Quotations

Collected by Donald Gudehus

A B | C D E | F G H | I J K | L M N | O P Q | R S T | U V W X Y Z

L

Marquis De Lafayette (Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Mottier) (Sept. 6, 1757, Auvergne, France - May 20, 1834, Paris, France), French soldier who served as a major general in the American Revolution, and statesman

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.

Marquis De Lafayette

If the liberties of the American people are ever destroyed, they will fall by the hands of the Clergy.

Marquis De Lafayette

Edwin Herbert Land (May 12, 1909, Bridgeport, CT - March 1, 1991, Cambridge, MA), American scientist and inventor

Intelligent men in groups are as a rule stupid. And very intelligent men in the automobile industry were fantastically and simply stupid.

Edwin H. Land, reflecting on the US automobile industry's lack of interest in safety devices in the post-war years.

Ann Landers (Esther Pauline Friedman) (July 4, 1918, Sioux City, IA - June 22, 2002, Chicago, IL), American columnist

Resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.

Ann Landers

Pierre-Simon Laplace (March 23, 1749, Beaumont-en-Auge, Normandy, France - March 5, 1827, Paris, France), French mathematician and astronomer

Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là. (I had no need of that hypothesis.)

Pierre-Simon Laplace, replying to Napoleon, who had asked why he hadn't mentioned God in his book on astronomy

The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportional to its strangeness.

Pierre-Simon Laplace

What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.

Pierre-Simon Laplace, allegedly his last words, as quoted in Augustus De Morgan's Budget of Paradoxes (1866)

Stan Laurel (Arthur Stanley Jefferson) (June 6, 1890, Ulverston, Lancashire, England - Feb. 23, 1965, Santa Monica, CA), English-American Comedic Movie Actor

If any of you cry at my funeral I'll never speak to you again.

Stan Laurel

You can take a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead.

Stan Laurel

John Le Carre (David John Moore Cornwell) ( October 19, 1931, Poole, Dorset, England - ), English writer of espionage novels

Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.

John Le Carre

Stanislaw Lec (Baron Stanislaw Jerzy de Tusch-Letz) (March 6, 1909 - May 7, 1966), Polish poet and aphorist of Polish and Jewish noble origin

If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?

Stanislaw Lec

Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?

Stanislaw Lec

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man, but they don't bite everybody.

Stanislaw Lec

John Winston Lennon (October 9, 1940, Liverpool, England - December 8, 1980, The Dakota, New York, NY), English musician, singer, and songwriter, and cofounder of The Beatles

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
And maybe someday you will join us
And the world will be as one

John Lennon, in Imagine

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with pasion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace live.

John Lennon

Jay Leno (April 28, 1950, New Rochelle, NY - ), American comedian

Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery.'?

Jay Leno

David Letterman (April 12, 1947, Indianapolis, IN - ), American producer and actor

People say New Yorkers can't get along. Not true. I saw two New Yorkers, complete strangers, sharing a cab. One guy took the tires and the radio; the other guy took the engine.

David Letterman

Oscar Levant

I once said cynically of a politican: 'He'll doublecross that bridge when he comes to it.'

Oscar Levant

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.

Oscar Levant

Sam Levenson (Dec. 28, 1911, New York, NY - Aug. 27, 1980, Neponsit, NY), American humorist

Insanity is hereditary - you get it from your children.

Sam Levenson, in Diner's Club Magazine, Nov 1963

You must learn from the mistakes of others. You can't possibly live long enough to make them all yourself.

Sam Levenso

Aaron Levenstein

Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

Aaron Levenstein

Anthony Lewis, American physicist and author

United we fall, divided we stand, "Ode to a Tripod".

Anthony Lewis, 1956

C. S. Lewis

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort, you will get neigither comfort nor truth, only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.: C. S. Lewis

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799), German astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and critic of art and literature

Astronomy is perhaps the science whose discoveries owe least to chance, in which human understanding appears in its whole magnitude, and through which man can best learn how small he is.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, in his Sudelbücher

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, in his Sudelbücher

You can make a good living from soothsaying but not from truthsaying.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, in his Sudelbücher

Rush Limbaugh (January 12, 1951, Cape Girardeau, Missouri - ), American radio host

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It make her a prositute.: Rush Limbaugh, March, 2012, after Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke testified before a congressional hearing in favor of having medical insurance cover contraception

Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12, 1809, Hardin County, Kentucky - April 14, 1865, Washington, DC), Sixteenth President of the US (1861 - 1865)

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.

