscape.
Author: Eric Hoffer
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What one generation sees as a luxury, the next sees as a necessity.
Author: Anthony Crosland
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We must think of human progress, not as of something going on in the race in general, but as something going on in a small minority, perpetually beleaguered in a few walled towns. Now and then the horde of barbarians outside breaks through, and we have an armed effort to halt the process. That is, we have a Reformation, a French Revolution, a war for democracy, a Great Awakening. The minority is decimated and driven to cover. But a few survive- and a few are enough to carry on.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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In history the way of annihilation is invariably prepared by inward degeneration, by decrease of life. Only then can a shock from outside put an end to the whole.
Author: Jakob Burckhardt
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And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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The biggest mischief in the past century has been perpetrated by Rousseau with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. The mob and the intellectuals derived from it the vision of a Golden Age which would arrive without fail once the noble human race could act according to its whims.
Author: Jakob Burckhardt
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Man differs from the animal only by a little; most men throw that little away.
Author: Mencius
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No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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Delay is ever fatal to those who are prepared.
Author: Lucan
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Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all other philosophers are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set the above their betters.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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No one in this world, so far as I know- and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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Nature abhors a moron.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous...The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
Author: H.l. Mencken
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Against stupidity the very gods fight in vain.
Author: Friedrich Von Schiller
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The acquiring of culture is the development of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.
Author: Jesse Bennett
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General jackdaw culture, very little more than a collection of charming miscomprehensions, untargeted enthusiasms, and a general habit of skimming.
Author: William Bolitho
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Custom, that unwritten law, By which the people keep even kings in awe.
Author: Charles Davenport
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Every man...should periodically be compelled to listen to opinions which are infuriating to him. To hear nothing but what is pleasing to one is to make a pillow of the mind.
Author: St. John Ervine
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Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Author: Francis Bacon
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There arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.
Author: Francis Bacon
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Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
Author: Francis Bacon
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It is easier to show the disorder that must accompany reform than the order that should follow it.
Author: Frederic Bastiat
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He who allows oppression shares the crime.
Author: Erasmus Darwin
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Every change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend through the whole of society. Every change thus in a sense creates a "problem" for society, even though no single individual perceives it as such; it is gradually "solved" by the establishment of a new overall adjustment.
Author: F.a. Hayek
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The strongest man upon Earth is he who stands most alone.
Author: Henrik Ibsen
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Under normal conditions the research scientist is not an innovator but a solver of puzzles, and the puzzles upon which he concentrates are just those which he believes can be both stated and solved within the existing scientific tradition.
Author: Thomas Kuhn
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Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.
Author: Rollo May
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There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.
Author: John Milton
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Peace is a natural effect of trade.
Author: De Montesquieu
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A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die out, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Author: Max Planck
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To gauge the understanding and insight that metaphysics provides is to ask whether, in the final analysis, it helps us to cope with our world and harmonize our existence with nature, humanity, and ourselves, and leads to greater freedom and self-realization. Metaphysics is only the beginning. The end is human progress.
Author: Rudolph Rummel
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The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Don't think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm.
Author: Malayan Proverb
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Everybody wants to be somebody; nobody wants to grow.
Author: Johann Von Goethe
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Without a struggle, there can be no progress.
Author: Frederick Douglass
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Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
Author: Henry Kaiser
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Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.
Author: Randolph Bourne
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Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Author: Robert Frost
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Think what a better world it would be if we all, the whole world, had cookies and milk about three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down on our blankets for a nap.
Author: Barbara Jordan
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Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
Author: George Bernard Shaw
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One great society alone on earth: the noble living and the noble dead.
Author: William Wordsworth
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Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.
Author: August Strindberg
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Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Author: Honore De Balzac
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For piety lies not in being often seen turning a veiled head to stones, nor in approaching every altar, nor in lying prostrate...before the temples of the gods, nor in sprinkling altars with the blood of beasts...but rather in being able to look upon all things with a mind at peace.
Author: Lucretius
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Author: Stendhal
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