Favourite Quotes from Various Sources
A compilation of David's favourite quotes.
Below is presented a collection of quotations from various individuals. The items have been accumulated over the years by David.
A key step toward societal improvement is to relieve
ignorance, so we do not have to relive it.
Prad Basu
All men have opinions, but few men think.
George Berkeley
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical
concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by
complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature
through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather
magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them
for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken
form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly
err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world
older and more complete than ours they move finished and
complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or
never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are
not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations,
caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow
prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.
Henry Beston
The Man who pretends to be a modest enquirer into the truth
of a self-evident thing is a Knave.
William Blake
Logic is the art of making truth prevail.
La Bruyere
An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great
language.
Martin Buber
The currently fashionable supposition that the world can be
described only by science is due either to a pedestrian
conception of what it is to describe or to a romantic view of
the powers of science.
Panayot Butchvarov
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found
truth without it.
G. K. Chesterton
The empires of the future are empires of the mind.
Winston Churchill
If Wisdom be attainable, let us not only win but enjoy
it.
Cicero
Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife by the
millions in order to protect his domestic animals and their
feed. Then he kills domestic animals by the billions and eats
them. This in turn kills man by the millions, because eating
all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal - health
conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So
then man tortures and kills millions more animals to look for
cures for these diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human
beings are being killed by hunger and malnutrition because food
they could eat is being used to fatten domestic animals.
Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter at the
absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and
once a year sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth."
C. David Coats
The most successful exploiter is the one who makes others
feel that he or she has their best interests at heart.
Randall Collins
It is hard to fight against anger: to master it is the mark
of a rational man.
Democritus
Reason is often a more powerful persuader than gold.
Democritus
...the word is the shadow of the deed.
Democritus
There is something perhaps something a trifle absurd and
obsessive in the need for a "proof" that existence of life is
better than its non-existence. It resembles the demand to have
it "established by argument" that love is better than
hate.
Paul Edwards
If mankind is to survive, we shall require a substantially
new manner of thinking.
Albert Einstein
Three rules of work:
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Albert Einstein
...propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in
man - the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest
and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate
man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most
common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest
patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with
regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate,
hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love
or impartiality.
Jacques Ellul
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To find the best in others;
To appreciate beauty;
To leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
...there are no beginnings, not even to stories. There are
only places where you make an entrance into someone else's life
and either stay or turn and go away.
Timothy Findley
You never become a statistic until after the fact.
Murray Freedman (my maternal uncle)
Don't criticize each other while you eat. You can do that
after.
Sarah Freedman [my maternal grandmother]
Sometimes doing things the hard way is easier.
Sarah Freedman
When I put food before him my dog eats it; when I throw the
stick, he fetches it....Several times, I have tried putting
food before him and throwing a stick at the same time; each
time he has sought neither the food nor the stick but stood
looking at me.
R. G. Frey
Non-violence and truth are inseparable and presuppose one
another.
M. K. Gandhi
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
M. K. Gandhi
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
M. K. Gandhi
I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse
- I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard.
William Lloyd Garrison
Much learning does not teach sense.
Heraclitus
A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a
long time, and thought is a painful process.
A. E. Housman
The end of argument or discussion should be not victory, but
enlightenment.
Joseph Joubert
If you are really inquiring you cannot start with a
conclusion, and all ideologies are a conclusion.
Krishnamurti
Or thou might'st better listen to the wind, Whose language
is to thee a barren noise, Though it blows legend-laden through
the trees.
John Keats
The poetry of earth is never dead.
John Keats
We read fine...things but never feel them to [the] full
until we have gone the same steps as the author.
John Keats
[Robert] Nozick (1983), reviewing Regan's The Case for
Animal Rights, accuses him of going too far in attributing
equal rights to animals, and opts for speciesism but without
providing a justification. H. Cohen (1983) replies: "If this is
the best that the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department
can do, then the case for animal rights must be strong
indeed."
Charles Magel
How, after all, did Darwin know which species were the
"fittest"? Simply by checking on which ones, in fact, survived.
Why not, then use a more exact phrase: "the survival of the
survivors"?
Maynard Mack
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that
ever does.
Margaret Mead
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we
are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the
familiar scene, and as if by magic we see a new meaning in
it.
Anais Nin
Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they
do.
Bertrand Russell
I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do
not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.
Bertrand Russell
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
William Shakespeare
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are
dreamt of in your philosophy.
William Shakespeare
150 years ago, they would have thought you were absurd if
you advocated for the end of slavery. 100 years ago, they would
have laughed at you for suggesting that women should have the
right to vote. 50 years ago, they would object to the idea of
African Americans receiving equal rights under the law. 25
years ago they would have called you a pervert if you advocated
for gay rights. They laugh at us now for suggesting that animal
slavery be ended. Some day they won't be laughing.
Gary Smith
Be a good citizen of Earth.
Doris Sztybel [my mother]
For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is
one striking at the root.
Henry David Thoreau
For lack of attention, a thousand forms of loveliness elude
us every day.
Evelyn Underhills
We think in generalities, but we live in detail.
Alfred North Whitehead
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts...
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth...
William Wordsworth
...take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree
William Butler Yeats
When the Many are reduced to One, to what is the One
reduced?
Zen koan
A note on the sexist language in some of these quotations: it occurs in statements written before sexism in language came under scrutiny, and so is reproduced, with the understanding that the authors no doubt intended to refer to females as well as to males. I do not favour sexist language in my own writings, but also do not prefer to censor nor even alter significant historical thoughts that are guilty, perhaps, of conforming to the linguistic conventions of their times.
