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"The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal." -- Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910) http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Mark.Twain.Quote.4F8C
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"The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth -- that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one." -- H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) American Journalist, Editor, Essayist, Linguist, Lexicographer, and Critic http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/H..L..Mencken.Quote.4F85
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"How did it happen? How did our national government grow from a servant with sharply limited powers into a master with virtually unlimited power? In part, we were swindled. There are occasions when we have elevated men and political parties to power that promised to restore limited government and then proceeded, after their election, to expand the activities of government. But let us be honest with ourselves. Broken promises are not the major causes of our trouble. Kept promises are. All too often we have put men in office who have suggested spending a little more on this, a little more on that, who have proposed a new welfare program, who have thought of another variety of 'security.' We have taken the bait, preferring to put off to another day the recapture of freedom and the restoration of our constitutional system. We have gone the way of many a democratic society that has lost its freedom by persuading itself that if 'the people' rule, all is well." -- Barry Goldwater (1909-1998) US Senator (R-Arizona) http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Barry.Goldwater.Quote.4136
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"After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, nervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." -- Alexis de Tocqueville [Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel, le Comte de Tocqueville] (1805-1859) French historian Source: Democracy in America, Vol. II (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), Chap. 6 http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Alexis.de.Tocqueville.Quote.3FC8
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"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice." -- Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921 http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/quote_blog/Albert.Einstein.Quote.92C7
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I am one of you and being one of you
Is being and knowing what I am and know.
Yet I am the necessary angel
of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and
stubborn, man-locked set
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid
lingerings,
Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of
half-meanings.
--Wallace Stevens
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens>
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You can't believe everything you read on the internet. That's how WWI got started. (Playstation 3 Commerical - 2009)
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I want to congratulate you for not only showing the images of people protesting in the streets but actually inviting some of them into the studio.
Because most Americans do not identify with 10,000 people screaming in the streets. But why do they do that? They do it because they are not invited, like Henry Kissinger, into a studio so they can speak calmly into a mike and explain what their point of view is. They can only hope that if they scream very loud, that perhaps on a global warming day a CBS exec will open his window and that sound of "NO WAR!" will waft into CBS's studios and perhaps hit an open mike. (Amy Goodman)
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Our ability as humans to understand the world around us gives us an important responsibility as stewards of the planet, and fortunately more and more people are beginning to understand that. I just hope we have enough time. (Jane Goodall)
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Caligula: Rasputin! Bring in the bucket of soapy frogs and remove his trousers! ("Red Dwarf")
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The headline of the _Daily News_ today reads: "BRUNETTE STABBED TO DEATH."
Underneath, in lowercase letters: "6,000 Killed in Iranian Earthquake." I wonder what color hair they had. (Abbie Hoffman)
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Diana: Dozens of community pop-in centers; oh god, how depressing. I bet they're all run by those offensively jolly fat women with tea urns welded to their hips and huge slabs of homemade carrot cake that they shove down your throat with plungers. ("Waiting for God")
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I completely abhor the idea of people telling me they're color-blind. I want you to recognize that I am black and understand that because I am black I might see things a different way. I don't want you to give me special privileges or give me any special stereotypes because of it, but me, my color, my background, where I come from is a part of who I am, and trying to ignore that as a compliment is dishonest. (Bomani Armah)
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Fat woman: How dare you say that to my face!?
Al: Well, I'd say it to your back, but my car only has half a tank of gas! ("Married with Children")
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What is the use of philosophy, if all it does is enable you to talk... about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life? (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
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Caligula: Rasputin! Bring hither the skindiving suit with the bottom cut out, and unleash the rampant wildebeest! ("Red Dwarf")
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Knowledge not renewed, quickly becomes ignorance. (Peter Drucker)
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I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of. (Clarence Darrow)
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Mama: Your idea of a workout includes a man, a bed, and a cigarette afterwards!
Naomi: That is a total lie! I've never smoked a cigarette in my life! ("Mama's Family")
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That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. (Emily Dickinson)
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The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. (Lao Tzu)
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The Inquisitor: Thomas Olwin? Thomas Olwin, you have been found unworthy of having existed.
