Category: Thought

“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”

We have the right as individuals to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

L’homme est libre au moment qu’il veut l’être.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694 – 1778), Brutus, act II, scene I (1730).

Voyager upon life’s sea:—
To yourself be true,
And whate’er your lot may be,
Paddle your own canoe.

There is a scale in the meaning of the word socialist. In France it means about the same thing as a communist, when one uses plain language. When one uses the language of Monsieur Drumont, it means a Jew. In England a socialist is equal to a French conservative republican. In America it means a thief. In Germany it means an ingenious individual of restricted financial resources, who generally fails to blow up some important personage with wet dynamite. In Italy a socialist is an anarchist pure and simple, who wishes to destroy everything existing for the sake of dividing a wealth which does not exist at all. It also means a young man who orders a glass of water and a toothpick at a cafe, and is able to talk politics for a considerable time on this slender nourishment.

Francis Marion Crawford, Marzio’s Crucifix (1887).

On doit des égards aux vivants; on ne doit aux morts que la vérité.

We should be considerate to the living; to the dead we owe only the truth.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694 – 1778), Letter to M. de Grenonville (1719).

Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn’t be relied on to guard henhouses.

A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

George F. Will (born May 4, 1941), quoted in A Ford Not A Lincoln (1975), Richard Reeves, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ch, 1 ; as cited by The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993), ed. Robert Andrews, Columbia University Press, p. 707.

If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.