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Query
Created by
yeme
on
3/17/2010
Quotation Subject
en
id
:
/base/yemebase/views/quotation_subject
mid
:
/m/0bbqmty
permission
:
/m/0bbqk1l
Discuss
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Lawyer
First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.
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Insanity
Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.
I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.
Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.
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Social psychiatry
An individual's reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule it will be both incomplete and wrong...
By labeling a bundle of problems with a single conceptual label, we make dealing with that problem easier - provided we're not interested in solving it.
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Conceptual model
An individual's reality model can be right or wrong, complete or incomplete. As a rule it will be both incomplete and wrong...
Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
By labeling a bundle of problems with a single conceptual label, we make dealing with that problem easier - provided we're not interested in solving it.
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Automobile
The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.
The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete.
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.
The improved American highway system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.
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Youth
I am not young enough to know everything.
It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. -- Lamentations 3:27
We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.
If youth but had the knowledge and old age the strength.
Youth, with swift feet, walks onward in the way; the land of joy lies all before his eyes.
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Knowledge
I am not young enough to know everything.
The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving toward the grand fallacy.
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.
Knowledge of the world in only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
No man knows less than the man who knows it all
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Ethics
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...
The character ethic, which I believe to be the foundation of success, teaches that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their basic character.
Every aspect of Western culture needs a new code of ethics -- a rational ethics -- as a precondition of rebirth.
Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.
Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?
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Nature
Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe...
The unnatural, that too is natural.
The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.
I am against nature. I don't dig nature at all. I think nature is very unnatural. I think the truly natural things are dreams, which nature can't touch with decay.
Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of the earth and the life upon it, that I cannot think of heaven and the angels.
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Bioethics
If we don't play God, who will?
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Science Fiction
I'll be back
Apparently I’ve been typecast in science fiction: I’m a Russian bisexual telepathic Jew.
Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art.
Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today -- but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.
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Film
I'll be back
Hello, I Must Be Going
People sometimes say that the way things happen in the movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen to you in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television -- you don't feel anything.
I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it -- yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don't give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.
For me, the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
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The Movies
I'll be back
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Science
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Science is like a blabbermouth who ruins a movie by telling you how it ends.
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
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Wisdom
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
It is characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.
Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.
For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.
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Theory
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
It is theory that decides what can be observed.
Socrates thought and so do I that the wisest theory about the gods is no theory at all.
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Experience
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
Experience is largely non-transferable.
Experience is a revelation in the light of which we renounce our errors of youth for those of age.
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Action
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.
Action is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in speech, in thoughts whereof speech is the shadow; and precipitates itself therefrom. The kind of speech in a man betokens the kind of action you will get from him.
Do every act of your life as if it were your last.
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Artificial intelligence
No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain...
More human than human
The question of whether Machines Can Think ... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.
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Traffic engineering
The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something. To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.
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Software Testing
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
Testing is an empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the software under test.
Testing is questioning a product in order to evaluate it.
Quality is value to some person.
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War
There is no calamity greater than lightly engaging in war.
The sky was full of stars, and every star an exploding ship.
It was the dawn of the third age of mankind…
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.
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C
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.
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C++
C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off.
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Art
Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin?
There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.
Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.
Photographing a cake can be art.
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Writer
“Sociologically, politically, psychologically, spiritually, it was never enough for him [James Baldwin] to categorize himself as one thing or the other: not just black, not just sexual, not just American, nor even just as a world-class literary artist. He embraced the whole of life the way the sun’s gravitational passion embraces everything from the smallest wandering comet to the largest looming planet. He both confronted and cultivated creative vision with a drive, passion, and brilliance that few have matched, and simply being able to watch his genius sparkle from one sentence to the next could generate both awe and revelation.”
Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative.
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Depression
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms -- the animation, the fits.
The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape.
That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
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Poetry
That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty.
“Xenophobia–– you banished with a moonwalk… danced hate into joy.” --from poem Notes for an Elegy in the Key of Michael
“Aberjhani's writing blows the mind and frees the psyche of any rigid assumptions about ancestral heritage. Here, our collective experience is starkly rendered. The transparency of one culture overlays another, and another, to form the daguerreotype of possibilities that is homo sapiens, interacting, almost like the elements themselves, with the created world and modified only by context and its imperatives.”-- from Circles and Arcs
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Courage
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
A strong man and a waterfall always channel their own path.
Woman and men of retiring timidity are cowardly only in dangers which affect themselves, but the first to rescue when others are in danger.
All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
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Tragedy
There is nothing more tragic than to find an individual bogged down in the length of life, devoid of breadth.
It's not the tragedies that kill us, it's the messes.
In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst.
We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his?
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Doubt
Despair is the damp of hell, as joy is the serenity of heaven.
Philosophy when superficially studied, excites doubt, when thoroughly explored, it dispels it.
If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go out.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
When in doubt, ask. When not in doubt, ask.
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Goal
If a man knows not what harbor he seeks, any wind is the right wind.
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
You cannot make it as a wandering generality. You must become a meaningful specific.