Abraham Lincoln

How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.

Abraham Lincoln

Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's ppetite by legislation and makes crimes out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.

Abraham Lincoln

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Abraham Lincoln

The best way to destroy your enemy is to make him your friend.

Abraham Lincoln

The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my religion.

Abraham Lincoln

The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion.

Abraham Lincoln

Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.

Abraham Lincoln

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself.

Abraham Lincoln

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

Abraham Lincoln

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time.

Abraham Lincoln, possibly apocryphal

Lizard (lizard@dnai.com or lizard@mrlizard.com)

Ask not for whom the book burns, it burns for thee.

Lizard, early 1990s

Jack London (Jan. 12, 1876, San Francisco, CA - Nov. 22, 1916, Glen Ellen, CA), American writer

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze
than it should be stifled by dryrot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
every atom of me in magnificent glow,
than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time

Jack London

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

Jack London

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Feb. 27, 1807, Portland, ME - Mar. 24, 1882, Cambridge, MA), American poet, educator, and linguist

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing;
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Sophia Loren (Sofia Villani Scicolone) (September 20, 1934, Rome, Italy - ), Italian actress

A woman's dress should be like a barbed wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.

Sophia Loren

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

Sophia Loren

Dale F. Lott, American biologist

Among dogs, the family that preys together stays together.

Dale F. Lott, in Natural History, October, 2002

Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (98 or 96 BC - Oct. 15, 55 BC, Rome), Roman poet and philosopher

Nothing can be created from nothing.

Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), c. 59 BC

The falling drops at last will wear the stone.

Lucretius

Charles Lyell, English Geologist

I could think of nothing for days after your lesson on coral reefs, but of the tops of submerged continents. It is all true, but do not flatter yourself that you will be believed, till you are growing bald, like me, with hard work and vexation at the incredulity in the world.: Charles Lyell, in a letter to Charles Darwin, 1836

M

Top

Douglas Mac Arthur (January 26, 1880, Little Rock, AK - April 5, 1964, Washington, DC), American Five Star General of the Army

Global war has become Frankenstein's monster, threatening to destroy both sides.: Douglas Mac Arthur
We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction.: Douglas Mac Arthur

Ernst Mach (Feb. 18, 1838, Chirlitz-Turas, Moravia, Austrian Empire - Feb. 19, 1916, Haar, Germany), Austrian physicist and philosopher

Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses.: Ernst Mach, Mach's version of Occam's Razor, and the embodiment of positivism

Niccolo Machiavelli (May 3, 1469, Florence, Italy - June 21, 1527, Florence, Italy), Italian statesman and political philosopher

Impetuosity and audacity often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.: Niccolo Machiavelli
No enterprise is more likely to succeed than one concealed from the enemy until it is ripe for execution.: Niccolo Machiavelli, in The Art of War

James Madison, Fourth President of the United States

A just government has no need for the clergy or the church. The fruits of Christianity are pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; and in both clergy and laity, superstition, bigotry and persecution.: James Madison
A poplular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prolugue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both.: James Madison
By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.: James Madison, in The Federalist #10, referring to the "tyranny of the majority"
Congress should not establish a religion and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contary to their conscience, or that one sect might obtain a pre-eminence, or two combined together, and establish a religion to which they would compel others to conform.: James Madison, summary of the first amendment, Annals of Congress, August 15, 1789
Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.: James Madison
Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.: James Madison
What influence in fact have Christian ecclesiastical establishments had on civil society? In many instances they have been upholding the thrones of political tyranny. In no instance have they been seen as the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wished to subvert the public liberty have found in the clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate liberty, does not need the clergy.: James Madison
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the Constituents.: James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 17, 1788, referring to the "tyranny of the majority"

Madonna, American popular singer

I always thought of losing my virginity as a career move.

