Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.

Pat Caddell, 1972

I knew this (McGovern's) campaign was too god-damn honest! It was bound to get us in trouble... Now I understand why the North Vietnamese wouldn't agree to elections in the South.

T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Between the idea
And the reality
...
Falls the Shadow

Aldo Leopold, "A Sand County Almanac"

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Abraham Lincoln, 1861

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Ken Boulding

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"

Now observe the results of a society built on the principle of individualism. This, our country. The noblest country in the history of men. The country of greatest achievement, greatest prosperity, greatest freedom.

Jose (Pepe) Mujica

Pertenezco a una generación que quiso cambiar el mundo, fui aplastado, derrotado, pulverizado, pero sigo soñando que vale la pena luchar para que la gente pueda vivir un poco major y con un mayor sentido de igualdad.

(I belong to a generation that wanted to change the world, I was crushed, defeated, pulverized, but I keep on dreaming that it is worth the effort to fight so that the people can live a little better and with a greater sense of equality.)

Yogi Berra

It ain't over 'til it's over

(It was over for Yogi Berra when he died on September 22, 2015.)

Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"

The 'common good' of a collective - a race, a class, a state - was the claim and justification of every tyranny ever established over men.

A. Philip Randolph

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

Joan Baez, "Daybreak"

I do not doubt that one can have a spiritual experience, but I'm convinced that to the degree that it is induced it will be fabricated, and therefore deceptive. (Perhaps that explains in part my total lack of interest in drugs. I feel that I know there is no shortcut to enlightenment.)

Loren Eiseley

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.

Ayn Rand

Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.

Victor Hugo

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.

Pearl Swiggum, 1975

Success stories, to be happy ones, shouldn’t have endings.

T.S. Eliot

For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Loren Eiseley

[Man's] basic and oldest characteristic [is] that he is a creature of memory, a bridge into the future, a time binder. Without this recognition of continuity, love and understanding between the generations becomes impossible.

Lao-Tse

The is is the was of what shall be.

Joan Baez, "Daybreak"

My father wrote that it always amazed him how I came to conclusions intuitively which took him years to realize.

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Irony of American History"

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Plato, "Republic"

The wise man who refuses to concern himself properly with the affairs of his city will be appropriately punished. He will be constrained to live out his life under bad government.

Louie Michelson, 1973

What difference will it make a hundred years from now?

Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Authority is the most damaging trauma to which the psyche is subjected between birth and death.

Gabriel García Marquez, "Cien Años de Soledad"

En la escuela desportillada donde experimentó por primera vez la seguridad del poder, a pocos metros del cuarto donde conoció la incertidumbre del amor, Arcadio encontró ridículo el formalismo de la muerte. En realidad no le importaba la muerte sino la vida, y por eso la sensación que experimentó cuando pronunciaron la sentencia no fue una sensación de miedo sino de nostalgia.

(In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did and therefore the sensation he felt when they announced the sentence was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.)

Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Donde quiera que la muerte nos sorprenda, bien venida sea.

(Where ever death may surprise us, it will be welcome.)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

... Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate with God on its side. It's that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive.

Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

After browsing among the stately ruins of Rome, of Baiae, of Pompeii, and after glancing down the long marble ranks of battered and nameless imperial heads that stretch down the corridors of the Vatican, one thing strikes me with a force it never had before: the unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame. Men lived long lives in the olden time, and struggled feverishly through them, toiling like slaves in oratory, in generalship, or in literature, and then laid them down and died, happy in the possession of an enduring history and a deathless name. Well, twenty little centuries flutter away, and what is left of these things? A crazy inscription on a block of stone, which snuffy antiquaries bother over and tangle up and make nothing out of but a bare name (which they spell wrong) - no history, no tradition, no poetry - nothing that can give it even a passing interest.

C.Wright Mills

When little is known, or only trivial items publicized, or when myths prevail, then plain description becomes a radical fact - or at least is taken to be radically upsetting.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

... I had hoped, as a broadcaster, to be merely ludicrous, but this is a hard world to be ludicrous in, with so many human beings so reluctant to laugh, so eager to believe and snarl and hate. So many people wanted to believe me!

Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.

Victor Hugo, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"

Alas! The small things shall bring down the great things; a tooth triumphs over a whole carcass. The rat of the Nile destroys the crocodile, the swordfish kills the whale; the book will kill the edifice.

Note: In the modern world one could continue: The atom will destroy humankind, or perhaps the germ.

Alexis de Tocqueville

There is a great difference between doing what one does not approve, and feigning to approve what one does; the one is the weakness of a feeble person, the other befits the temper of a lackey.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., "Mother Night"

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

John Paul Stevens

Money is property; it is not speech … Speech has the power to inspire volunteers to perform a multitude of tasks on a campaign trail, on a battleground, or even on a football field. Money, meanwhile, has the power to pay hired laborers to perform the same tasks. It does not follow, however, that the First Amendment provides the same measure of protection to the use of money to accomplish such goals as it provides to the use of ideas to achieve the same results.

Roger Ebert

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

This world ... belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?

Thomas Jefferson, 1787

God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion... What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The First Circle"

One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.

Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"

The stately language of the Bible refers to a crown of life whose luster will reflect the day beams of the endless ages of eternity, not the butterfly existence of a city built by men's hands, which must pass to dust with the builders and be forgotten even in the mere handful of centuries vouchsafed to the solid world itself between its cradle and its grave.

Winston Churchill, 1947

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Dante Alighieri

The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

The foremost, or indeed the sole condition, which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, is simplified, and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "August 1914"

...it's a universal law - intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.

John Steinbeck, "East of Eden"

It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1840

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.

Sergei Eisenstein, Russian film director

If educated, the cerebral strength of the masses is like rich new soil.

Blaise Pascal

I praise and prize only that writer who tells the truth about men - with tears in his eyes.

Thomas Jefferson

Legislators do not generally possess information enough to perceive the important truths, that knowledge is power, and knowledge is safety, and that knowledge is happiness.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Dimmi, dimmi se mai fu fatta cosa alcuna.

(Tell me, tell me if anything ever got done.)

Henry David Thoreau

It is not enough to be busy... The question is, what are we busy about?

Thomas Jefferson

I believe, with the Quaker preacher, that he who steadfastly observes those moral precepts in which all religions concur, will never be questioned at the gates of heaven, as to the dogmas in which they all differ.

Carl Sandburg

Offering and Rebuff

I could love you
as dry roots love rain.
I could hold you
as branches in the wind
brandish petals.
Forgive me for speaking so soon.

T.S. Elliot, "The Cocktail Party"

If we all were judged according to the consequences of all our words and deeds, beyond the intention and beyond our limited understanding of ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.

Thomas Jefferson

It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Erich Fromm

The courage to trust reason requires risking isolation or aloneness, and this threat is to many even harder to bear than the threat to life.

Rene Des Cartes

Cogito ergo sum.

(I think, therefore I am.)

Thomas Jefferson

To annul this privilege, and instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger, than benefit, to society, to make an opening for the aristocracy of virtue and talent, which nature has wisely provided for the direction of the interests of society, & scattered with equal hand through all its conditions, was deemed essential to a well ordered republic.

Van Potter

Wouldn't it be better to admit God may not exist than to call all catastrophes acts of God?

P.M.S. Blackett

If we only discussed those things about which we are knowledgeable, a deathly silence would descend upon the earth.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"

Ideology - that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerers of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late) by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Bernard de Fontenelle

A great obstacle to happiness is to expect too much.

James Branch Cabell, 1926

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "The First Circle"

What is the most precious thing in the world? Not to participate in injustices. They are stronger than you. They have existed in the past and they will exist in the future. But let them not come about through you.

Loren Eiseley, "The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature"

The need is not really for more brains, the need is now for a gentler, a more tolerant people than those who won for us against the ice, the tiger and the bear. The hand that hefted the ax, out of some old blind allegiance to the past fondles the machine gun as lovingly. It is a habit man will have to break to survive, but the roots go very deep.

John Steinbeck, "East of Eden"

Timshel! [Hebrew]

(Thou mayest!)

Julio Iglesias, "La vida sigue igual"

Unos que nacen otros moriran
unos que rien otros lloraran
aguas sin cauces, rios y mar
penas y glorias, guerras y paz.

Siempre hay por que vivir por que luchar
siempre hay por quien sufrir y a quien amar.
Al final las obras quedan las gentes se van
otros que vienen las continuaran
la vida sigue igual.

Pocos amigos que son de verdad
cuantos te halagan si triunfando estas
y si fracasas bien comprenderas
los buenos quedan los demás se van.

Siempre hay por que vivir por que luchar
siempre hay por quien sufrir y a quien amar.
Al final las obras quedan las gentes se van
otras que vienen las continuaran
la vida sigue igual.

(Some are born others will die
some laugh others will cry
water without channels, rivers and sea
hardships and glory, wars and peace.

There is always a reason to live a reason to fight
there is always someone to suffer for and someone to love.
In the end the works remain the people go away
others that come will continue them
life goes on the same way.

Only a few friends are true
how they praise you when you are successful
and if you fail you will understand well
that the good remain the rest go away.

There is always a reason to live a reason to fight
there is always someone to suffer for and someone to love.
In the end the works remain the people go away
others that come will continue them
life goes on the same way.)

Loren Eiseley

Perhaps a creature of so much ingenuity and deep memory is almost bound to grow alienated from his world, his fellows, and the objects around him. He suffers from a nostalgia for which there is no remedy upon earth except as it is to be found in the enlightenment of the spirit - some ability to have a perceptive rather than an exploitive relationship with his fellow creatures.

Václav Havel (then President of Czechoslovakia, addressing the US Congress), 1990

As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always be no more than an ideal. One may approach it as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but it can never be fully attained.

In this sense you, too, are merely approaching democracy. You have thousands of problems of all kinds, as other countries do. But you have one great advantage: You have been approaching democracy uninterrupted for more than 200 years.