Thomas Olwin: Is that you, Mother? ("Red Dwarf")
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I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens who, reading newspapers, live and die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world during their time. (Harry S. Truman)
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There are no dull subjects. There are only dull writers. (H. L. Mencken)
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Journalists separate the wheat from the chaff... and then print the chaff. (Adlai Stevenson)
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In wildness is the preservation of the world. (Henry David Thoreau)
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
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Prejudice is only cowardice in the face of complexity. (Jay Lemke)
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It would be a very good thing if every trick could receive some short and obviously appropriate name, so that when a man used this or that particular trick, he could at once be reproved for it. (Schopenhauer)
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We have met the enemy and he is us. ("Pogo" - Walt Kelly)
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Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at. (David Gerrold)
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Tom: I told you curry-flavored condoms would never catch on! ("Waiting for God")
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Man: No matter whose wife I am in prison, I'll always be your husband! ("Married with Children")
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How happy are the astrologers, who are believed if they tell one truth to a hundred lies, while other people lose all credit if they tell one lie to a hundred truths. (Francesco Guicciardini)
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Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. (A. J. Liebling)
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It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so. (Artemus Ward)
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Figures don't lie, but liars figure.
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Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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Learn as much by writing as by reading. (Lord Acton)
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Education is not simply the world of abstract verbalized knowledge. (Aldous Huxley)
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Many people would sooner die than think. In fact, they do. (Bertrand Russell)
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When you say the meek will inherit the earth, do you mean "as is"? ("Frank & Ernest" - Bob Thaves)
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Woman: Oh, what a world we live in these days. I blame it all on convenience foods, how about you?
Oliver: Oh, I think it all started to go wrong with Bill Haley and the Comets. ("Oliver's Travels")
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Kochanski: Have you heard of something called "tough love"?
Kryten: Does it involve dressing up? ("Red Dwarf")
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To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. (William Blake)
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Has any reader found perfect accuracy in the newspaper account of any event of which he himself had inside knowledge? (Edward Verrall Lucas)
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There is an art to making whole lies out of half-truths. (Christy Mathewson)
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Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Citizens who think for themselves, rather than uncritically ingesting what their leaders and others with power tell them, are the absolutely necessary ingredient of a society that is to remain free. (Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender)
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The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. (Oscar Wilde)
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A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen, philosophers, and divines. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.
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Good news is just life's way of keeping you off balance.
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The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning. (Adlai Stevenson)
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If voting could really change things, it would be illegal. (Revolution Books, NYC, NY)
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Democracy: Four wolves and a lamb voting on lunch.
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Nothing's impossible for those who don't have to do it.
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Man 1: The Senate is a whorehouse; Congress is a whorehouse.
Man 2: Not to insult whores in any way.
Woman: That's "working woman." (conversation on KPFA public radio, 94.1 FM, California)
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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. (George Santayana)
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A woman's favorite position is C.E.O.
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Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is. (Richard Guindon)
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An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public. (Talleyrand)
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When an idea is wanting, a word can always be found to take its place. (Goethe)
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Advertising is legalized lying. (H. G. Wells)
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He who defines the terms wins the argument. (Chinese proverb)
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The service we render for others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth. (Wilfred Grenfell)
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Would you persuade, speak of interest, not reason. (Benjamin Franklin)
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There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. (Benjamin Disraeli)
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Sample size does not overcome sample bias.
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Memory says, "I did that." Pride replies, "I could not have done that." Eventually, memory yields. (Nietzsche)
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Woman: For a man who's always getting blown up, you sure have soft skin! ("The Wild Wild West")
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As the granddaughter of an Orthodox rabbi, it horrifies me to see little Israeli children wearing gas masks. But there is a more horrible image, and that is Palestinian children without gas masks. (Amy Goodman)
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It's much easier to do and die than it is to reason why. (H.A. Studdert Kennedy)
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Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.
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Beware of and eschew pompous prolixity. (Charles A. Beardsley)
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I am firm, you are obstinate, he is pigheaded. (Bertrand Russell)
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The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they'll sleep at night. (Otto von Bismarck)
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Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. (The Devil's Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce)
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All that we do is touched with ocean, yet we remain on the shore of what we know. (Richard Wilbur)
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Not to know what has happened before one was born is always to be a child. (Cicero)
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Jack: She says I have the body of a twenty-four year old.
Kate: A twenty-four-year-old what?
Gloria: Sofa. ("Class Act")
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[Nazi] Germany has taught me that an uncritical view of the national past generated an equally subservient acceptance of the present. (Hans Schmitt)
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Howie: There's an old psych[ology] joke, and I just remember the punchline, but it goes: "Dahmer, Manson, and Ronald Reagan all came from normal families." (deleted scene from "The Broken Hearts Club")
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A high school teacher, after all, is a person deputized by the rest of us to explain to the young what sort of world they are living in and to defend, if possible, the part their elders are playing in it. (Emile Capouya)
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. (George Santayana)
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Stop repeat offenders. Don't re-elect them!