Madonna

George Herbert (Leigh-Mallory) Leigh Mallory (June 18, 1886, Mobberley, Cheshire, England, - June 8, 1924, Mt. Everest, Nepal), English mountaineer

Because it's there.: George Mallory, in response to the question 'Why do you want to climb Everest?' in a March, 1923 interview with The New York Times

Horace Mann (May 4, 1796, Franklin, MA - August 2, 1859, Yellow Springs, OH), American education reformer

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.: Horace Mann

Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875, Lubeck, Germany - August 12, 1955, Zurich, Switzerland), German novelist and Nobel laureate in literature, 1929

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.: Thomas Mann

Katherine Mansfield

Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in.

Katherine Mansfield

Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908, Baltimore, MD - Jan, 24, 1993, Bethesda, MD), first black Supreme Court Justice (1967 - 1991)

If the 1st Amendment means anything, it means that the state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch.

Thurgood Marshall

Chico Marx (Leonard Marx) (Mar. 27, 1887, New York City, NY - Oct. 11, 1961, Hollywood, CA), American comedian, musician, and actor

It is better to have loft and lost than to never have loft at all.: Chico Marx, in Monkey Business, 1931
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?: Chico Marx (while disguised as Groucho), in Duck Soup, 1933, responding to Margaret Dumont after being caught in a compromising situation

Groucho Marx (Julius Henry Marx) (Oct. 2, 1890, New York City, NY - Aug. 19, 1977, Los Angeles, CA), American comedian and actor

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.: Groucho Marx
A man is as young as the woman he feels.: Groucho Marx
Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.: Groucho Marx
Anyone who says he can see through women is missing a lot.: Groucho Marx
As soon as I get through with you, you'll have a clear case for divorce and so will my wife.: Groucho Marx
Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.: Groucho Marx
Dig trenches? With our men being killed off like flies? There isn't time to dig trenches. We'll have to buy them ready made.: Groucho Marx
Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped.: Groucho Marx
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.: Groucho Marx
He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.: Groucho Marx
Heifer cow is better than none.: Groucho Marx, in Monkey Business, 1931
Hello, I must be going.: Groucho Marx
Here's to our wives and girlfriends ... may they never meet!: Groucho Marx
How do you feel about women's rights? I like either side of them.: Groucho Marx
I can see you and I married. I can see you bending over the stove. I can't see the stove!: Groucho Marx, to Margret Dumont
I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought I'd rather dance with the cows until you come home.: Groucho Marx, in Duck Soup, 1933
I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions - the curtain was up.: Groucho Marx
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.: Groucho Marx
I know, I know - you're a woman who's had a lot of tough breaks. Well, we can clean and tighten those brakes, but you'll have to stay in the garage all night.: Groucho Marx, in Monkey Business, 1931
I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.: Groucho Marx
I sent the club a wire stating, Please accept my resignation. I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.: Groucho Marx
I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.: Groucho Marx
I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.: Groucho Marx
Ice Water? Get some Onions - that'll make your eyes water!: Groucho Marx
If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.: Groucho Marx
If they'd lower the taxes and get rid of the smog and clean up the traffic mess, I really belive I'd settle here until the next earthquake.: Groucho Marx, in reference to Los Angeles
I've been around so long, I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.: Groucho Marx
I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.: Groucho Marx
Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.: Groucho Marx
Members of the faculty and faculty members, students of Huxley and Huxley students - well, I guess that covers everyone. I thought my razor was dull until I heard his speech and that reminds me of a story that's so dirty I'm ashamed to think of it myself. I came to this college for one reason: to get my son out of it. I remember the day he left for school, a mere boy and a beardless youth. I kissed them both goodbye.: Groucho Marx, in Horsefeathers as the newly inducted President of Huxley College after being introduced by the outgoing president
Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.: Groucho Marx
Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.: Groucho Marx
Mrs. Teasdale: He's had a change of heart. [Groucho]: A lot of good that'll do him. He's still got the same face.: Groucho Marx
Now there's a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!: Groucho Marx
Now they've got my watch. This is going too far. It wasn't going, and now its gone.: Groucho Marx, in Animal Crackers (1930)
One morning I shot an elephant in my Pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.: Groucho Marx, in Animal Crackers (1930)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.: Groucho Marx
Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse.: Groucho Marx
Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.: Groucho Marx
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it and then misapplying the wrong remedies.: Groucho Marx
Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.: Groucho Marx
Remember men you are fighting for the ladies honor, which is probably more than she ever did.: Groucho Marx
Remember men we're fighting for this woman's honor , which is more than she ever did.: Groucho Marx, in Duck Soup
Room service? Send up a larger room.: Groucho Marx
Send two dozen roses to Room 424 and put 'Emily, I love you' on the back of the bill.: Groucho Marx
She got her good looks from her father. He's a plastic surgeon.: Groucho Marx
She's afraid that if she leaves, she'll become the life of the party.: Groucho Marx
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing .. if you can fake that, you've got it made.: Groucho Marx
There's one way to find out if a man is honest-ask him. If he says 'yes,' you know he is a crook.: Groucho Marx
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.: Groucho Marx
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.: Groucho Marx
Time wounds all heels.: Groucho Marx
We took pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. But we're going back again in a couple of weeks.: Groucho Marx, in Animal Crackers (1930)
We tried to remove the tusks but they were embedded in so firmly that we couldn't budge them. Of course in Alabama the tusks are loosa. But that's entirely ir-elephant to what I was talking about.: Groucho Marx, in Animal Crackers (1930)
Why, I'd horse-whip you if I had a horse.: Groucho Marx
Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?: Groucho Marx
Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!: Groucho Marx
Women should be obscene and not heard.: Groucho Marx
You know I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters?: Groucho Marx
You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I'll bet he was glad to get rid of it.: Groucho Marx

