Quotes by arguments. When we are talking or writing about some topics it could be of great help for everyone to have good ideas on the subject and using proper words to express them. That’s why in collecting quotes we always are borrowing from what has always gone on. Even Isaac Newton once said: “If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
What’s more we know from Voltaire that originality is nothing but judicious imitation, that’s why the most original writers borrowed one from another. The ideas and instructions that we find in books and writings are like fire, we fetch it by our friends, communicate it to others, and we try to let it become property of all.
Sébastien Roch Nicolas de Chamfort used to say: “Most anthologists of quotations are like those who eat cherries or oysters: first picking the best ones and winding up by eating everything.”; so, keeping this principle in mind you can understand my method of collecting and writing quotes and aphorisms, that is to say I don’t follow the above criterion, habit or silly addiction, but I try to choose only the best sentences and the more useful or critical ideas that agree with my way of thinking, my “Weltanschauung”, my poetics, my style and my literary, aesthetic and cultural strategy; only after this kind of careful selection I write my pages, both of quotations and of essays or articles. That’s the main difference between my blogs and websites, and the work of other more voracious writers or webmasters.
Carl William Brown
Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.
Colin Powell
Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.
Barack Obama
There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.
Christopher Hitchens
He who establishes his argument by noise and command shows that his reason is weak.
Michel de Montaigne
You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it.
Noam Chomsky
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
Gertrude Stein
The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.
Sydney J. Harris
Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Carl William Brown A futuristic and surrealistic thinker is an artist who can enjoy both the deep sorrow of the real death in life and the feeble pleasure of an unreal life in death.
Carl William Brown
There is no sin except stupidity.
Oscar Wilde
The only thing that ever consoles man for the stupid things he does is the praise he always gives himself for doing them.
Oscar Wilde
When the balance is broken then everything includes itself in power, power into will, will into appetite. So appetite, aided by will and power, becomes a universal wolf, at last eating up itself.
Carl William Brown
Strange as it may seem, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and formal education positively fortifies it.
Stephen Vizinczey
Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.
G. C. Lichtenberg
To accuse another of having weak kidneys, lungs, or heart, is not a crime; on the contrary, saying he has a weak brain is a crime. To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.
Primo Levi
Stupidity gets up early; that is why events are accustomed to happening in the morning.
Karl Kraus
An empty head is not really empty; it is stuffed with rubbish. Hence the difficulty of forcing anything into an empty head.
Eric Hoffer
No man is an Island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main….any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee!
John Donne
There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an idiot; and an idiot has some advantages over a wise man.
William Hazlitt
We never really know what stupidity is until we have experimented on ourselves.
Paul Gauguin
Hail Horrors! hail Infernal World! and thou, profoundest Hell, Receive thy new Possessor-one who brings A mind not to be changed by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make
a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven. What matter where, if I be still the same, and what I should be, all but less than He; whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built here for His envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure; and in my choice, To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven….
John Milton
The question now is: Can we understand our stupidity? This is a test of intellect, not of character.
John King Fairbank
The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the young orators describe; the key to all ages is—Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, and fear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Cardinal is at his wit’s end—it is true that he had not far to go.
Lord Byron
It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sense on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?
William Booth
The good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take, who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
William Wordsworth
To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.
Simone Weil
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either a saint or a mediocrity.
Simone Weil
Alexander at the head of the world never tasted the true pleasure that boys of his own age have enjoyed at the head of a school.
Horace Walpole
Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the distinguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents’ birthdays.
Stephen Vizinczey
Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.
Gloria Steinem
You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
George Bernard Shaw
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
William Shakespeare
Power! Did you ever hear of men being asked whether other souls should have power or not? It is born in them. You may dam up the fountain of water, and make it a stagnant marsh, or you may let it run free and do its work; but you cannot say whether it shall be there; it is there. And it will act, if not openly for good, then covertly for evil; but it will act.
Olive Schreiner
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
Bertrand Russell
The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.
Jean Rostand
All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest. Howsoever, he that for want of will or wit useth not those means, must rest in servitude and poverty.
Sir Walter Ralegh
A cock has great influence on his own dunghill.
Publilius Syrus
Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
George Orwell
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell
Not necessity, not desire—no, the love of power is the demon of men. Let them have everything—health, food, a place to live, entertainment—they are and remain unhappy and low-spirited: for the demon waits and waits and will be satisfied.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Mao Zedong
Power? It’s like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
Harold Macmillan
The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.
Ursula K. Le Guin
We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.
Jean de La Bruyère
I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.
Thomas Jefferson
Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.
Eric Hoffer
The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.
Václav Havel
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
Jean Genet
In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Michel Foucault
All personal, psychological, social, and institutionalized domination on this earth can be traced back to its source: the phallic identities of men.
Andrea Dworkin
Power has only one duty—to secure the social welfare of the People.
Benjamin Disraeli
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
Charles Horton Cooley
From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes.
Albert Camus
Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, never can willingly abandon it. They may be distressed in the midst of all their power; but they will never look to anything but power for their relief.
Edmund Burke
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them….I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
John Milton
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It’s very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
Jean Baudrillard
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
Roland Barthes
But the relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.
James Baldwin
It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man’s self.
Francis Bacon
To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
Ernest Renan
Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.
P. J. O’Rourke
Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Authority is not a quality one person has, in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Erich Fromm
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
Charles de Gaulle
Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kill reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. (from Areopagitica)
John Milton
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.
Mikhail Bakunin
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.
Mikhail Bakunin
No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.
Joseph Addison
No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better.
Sir Robert Giffen
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.
George Bernard Shaw
No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it.
George Bernard Shaw
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.
George Bernard Shaw
The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.
George Bernard Shaw
No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaw
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
George Bernard Shaw
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
A fool’s brain digest philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child’s character.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
George Bernard Shaw
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw
Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
George Bernard Shaw
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
George Bernard Shaw
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
George Bernard Shaw
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
George Bernard Shaw
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
George Bernard Shaw
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
George Bernard Shaw
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.
George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw