- Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people. – Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, “father” of America’s nuclear navy (1900-1986)
- What experience and history teach is this: that people and governments have never learned anything from history. – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher (1770-1831)
- More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing nothing, than by believing too much. – P.T. Barnum, American showman (1810-1891)
- The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached. – Woodrow Wilson, American president (1856-1924)
- The crisis you have to worry about most is the one you don’t see coming. – Mike Mansfield, American statesman (1903-2001)
- A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future. – Sydney J. Harris, American journalist (1917-1986)
- Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth. – Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)
- Only the vanquished remember history. – Marshall McLuhan, Canadian communications theorist (1911-1980)
- If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference. – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
- One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. – Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
- If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. – Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
- It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well. – Rene Descartes, French philosopher (1596-1650)
- There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. – Learned Hand, jurist (1872-1961)
- One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. – Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
- When money speaks, the truth keeps silent. – Russian proverb
- It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificually induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. – General Douglas MacArthur, Speech, May 15, 1951
- Life is like a library owned by an author. In it are a few books which he wrote himself, but most of them were written for him. – Harry Emerson Fosdick, preacher and author (1878-1969)
- A conscience which has been bought once will be bought twice. – Norbert Wiener, American mathematician (1894-1964)
- No man has a right in America to treat any other man tolerantly, for tolerance is the assumption of superiority. – Wendell Willkie, American politician (1892-1944)
- Any frontal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance. – Hendrik Willem van Loon, Dutch-American journalist and lecturer (1882-1944)