Karl Marx (May 5, 1818, Trier, Germany - Mar. 14, 1883, London, England), German philosopher, social scientist, historian and revolutionary

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
This is sometimes stated as:
Religion is the opium of the masses.

Karl Marx, in Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, 1884

Abraham Maslow (April 1, 1908, Brooklyn, NY - June 8, 1970, Menlo Park, CA), American psychologist

A first-rate soup is more creative than a second rate painting.

Abraham Maslow

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

Abraham Maslow

All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.

Abrahma Maslow

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Abraham Maslow

I have learned the novice can often see things that the expert overlooks. All that is necessary is not to be afraid of making mistakes, or of appearing naive.

Abraham Maslow

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life.

Abraham Maslow

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

Abraham Maslow

When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

Abraham Maslow

James Clerk Maxwell (June 13, 1831, Edinburgh, Scottland - Nov. 5, 1879, Cambridge, England), Scottish physicist

In a few years, all the great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and ... the only occupation which will then be left to the men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals.: James Clerk Maxwell, University of Cambridge inaugural lecture, 1871, expressing the mood prevalent at the time (a mood he disagreed with)

Eugene McCarthy (March 29, 1916 - ), Democratic United States Senator from Minnesota, author, and poet

It is dangerous for a national candidate to say anything people might remember.

Eugene McCarthy

Paul McCartney, English musician and Beatles member

We were the biggest nickers in town; plagiarists extraordinaire.

Paul McCartney, in Musician Magazine

James P. McGovern (November 20, 1959, Worcester, MA - ), United States Congressional Representative from Massachusetts

The same people who drove the economy into the ditch are now complaining about the size of the tow truck.

James McGovern, describing Republican opposition to a spending bill, February 25, 2009

Charles Henry ("Mountain Charlie") McKiernan

Right Wrongs Nobody.

Charles Henry ("Mountain Charlie") McKiernan

Mignon McLaughlin (1915 - ), American journalist and author

Courage doesn't know what's around the corner, but goes around it anyway.

Mignon McLaughlin

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Mignon McLaughlin

For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance.

Mignon McLaughlin, in Atlantic, July, 1965

Many are saved from sin by being so inept at it.

Mignon McLaughlin

June McNally

A good report is like a good skirt: long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting.

