| ABBA EBAN
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they
have exhausted all other alternatives.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man
would indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by
fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science
is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless
dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires.
A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life
into the world of objective perception and thought.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age
eighteen.
People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction
between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent
illusion.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already
earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake,
since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace
to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command,
senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes
by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how
despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds
than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing
under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
GEORGE ELIOT
Middlemarch
We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture,
our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our
own case, link us indissolubly with the established order.
~~~
There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike
called love, and claim the privileges of a sublime rage which
is an apology for everything (in literature and drama).
~~~
However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice
or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things,
and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more
conversation.
~~~
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful
whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and
charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one
loved.
I'm not denying that women are foolish: God Almighty made them
to match the men.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is
no path and leave a trail.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at
last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact,
the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
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