Courtney's Favorite Quotes
A
"What are the eyes? Two holes in the mask of life."
- Ada
"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
-John Allston
"Be the first to say something obvious, and you will become immortal."
If you know who said this, please email me.
"To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing."
Elbert Hubbard
B
"Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
- James Baldwin
"When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us."
- Alexander Graham Bel
"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils."
-Hector Berlioz
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
-Edmunde Burke
"The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
-Steven Biko
C
"The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."
- James B. Cabell
"Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life."
- Sandra Carey
"Be wiser than other people, if you can, but do not tell them so."
- Lord Chesterfiel
"He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever."
- Chinese proverb
"He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know."
- Tao Teh Ching
"Politicians should read science-fiction, not westerns and detective stories."
-Arthur C. Clark
"When you have nothing to say, say nothing."
- Charles Caleb Colto
"Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion."
- Henry Steele Commager
"I hear and I forget. I see and I believe. I do and I understand."
- Confucius
D
"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow."
- James Dean
"Minds are like parachutes, they only function when open."
-Thomas Dewar
"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."
-Justice William O. Douglas
E
"The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children."
-Edward VII
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds"
- Albert Einstein
"Two things are infinite: The universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
- Albert Einstein
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
-Albert Einstein
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
- Albert Einstein
"It's all mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter."
-Albert Einstein
"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."
-George Eliot
"Imitation is suicide, envy is ignorance."
- Ralph Ellison
"Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whosoever would be a man must be a nonconformist."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Millions long for immortality but do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
- Susan Ertz
"Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish."
- Euripides
F
"Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do."
- Benjamin Franklin
"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
- Benjamin Franklin
"The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them."
- Robert Frost
"I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
- Robert Frost
G
"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. Always."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"An eye for an eye leaves the world blind."
- Mahatma Gandhi
"Silence is an argument carried on by other means."
- Ernesto Guevara
H
"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."
- Heinrich Heine
"I'm gonna live forever, or die trying."
- Joseph Heller (Catch 22)
"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."
- Ernest Hemingway
"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die."
-Herbert Hoover
"Maybe this world is another planet's Hell."
- Aldous Huxley
"Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you."
- Aldous Huxley
I
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ibsen
J
"Many people say it is insane to resist the system but it is actually insane not to."
- Mumia Abu Jamal
"The first casualty when war comes is truth."
-Hiram Johnson
K
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
- John F. Kennedy
"Forgive, but never forget."
- John F. Kennedy
"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
- Robert F. Kennedy
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they never use."
-Kierkegaard
"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If you haven't found anything you are willing to die for, you aren't fit to live."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."
- Akiro Kurosawa
L
"Happiness is not something you experience, it is something you remember."
- Oscar Levant
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."
-John Locke
"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
-Clare Booth Luce
M
"Don't gain the world for the price of your soul, wisdom is better than silver and gold."
- Bob Marley
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds."
- Bob Marley
"Die Religion... ist das Opium des Volkes." [Religion...is the opium of the people]
- Karl Marx
"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
- Karl Marx
"Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form."
-Karl Marx
"Misery motivates, not utopia."
-Karl Marx
"You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do."
-Olin Miller
"There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees."
-Michael de Montaigne
"No man, however great, is known to everybody and no man, however solitary, is known to nobody."
- Moore
"Always question the authority."
- Tom Morello
"You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
- John Morley
N
"Stop the world. I want to get to off."
-Anthony Newly
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he doesn't become a monster."
-Frederick Wilhelm Nietsche
O
"The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it."
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
"Who controls the past controls the future; Who controls the present controls the past."
-George Orwell, 1984
P
"Its not what I had feared, but what I had not thought to fear"
-Edgar Allan Poe
R
"The classroom is the last room to get the truth."
- Rage Against the Machine
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear."
- Ambrose Redmoon
"Diplomacy is the art of saying »nice doggy« until you can find a rock."
- Will Roger
"Yes, I know my enemies, they're the teachers who taught me to fight me: Compromise, Conformity, Assimilation, Submission, Ignorance, Hypocrisy, Brutality, the Elite, all of which are American Dreams."
- Zack de la Rocha
"Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
- Eleanor Roosevelt.
"People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little."
- Jean Jacques Rousseau
S
"Death is more universal than life; everyone dies but not everyone lives."
- Sachs
"You can kill a revolutionary, but you cannot kill a revolution."
- Afeni Shakur
"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."
- George Bernard Shaw
"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
-George Bernard Shaw
"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it!"
- Socrates
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life's realities."
-Dr. Suess
"Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not."
- Dr. Suess
T
"It is not what you look at, but what you see."
-Thoreau
"If you can't convince them, confuse them."
- Harry S. Truman
U
"If you do not understand my words, you will not understand my silence."
-Unknown
V
"Each of us bears his own Hell."
- Virgil
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Voltaire
"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too."
-Voltaire
W
"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
- Booker T. Washington
"It is better to be looked over than overlooked."
- Mae West
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world it's own shame."
-Oscar Wilde
Z
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."
-Emiliano Zappata
HOME
