Citatnik

I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name

A rather curious form of this admiration for groups to which the admirer does not belong is the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed: subject nations, the poor, women, and children. The eighteenth century, while conquering America from the Indians, reducing the peasantry to the condition of pauper laborers, and introducing the cruelties of early industrialism, loved to sentimentalize about the "noble savage" and the "simple annals of the poor."

Political cults create their own reality as effectively as the Scientologists or the Exclusive Brethren. Their leaders cannot allow members to take at face value evidence that contradicts their teachings... To maintain control the cult must blacken the world beyond its walls.

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.

“The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country.”

For every nugget of truth some wretch lies dead on the scrapheap

Have you felt it too? Have you seen how your best friends love everything about you- except the things that count? And your most important is nothing to them; nothing, not even a sound they can recognize.

Once a political or religious totalitarian movement has momentum, it has an irrational life and logic of its own which can't be explained away. It kills because its ideology says it has to kill.

Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.

A harvest of peace is produced from a seed of contentment.

In a war of ideas, it is people who get killed.

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.

Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.