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If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be. (Thomas Jefferson)
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The point of regularly testing our background beliefs in terms of our experiences and of what we learn from others is precisely to weed out background beliefs that are false. (Howard Kahane and Nancy Cavender)
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The object of reasoning is to find out, from the consideration of what we already know, something else which we do not know. (Charles Sanders Pierce)
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The Doctor: That's the one thing common between the most powerful and the most stupid: They don't alter themselves to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit themselves. ("Doctor Who")
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A simple person believes every word he hears; a clever one understands the need for proof. (Proverbs 14:15)
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The prejudice against careful analytic procedure is part of the human impatience with technique which arises from the fact that men are interested in results and would like to attain them without the painful toil which is the essence of our moral finitude. (Morris R. Cohen)
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There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. (Sir Joshua Reynolds)
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Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government's daily incursions into Palestinian territory--the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, 19th-century colonialism, dressed up as a new-fashioned, 20th-century war. Is it really impossible for Jewish people, who suffered so cruelly themselves -- more cruelly, perhaps, than any other people in history--to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers, but can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination? Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? (Arundhati Roy)
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Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head, and this is our life. Exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. (As You Like It - Shakespeare)
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Jack: A health club? What the hell is a health club?
Gloria: It's a symbol of Western decadence. ("Class Act")
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He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood. (Samuel Johnson)
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The most violent element in society is ignorance. (Emma Goldman)
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If ignorance is bliss, you must be orgasmic.
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Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. (1984 - George Orwell)
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Hugo: Alice, in the words of Sigourney Weaver, from the film _Aliens_...
Alice: "Get away from her, you bitch!"
Hugo: Umm, no, it wasn't that line, it was before that...
Alice: Oh! "You wait in the ventilation shaft while I check the corridor!"
("The Vicar of Dibley")
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When American scholars talk about... Soviet texts which blatantly indoctrinate, they are called brainwashing. When our own texts are biased, prejudiced, one-sided and unfair, it is called "transmitting a favorable view of our democracy." (S. Samuel Shermis)
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Gloria: You can't just sell human beings.
Kate's father: What about Australians? ("Class Act")
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Thoughtfully written analysis is out, "live pops" are in... Hire lookers, not writers. Do powder-puff, not probing, interviews. Stay away from controversial subjects. Kiss ass, move with the mass, and for heaven and the ratings' sake don't make anybody mad... Make nice, not news. (Dan Rather)
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It was a pretty good adjective. Then it became a noun. Any time an adjective becomes a noun, it's in trouble. (Eugene McCarthy, on the term "liberal")
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Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence. ("Time Bandits")
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You can lead a man up to the university, but you can't make him think. (Finley Peter Dunne)
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To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge. (Henry David Thoreau)
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. (Mark Twain)
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Dance like nobody's watching; love like it's never going to hurt.
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Think with your head, not your guts.
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Populus vult decipi. (The people want to be deceived.)
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I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it.
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Man is a social animal; only in the herd is he happy. It is all one to him whether it is the profoundest nonsense or the greatest villainy - he feels completely at ease with it - so long as it is the view of the herd, and he is able to join the herd. (Soren Kierkegaard)
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So you're a feminist? Isn't that cute!
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He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met. (Abraham Lincoln)
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Work is for people who don't know how to fish.
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Every dogma has its day. (Abraham Rotstein)
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Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. (Montaigne)
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How strange it is to see with how much passion/people see things only in their own fashion. (Moliere)
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I was very shocked when my son told me that his boyfriend was a homosexual. ("Frye and Laurie")
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Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider. (Francis Bacon)
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Every man is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. (Bertrand Russell)
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Orthodontics and the hair dryer have become vital to the achievement of political power. (Len Deighton)
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March isn't the only thing that's in like a lion, out like a lamb.
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Bob: Kiri has said to me before that: "I wish I was a guy, then I could get men." If that was all it took...
Zurd: Yes, being a guy makes you an automatic guy-magnet...
Bob: Damn right it does, I have three crawling in through my windows right as we speak, and another one is banging on the heater vent in the wall begging me to let him in.
Zurd: But we all know that Bob has a little something called "standards," and will shoo those men away, right?
Bob: Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! The key word being "little."
Zurd: ... Bob?
Bob: Yeah?
Zurd: Say yes. Even if it's a lie...
Bob: "Yes."
Zurd: Thank you, Bob. (Zurd and Bob)
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