In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn than to contemplate.

Rene Descartes, (1596-1650)

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Aldous Huxley, (1894-1963)

To plan for the future without having a sense of history is like trying to plant cut flowers.

David McCullough

The voice of conscience is so delicate that it is easy to stifle it; but it is also so clear that it is impossible to mistake it.

Madame De Stael, (1766-1817)

Liberal education is the pursuit of human excellence, not the pursuit of excellent salaries and excellent forms of polish and sophistication. Liberal education is not even about excellent intellectual achievements. Its goal is more ethical than intellectual: It focuses on the development of individuals as moral agents, and it teaches students how to reflect both analytically and evaluatively on the fact that the choices we make turn us into the persons we become.

Marshall Gregory

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

George Orwell, (1903-1950)

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.

Mark Twain, (1835-1910)

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad, novelist (1857-1924)

I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, (1882-1945)

The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.

Thomas Carlyle, (1795-1881)

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci, (1452-1519)

In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.

Ivan Illich, priest (1926-2002)

The middle class and working poor are told that what’s happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand.” This is a lie. What’s happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.

Bill Moyers, 2004

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

One need not have been Caesar in order to understand Caesar.

Max Weber

The important fact of the present time is not the struggle between capitalism and socialism but the struggle between industrial civilization and humanity.

Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970)

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein, (1879-1955)

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.

John Adams, (1735-1826)