If you set goals and go after them with all the determination you can muster, your gifts will take you places that will amaze you.
Who walks the fastest, but walks astray, is only furthest from his way.
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Business
It is much more difficult to measure non-performance than performance. Performance stands out like a ton of diamonds. Non-performance can almost always be explained away.
Formerly when great fortunes were only made in war, war was business; but now when great fortunes are only made by business: Business is war!
It doesn't matter to me if a man is from Harvard or Sing Sing. We hire the man, not his history.
Don't try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can't be done, except by liars.
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
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Imagination
I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.
Not our logical faculty, but our imaginative one is king over us. I might say, priest and prophet to lead us to heaven-ward, or magician and wizard to lead us hellward.
Imagination rules the world.
It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
Act as if you have already achieved your goal and it is yours.
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Intelligence
Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.
"There must be love, and understanding, to betray. Most men haven't the wit or the honor for betrayal: not to know it when they see it; not the stomach to apprehend it as they do it. Most men, blind and dumb in their self-centeredness, don't betray: they merely disappoint."
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Technology
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.
Technology is the drug of choice for most Americans. Source unknown Theory: when you have ideas. Ideology: when ideas have you.
However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson: Nothing is impossible.
The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.
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Sanity
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.
No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
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Suffering
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
It is good for me that I was afflicted that I may learn Thy statutes. -- Psalms 119:71
It is the lot of man to suffer.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.
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Happiness
Many people think that if they were only in some other place, or had some other job, they would be happy. Well, that is doubtful. So get as much happiness out of what you are doing as you can and don't put off being happy until some future date.
Scarcely one person in a thousand is capable of tasting the happiness of others.
It seldom happens that any felicity comes so pure as not to be tempered and allayed by some mixture of sorrow.
We are made happy when reason can discover no occasion for it. The memory of some past moments is more persuasive than the experience of present ones. There have been visions of such breadth and brightness that these motes were invisible in their light.
A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity.
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Excellence
We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.
The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.
Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.
Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art -- an individual masterpiece.
It is just the little difference between the good and the best that makes the difference between the artist and the artisan. It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that makes the master's fame.
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Dream
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity; and thrill; in waking; to find they have been upon the verge of the great secret.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.
One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.
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Coffee
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Coffee is a beverage that puts one to sleep when not drank.
Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
Right, you just brush your teeth with coffee grounds.
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Mathematics
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
Mathematical reasoning may be regarded...
May not music be described as the mathematics of the sense, mathematics as music of the reason?
In studying mathematics or simply using a mathematical principle, if we get the wrong answer in sort of algebraic equation, we do not suddenly feel that there is an anti-mathematical principle that is luring us into the wrong answers.
Yet what are all such gaieties to me whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?
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Debugging
Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.
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Money
If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people He gives it to.
Money is truthful. If a man speaks of honor, make him pay cash.
Revenue is vanity... margin is sanity... cash is king.
Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.
Part of your heritage in this society is the opportunity to become financially independent.
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God
Trust in God, but tie your camel tight.
The one thing that a fish can never find is water; and the one thing that man can never find is God.
We always believe God is like ourselves, the indulgent think him indulgent and the stern, terrible.
God is only a great imaginative experience.
The guarantee that our self enjoys an intended relation to the outer world is most, if not all, we ask from religion. God is the self projected onto reality by our natural and necessary optimism. He is the not-me personified.
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Camel
Trust in God, but tie your camel tight.
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Death
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
So well do I love you, I go to my god singing your praises. When I meet my father, I will tell him I fought beside you.
“We fouled up. I did. He got hurt. Badly, maybe. And the god…is not helping him today.”
"Strife brings all things into being on her battlefield. This I know. I have been there many times,” says Vashanka, lord of sack and pillage. “I have died before.”
“Commander, you and your Stepsons are always welcome here. This fuss is not our doing. I saw the body. There’s no sign of…murder on her, but sometimes girls just…die.”
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Memory
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
A man's real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.
Why is our memory good enough to recall to the last detail things that have happened to us, yet not good enough to recall how often we have told them to the same person.
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Religion
A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.
Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.
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Grape Growing
Grape growing is 90% art, wine making is 90% science.
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Fascism
Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power.
Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived in their relation to the State.
I wouldn't call it fascism exactly, but a political system nominally controlled by an irresponsible, dumbed down electorate who are manipulated by dishonest, cynical, controlled mass media that dispense the propaganda of a corrupt political establishment can hardly be described as democracy either.
I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.
Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction.
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Innovation, novelty
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Innovation
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
It's not a revolution if nobody loses
No one asks you to throw Mozart out of the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Lao Tzu and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.
Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
INNOVATION is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation.
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Novelty
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
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Ideas
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
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Freedom
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
It is quite impossible to guarantee world peace. But is should be possible to guarantee world freedom.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
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Education
The highest result of education is tolerance.
Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.
The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch somebody else doing it wrong, without comment.
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Torah study
Say not, when I have leisure I will study; you may not have leisure.
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Education, scholars
The ink of a scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.
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