June McNally

Margaret Mead, American Anthropologist

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

One of the greatest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

Margaret Mead

William Hughes Mearns (1875 - 1965), American American psychologist, educator, and poet

The Little Man Who Wasn't There

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

William Hughes Mearns, The Psychoed

Henry Louis (H. L.) Mencken (Sept. 12, 1880, Baltimore, MD - Jan. 29, 1956, Baltimore, MD), American editor, author, and critic

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

H. L. Mencken

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

H. L. Mencken

A judge is a law student who grades his own papers.

H. L. Mencken

A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.

H. L. Mencken

A man may be a fool and not know it - but not if he is married.

H. L. Mencken

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

H. L. Mencken

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.

H. L. Mencken

A wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband.

H. L. Mencken

Alimony: The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.

H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices

Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor.

H. L. Mencken

Clergyman: a ticket speculator outside the gates of heaven.

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices

"Correct" spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices

Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

H. L. Mencken

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

H. L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

H. L. Mencken

Firmness in decision is often merely a form of stupidity. It indicates an inability to think the same thing out twice.

H. L. Mencken

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken

Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.

H. L. Mencken

Historian: An unsuccessful novelist.

H. L. Mencken

If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner.

H. L. Mencken

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

H. L. Mencken

Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

H. L. Mencken

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

H. L. Mencken

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

H. L. Mencken

It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.

H. L. Mencken

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

H. L. Mencken, in Chicago Tribune

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

H. L. Mencken

It is the dull man who is always sure, and the sure man who is always dull.

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices

It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law ... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts.

H. L. Mencken

Judge: A law student who marks his own papers.

H. L. Mencken

Jury - A group of 12 people, who, having lied to the judge about their health, hearing, and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

H. L. Mencken

Lawyer: One who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

H. L. Mencken

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.

H. L. Mencken

Men always try to make virtues of their weaknesses. Fear of death and fear of life both become piety.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

H. L. Mencken

Nature abhors a moron.

H. L. Mencken

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.

H. L. Mencken

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.

H. L. Mencken

One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.

H. L. Mencken

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

H. L. Mencken, The American Language

Remorse: Regret that one waited so long to do it.

H. L. Mencken

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

H. L. Mencken

...school teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.

Self-respect: The secure feeling that no one, as yet, is suspicious.

H. L. Mencken, Notebooks

Sunday School: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

H. L. Mencken

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...

H. L. Mencken

...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man - that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense - has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...

H. L. Mencken

The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.

H. L. Mencken

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

H. L. Mencken

The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions per minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

H. L. Mencken

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

H. L. Mencken

The place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least.

H. L. Mencken, in reference to Texas

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

H. L. Mencken

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.

H. L. Mencken

The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth - that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.

H. L. Mencken

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

H. L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken's Notebooks

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

H. L. Mencken

There are no dull subjects, there are only dull writers.

H. L. Mencken

There is always an easy solution to every human problem_neat, plausible, and wrong.

H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach.

H. L. Mencken

Time is the great legalizer, even in the field of morals.

H. L. Mencken, Prejudices

Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it.

H. L. Mencken

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

H. L. Mencken

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

H. L. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

H. L. Mencken

When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental - men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard...

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre - the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

H. L. Mencken, Bayard vs. Lionheart, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

H. L. Mencken

Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.

H. L. Mencken

N. David Mermin, American physicist

They think I used the example of relativity because I was offended by their defilement of a sacred text. I think I did it because I understand relativity better than the other subjects they discussed in their book, so I'm better able to see where they got it wrong. They overlook this obvious explanation because the rightness/wrongness axis is not a relevant dimension in their kind of sociological analysis of science. Note, for example, that when they reaffirm their lack of ``bias" against relatvitiy, they speak of beauty and culture, but not of truth, or even accuracy.: N. David Mermin, in Physics Today, July, 1996 in response to Collins and Pinch's letter on Mermin's review of their book The Golem.