John Lennon, "Imagine"

Imagine there's no heaven
it's easy if you try
no hell below us
above us only sky.
Imagine all the people
living in the world.
You may say I'm a dreamer
but I'm not the only one.
Some day I hope you will join us
and the world will live as one.
Imagine there's no country
it isn't hard to do
nothing to kill or die for
and no religion too.
Imagine all the people
living life in peace.
You may say I'm a dreamer
but I'm not the only one.
Some day I hope you will join us
and the world will live as one.

Albert Einstein

The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

Augustus De Morgan, "A Budget of Paradoxes"

Maseres was such an honest lawyer that he was not able to bear seeing his client victorious if he thought him guilty. As a result Maseres's business gradually fell off.

Plato

Those who have torches will pass them to others.

Chief Dan George

The white man is like the coyote, he wanders, finds a hunting ground and calls it his own. We are like our brother the bear ... we have only one home.

Ernest Becker

A protest without a program is little more than sentimentalism - this is the epitaph of many of the great idealisms.

Julius Nyerere, 1977

[Victory for] the forces of nationalism [is inevitable because] men will never willingly accept deliberate and organized humiliation as the price of existence.

Loren Eiseley

there is but one way into the future: the technological way

Mao Tse Tung

Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting progress in the arts and sciences and a flourishing socialist culture in our land. Different forms and styles in art should develop freely and different schools in science should contend freely. We think that it is harmful to the growth of art and science if administrative measures are used to impose one particular style of art or school of thought and to ban another. Questions of right and wrong in the arts and science should be settled through free discussion in artistic and scientific circles and through practical work in these fields. They should not be settled in an over-simple manner.

Albert Einstein

common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18

Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to "The Condemned of the Earth" by Franz Fanon

Es lo malo con la servidumbre: cuando se domestica a un miembro de nuestra especie, se disminuye su rendimiento y, por poco que se le de; un hombre de corral acaba por costar más de lo que rinde. Por esa razón los colonos se ven obligados a dejar a medias la domesticación: el resultado, ni hombre ni bestia, es el indígena. Golpeado, subalimentado, enfermo, temeroso, pero sólo hasta cierto punto, tiene siempre, ya sea amarillo, negro o blanco, los mismos rasgos de carácter: es perezoso, taimado y ladrón, vive de cualquier cosa y sólo conoce la fuerza.

(It's the bad thing about servitude: when you domesticate a member of our species, you reduce his productivity and, however little you give him; a domesticated man ends up costing more than he produces. For this reason the colonists are obliged to leave the domestication incomplete: the result, neither man nor beast, is the native. Beaten, underfed, sick, frightened, but only to a certain point, always has, whether he is yellow, black or white, the same character traits: he is lazy, cunning and a thief, he lives from whatever thing and only understands force.)

Virgil, "The Aeneid"

Said Nisus then:
"Do gods this ardor in our minds instil
O Euryalus, or does fierce longing grow
To be to each his god? ..."

Henry Kissinger, 1972

When the voice of controversy has stilled, all that matters will be whether what was done made a difference, whether it marked an episode or an epoch. We are living through one of the most difficult periods of our time. Some say we are divided over Vietnam; others blame other domestic discord. But I believe the cause of our anguish is deeper. Throughout our history we believed that effort was its own reward. Partly because so much has been achieved here in America, we have tended to suppose that every problem must have a solution and that good intentions should somehow guarantee good results. Utopia was seen not as a dream, but as our logical destination if we only traveled the right road. Our generation is the first to find that the road is endless, that in traveling it we will find not Utopia but ourselves. The realization of our essential loneliness accounts for so much of the frustration and rage of our time.

Virgil, "The Aeneid"

Aeneas: Them 'mid welling tears
Departing I addressed: "Live happily,
You whose own risks are now already passed;
We, from one fate are summoned to the next;
For you repose is won; no seas' expanse
Have you to plough, nor have you need to seek
Ausonian fields that ever back recede."

"I Ching" or "Book of Changes"

Truth and strength must dwell in the heart, while gentleness reveals itself in social intercourse. In this way one assumes the right attitude toward God and man and achieves something.

Benjamin Disraeli

To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step to knowledge.

Anne Frank, "The Diary of a Young Girl"

People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if; every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it, you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: "A quiet conscience makes one strong!"

Jean le Malchanceux

You may look for motive in an act, but only after the act has been committed. An effect creates not only the search for a cause, but the reality of the cause itself. I must warn you, however, that the attempt to establish relationships between acts and motives, effects and causes, is one of the most time-wasting games ever invented by Man. Do you know why you kicked the cat this morning? Or gave a sou to that beggar? Or set forth for Jerusalem rather than Gomorrah?

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Irony of American History"

Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous. We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought [not] to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise. ... Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends.

Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Science is an active response to the world. Mysticism accepts the world. Mystics scurry about trying to get in harmony with nature. Scientists turn nature to issues which we define. Science is resistance, rather than acceptance, ...

Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again"

There came to him an image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of allengulfing night.

Isabel Molina Vargas

No hay que tener vergüenza de hablar lo que Dios no tuvo vergüenza de criar.

(We should not be embarrassed to talk about what God was not embarrassed to create.)

Saint Augustine

As long as we aim at a good we are always on the way.

Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes - people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst.