Favourite Quotes
“Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.”
Albert Einstein
"Leaders. Being specific costs you nothing except time you’ll save cleaning up confusion."
Rands
"I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member."
Groucho Marx
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Fredrick Douglass (emphasis mine)
“Micromanaging is always an indicator of bad decisions made months earlier.”
Michael Lopp
“The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion…When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents…despotic in his ordinary demeanour – known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty – when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity – to join in the cry of danger to liberty – to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion – to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day… It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”
Alexander Hamilton (Objections and Answers Respecting the Administration, 18 August 1792)
“The plural of anecdote is not data.”
Unknown
“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”
Soren Kierkegaard
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
W.B. Yeats
“Today’s the youngest you’ll ever be, so live like it!”
Unknown
“When all is said and done, success without happiness is the worst kind of failure.”
Louis Binstock
“Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes.”
Eleanor Roosevelt
“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”
George Carlin
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
Plato
“All things are ready, if our minds be so.”
William Shakespeare
“Repetition is the death of magic.”
Bill Watterson
“Don’t play for safety. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world.”
Hugh Walpole
“Throughout the centuries, there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.”
Ayn Rand
“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with with the world.”
Marcus Auraleus
“You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
Mahatma Gandhi
“Never mistake activity for achievement.”
John Wooden
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving
Albert Einstein
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly."
Richard Bach
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
Oscar Wilde
“Good is the enemy of great.”
Jim Collins
“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.”
Mark Twain
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
Aristotle
“Fear is a lack of data.”
Unknown
“Honesty is a very expensive gift. Do not expect it from cheap people.”
Unknown
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.”
Bill Gates
“Prefer to be defeated in the company of the wise, than to excel among fools.”
Dogen Zenji
“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
Plato
“Be faithful to the nightmare of your choosing.”
Unknown
“Luck is probability taken personally.”
Unknown
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.”
William Shakespeare
“You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Christopher Columbus
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
Sir Ken Robinson
“By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
“You manage what you measure.”
Unknown
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Aristotle
“I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.”
Thomas Jefferson in Letter To George Logan, 12 Nov 1816
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
Winston Churchill
“I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of humankind has preserved – the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!”
John Adams
“Just as places are sensed, senses are placed.”
Unknown
“The odds do not determine the outcome.”
Unknown
“For most amateurs the best wood in the bag is the pencil.”
Chi Chi Rodriguez
“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“To know when you have enough is to be rich beyond measure.”
Lao Tzu
“When we can no longer change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
Viktor Frankl
“Cemeteries are filled with middling swordsmen.”
Rome / HBO
“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
George Santayana in Getting Things Done
“It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, ‘whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,’ and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.”
John Adams
“Know thyself. Nothing in excess.”
Delphi
“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
Winston Churchill
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those that matter don’t mind.”
Dr Seuss
"Oft expectation fails, and most oft there Where most it promises; and oft it hits, Where hope is coldest, and despair most sits.
Shakespeare
“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the byproduct of a good idea and modest expectations.”
Paul Rand
“Success is in the sincerity of the pursuit.”
Unknown
“Facts are stubborn things…”
John Adams in 1770 Trial