Joost Abraham Maurits Merloo (1903 - ), psychiatrist

In my own experience, I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party -- democratic or totalitarian -- through study and comparison of principles.: Joost Merloo, The Rape Of The Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, 1956
The bulk of the totalitarian-minded in the democratic societies are men and women who are attracted to this destructive way of life for inner emotional reasons unknown to themselves.: Joost Merloo, The Rape Of The Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, 1956
The tension of a mysterious danger is even more unbearable than danger itself. People hate the vacuum of an unknown situation. They want security. They even prefer war to the insecure expectation of a war with its threat of enemy surprise. This vague fearful expectation acts on their fantasies. They anticipate all kinds of mysterious dangers; they begin to provoke them. It is the evocation of fear and danger in order to escape the tension of insecurity.: Joost Merloo, Patterns of Panic, 1950

Thomas Merton (Jan. 31, 1915, Prades, France - Dec. 10, 1968, Bangkok, Thailand), American writer and Trappist monk

The most awful tyranny is that of the proximate utopia where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no sins because all the sinners have been wiped out.

Thomas Merton, 1948

Albert A. Michelson (Dec. 19, 1852, Strelno, Prussia - May 9, 1931, Pasadena, CA), American Nobel Laureate in Physics

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being suplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote ... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.: Albert A. Michelson, in a speech given at the dedication of the University of Chicago's Ryerson Physical Laboratory, 1894

John Stuart Mill (May 20, 1806, London, England - May 8, 1873, Avignon, France), English philosopher

Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most studid people are conservative.

John Stuart Mill

Language is the light of the mind.

John Stuart Mill

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.

John Stuart Mill

Edna St. Vincent Millay (Feb. 22, 1892, Rockland, ME - Oct. 19, 1950, Austerlitz, NY), American poet

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and oh, my friends --
It gives a lovely light.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Henry Miller, American author and artist

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

Henry Miller, 1947

Spike Milligan (April 16, 1918, Ahmed Nagar, India - ), British actor, humorist, novelist, and poet

Archduke Franz Ferdinand Found Alive! First World War a Mistake!

Spike Milligan, his favorite fantasy headline

Contraceptives should be used on every conceivable occasion.

Spike Milligan

C. Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, TX - March 20, 1962, Nyack, NY), American social scientist

In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.

C. Wright Mills

People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages.

C. Wright Mills

The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it.

C. Wright Mills

James Milton

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do ingloriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple: who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

James Milton, in Areopagitica

Hermann Minkowski (June 22, 1864, Aleksotas, Kaunas, Lithuania, Russian Empire - January 12, 1909, Göttingen, Germany), Russian-born German mathematician

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.: Hermann Minkowski, in a lecture at the Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, Cologne, Germany, September 21, 1908

Ludwig von Mises (September 29, 1881, Lemberg (now Lvov) in Galicia (now Ukraine), - October 10, 1973, New York City, NY), Austrian economist

An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.: Ludwig von Mises

Phillip Mitchem, American computer engineer

One should be suspicious of numbers without error bars . . .(4 out of 3 times +- 1)

Phillip Mitchem

Wilson Mizner

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

Wilson Mizner

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (Feb. 28, 1533, Chateau de Montaigne, Perigord, near Bordeaux, France - Sept. 13, 1592, Chateau de Montaigne, France), French essayist

It is fear that I stand most in fear of, in sharpness it exceeds every other feeling.

Montaigne

Man is certainly stark mad. He cannot even make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.

Montaigne, Book II Chapter XII, Apology for Raimond Sebond

John Pierpont Morgan (April 17, 1837, Hartford, CT - March 31, 1913, Rome, Italy), American financier and philanthropist

I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire a lawyer to tell me how to do what I want to do.

J. P. Morgan

Christopher Morley (May 5, 1890, Haverford, PA - March 28, 1957, Roslyn Estates, NY), American poet, playwright, and journalist

A human being. . . An ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.

Christopher Morley

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

Christopher Morley

By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces.

Christopher Morley

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned to habit from Nature.

Christopher Morley

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

Christopher Morley

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Christopher Morley

John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (Dec. 24, 1838, Blackburn, England - 1923), English Liberal politician and writer

All religions die of one disease - that of being found out.

John Morley

He who hates vice hates men.

