Quotes

Al Franken Quotes

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me.

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from.

When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.

The biases the media has are much bigger than conservative or liberal. They're about getting ratings, about making money, about doing stories that are easy to cover.

Akhenaten Quotes

In all thy undertakings, let a reasonable assurance animate thy endeavors if thou despairest of success, thou shalt not succeed.

The barb in the arrow of childhood suffering is this its intense loneliness, its intense ignorance.

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

Contemplate thy powers, contemplate thy wants and thy connections so shalt thou discover the duties of life, and be directed in all thy ways.

To be satisfied with a little, is the greatest wisdom; and he that increaseth his riches, increaseth his cares; but a contented mind is a hidden treasure, and trouble findeth it not.

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise be wise and thou art happy.

Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

In science, fact can only mean confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent. I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

The true beauty of nature is her amplitude she exists neither for nor because of us, and possesses a staying power that all our nuclear arsenals cannot threaten (much as we can easily destroy our puny selves).

The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best - and therefore never scrutinize or question.

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

Anne Lamott Quotes

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work You don't give up.

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Dalai Lama Quotes

It is essential to know that to be a happy person, a happy family, a happy society, it is very crucial to have a good heart, that is very crucial. World peach must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just the absence of violence but the manifestation of human compassion.

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Albert Pike Quotes

Everything actual must also first have been possible, before having actual existence.

He who endeavors to serve, to benefit, and improve the world, is like a swimmer, who struggles against a rapid current, in a river lashed into angry waves by the winds. Often they roar over his head, often they beat him back and baffle him. Most men yield to the stress of the current... Only here and there the stout, strong heart and vigorous arms struggle on toward ultimate success.

What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.

The double law of attraction and radiation or of sympathy and antipathy, of fixedness and movement, which is the principle of Creation, and the perpetual cause of life.

War is a series of catastrophes which result in victory.

Charles Krauthammer Quotes

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country - and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.

If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery.

Where religion is trivialized, one is unlikely to find persecution.

Post-Watergate morality, by which anything left private is taken as presumptive evidence of wrongdoing.

Take all your dukes and marquesses and earls and viscounts, pack them into one chamber, call it the House of Lords to satisfy their pride and then strip it of all political power. It's a solution so perfectly elegant and preposterous that only the British could have managed it.

Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

The maxim that people should not have a right till they are ready to exercise it properly, is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Diogenes Quotes

I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

[When asked what was the proper time for supper] If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.

If only it was as easy to banish hunger by rubbing the belly as it is to masturbate.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.

One ought to seek out virtue for its own sake, without being influenced by fear or hope, or by any external influence. Moreover, that in that does happiness consist.

Steven Weinberg Quotes

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.