John Morley

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

John Morley

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

John Morley, On Compromise, Ch. 5, 1874

Mohammed (Muhammad) (Mahomet Mohammed) (570, Mecca, Suadi Arabia - June 8, 632, Medina, Saudi Arabia), Arabic founder of Islam

A man's true wealth is the good he does in the world.

Mohammed

The worst one of the people before Allah is the scholar who does not put his knowledge into practice and does not benefit from it.

Mohammed, Qur'an (Koran)

Whoever insults a messenger of God must be killed.

Mohammed, Qur'an (Koran)

Ludovico Moscardo

Ne sapendo, a chi dar la colpa, li spagnuoli lo chiamorono mal Francese, li Francesi male Napolitano, e li Tedeschi, mal Spagnuolo.
(Not knowing whom to blame, the Spaniards call it the French Disease, the French the Neapolitan disease, and the Germans the Spanish disease.)

Ludovico Moscardo, 1672, in reference to syphilis

Louis Mountbatten (Louis of Battenberg, Lord Mountbatten) (June 25, 1900, Windsor, England - August 27, 1979, County Sligo, Ireland), English military commander and Viceroy of India

If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.

Louis Mountbatten

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, United States Senator from New York

We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (January 27, 1756, Salzburg, Austria - December 5, 1791, Vienna, Austria), Austrian composer and musician

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Mozart

John Muir

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.

John Muir, in The Mountains of California (New York: The Century Co., 1894)

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.

John Muir

When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.

John Muir, in his journal for July 27, 1869
He later revised this to:
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

John Muir, in My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911)

Edvard Munch (Dec. 12, 1863, L�ten, Norway - Jan. 23, 1944, Ekely, near Oslo, Norway) Norwegian painter and printmaker

From my rotting body,
flowers shall grow
and I am in them
and that is eternity.

Edvard Munch

The camera cannot compete with the brush and the palette so long as it cannot be used in heaven or hell.

Edvard Munch

Captain Edward A. Murphy (1917 - 1990), American engineer

If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it.: Edward A. Murphy, commenting on the incorrect mounting of sixteen accelerometers on a rocket sled in an experiment at Edward's Air Force Base in 1949. This statement, repeated at a news conference by the test subject, Major John Paul Stapp, became transformed into Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will". Actually, the similar version "anything that can go wrong, will" is Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives, popularized by science fiction author Larry Niven in several stories depicting a frontier culture of asteroid miners; this "Belter" culture professed a religion and/or running joke involving the worship of the dreaded god Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy.

Edward R. Murrow, American radio and TV journalist

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Edward R. Murrow

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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia - July 2, 1977, Montreux, Switzerland), Russian-American novelist and lepidopterist

Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither they nor their teacher know.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin, 1957

I am sufficiently proud of my knowing something to be modest about my not knowing all.

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955

I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love a memory, the stronger and stranger it is.

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973

I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.

Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 1973

Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.

Vladimir Nabokov, Radio Times, Oct., 1962

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 1951 amd 1966

Narayana, Sanskrit author

Greatness does not approach him who is forever looking down.

Narayana, from The Hitopadesa (Book of Good Counsel), c. 800 - 950 A.D.

Let this be an example for the acquisition of all knowledge, virtue, and riches. By the fall of drops of water, by degrees, a pot is filled.

Narayana, from The Hitopadesa (Book of Good Counsel), c. 800 - 950 A.D.

Subdue fate by exerting human strength to the maximum; and if, when the effort has been made and success is not achieved, no one else can be blamed.

Narayana, from The Hitopadesa (Book of Good Counsel), c. 800 - 950 A.D.

Ogden Nash (Aug. 19, 1902, Rye, NY - May 19, 1971, Baltimore, MD), American poet

Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.

Ogden Nash

I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.

Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road

Too clever is dumb.

Ogden Nash

George Jean Nathan (Feb. 14, 1882, Fort Wayne, IN - April 8, 1958, New York City, NY), American editor and drama critic

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

George Nathan

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.

George Nathan

I drink to make other people interesting.

George Nathan

Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

George Nathan

The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.

George Nathan

Women, as they grow older, rely more and more on cosmetics. Men, as they grow older, rely more and more on a sense of humor.

George Nathan

Native American

The soul would have no rainbow if the eyes had no tears.

Native American Proverb

Johann von Neumann (1903 - 1957)

In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them.

Johann von Neumann

Lady Dorothy (Fanny) Nevill (1826 - Mar. 24, 1913), British writer and horticulturist

The commercial class has always mistrusted verbal brilliancy and wit, deeming such qualities, perhaps with some justice, frivolous and unprofitable.

Dorothy Nevill, The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill, Ch. 8, 1907

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Dorothy Nevill

Sir Isaac Newton (Dec. 25, 1642, Woolsthorpe, England - Mar. 31, 1727, London, England), English scientist and mathematician

I do not know what I appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

Sir Isaac Newton

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than any other talent.

Sir Isaac Newton

If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants

Sir Isaac Newton, in a letter to Robert Hooke. First stated by Bernard of Chartres in 1126

Truth is ever to be found in the simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

Sir Isaac Newton

New York Times

Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

New York Times, in editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work, 1921

Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984), German Protestant Clergyman

In Germany they came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Martin Niemoeller, from Congressional Record October 14, 1968, p. 31636

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Oct. 15, 1844, Röcken bei Lützen, Germany - Aug. 25, 1900, Weimar, Germany), German philosopher

A certain sense of cruelty towards oneself and others is Christian; hatred of those who think differently; the will to persecute. Mortal hostility against the masters of the earth, against the 'noble', that is also Christian; hatred of mind, of pride, courage, freedom, libertinage of mind, is Christian; hatred of the senses, of joy in general, is Christian...

Friedrich Nietzsche

He who knows himself to be profound endeavors to be clear; he who would like to appear profound to the crowd endeavors to be obscure.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty - I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The beating of drums, which delights young writers who serve a party, sounds to him who does not belong to the party line like a rattling of chains, and excites sympathy rather than admiration.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Miscellaneous Maxims and Opinions, 1879

We have art that we do not die of the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What does not kill me, makes me stronger.

Friedrich Nietzsche

What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or God only a blunder of man?

Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Twilight of the Gods

Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good And Evil, 1886

Richard Nixon (Jan. 9, 1913, Yorba Linda, CA - April 22, 1994, New York City, NY), Thirty-seventh President of the United States (1969 - 1974)

A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits.: Richard Nixon, Remarks to reporters, Nov 11, 1960
Always do your best, never get discouraged, never be petty. And remember - others may hate you but they don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.: Richard Nixon, from his speech to the White House staff the morning of his resignation, Aug. 9, 1974
I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.: Richard Nixon
The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis'. One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.: Richard Nixon, reflecting on his historic trip to China in February, 1972
Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.: Richard Nixon, in a taped conversation with national security adviser Henry Kissinger, Dec. 14, 1972
Graham: "This stranglehold has got to be broken or this country's going down the drain." Nixon: "You believe that?" Graham: "Yes, sir." Nixon: "Oh boy. So do I. I can't ever say that, but I believe it." Graham: "No, but if you get elected a second time, then we might be able to do something.": Richard Nixon, in a conversation with Billy Graham about alleged Jewish influence in the media, from Nixon tapes of early 1972, National Archives

Louis Nizer (Feb. 6, 1902, London, England - Nov. 10, 1994, New York, NY), American lawyer and author

A man who works with his hand is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.

Louis Nizer

Robert Nordlander, American social critic

Those death sentences for blasphemy suggest that Islam lacks the moral and intellectual strength and integrity to defend itself against its critics.

Robert Nordlander, in a Letter to the Editor, The Daily Illini, University of Illinois, July 27, 2002

Oliver North (October 7, 1943, San Antonio, TX - ), Lt. Colonel in the United States Marines and staff member of the National Security Council

I was provided with additional input that was radically different from the truth. I assisted in furthering that version.: Oliver North, in his Iran-Contra testimony (May 5, 1987 - August 6, 1987) explaining why his statements in relation to Iran-Contra were not lies

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