"All warfare is based on deception."
- Sun Tzu
"When your opponent sets up a straw man, set it on fire and kick the cinders around the stage. Don't worry about losing the Strawperson-American community vote."
- James Lileks, "The Daily Bleat"
“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”
- Nietzsche
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
- Thomas Paine
“Love ceases to be a demon only when it ceases to be a god.”
- Denis de Rougemont
"After Dr. Johnson said patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel, the cynic Ambrose Bierce amended it with, "I beg to submit that it is the first." Then H.L. Mencken jumped in: "But there is something even worse: it is the first, last and middle range of fools."
"We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
- Werner Heisenberg
"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."
- Eric Hoffer
"Dishonest people are seldom dishonest in only one aspect of their lives."
- Marc McYoung
The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
- Einstein
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
- Voltaire
"A time comes when silence is betrayal."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If a Nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be... If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed."
- Thomas Jefferson
"None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free."
- Johann Von Goethe
Encrypting transactions on the Inter Net, for example, is as Purdue computer scientist Eugene Spafford has remarked, "the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit-card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench."
The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure.
- Charles C. Mann, "Homeland Insecurity",
"To be, or not to be- that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them."
- Shakespeare, Hamlet
"The human being created civilization not because of willingness but of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning."
- Morpheus, Deus Ex
"any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic",
-Arthur C Clarke
"I don’t like competition. I want to be the only fucking man in this world. I want an army of my sons and then find a planet to attack."
"Actually I like to let people in for free but charge them to get out."
- Peter Steele
"The heaven that rolls around cries aloud to you while it displays its eternal harmony, and yet your eyes are fixed upon the earth alone."
-Dante
"You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else's life. They're plenty loud and they talk all the time. "
"A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let's fight for liberty and he can't show you liberty. He can't prove the thing he's talking about so how in the hell can he be telling you to fight for it?"
-Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
- Isaac Asimov
"It really is of importance, not only what men do... but also what manner of men they are that do it. Among the works of man... The first importance surely is man himself."
- John Stuart Mill
"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
John Watson, one of the founders of modern behaviorism once wrote that personality “is the end product of our habit system”
"...It is urged that man knows that whatever is must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity, he also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: until that is clearly demonstrated we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant conjunction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a base where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes that which is least incomprehensible; -- it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it: if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the burthen?"
- Shelley, the necessity of Atheism
"What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books."
- Sigmund Freud
"Some of the early-20th century Chinese thinkers who were concerned with modernizing China recognized the necessity of breaking down small-scale social groups such as the family: "(According to Sun Yat-sen) The Chinese people needed a new surge of patriotism, which would lead to a transfer of loyalty from the family to the state. . .(According to Li Huang) traditional attachments, particularly to the family had to be abandoned if nationalism were to develop to China." (Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 125, page 297.)"
- Ted Kaczynski
If ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, knowledge of nature is made for their destruction.
-Shelley
"Because modern institutions depend on the transmission of a certain world view and then willing acquiescense in the truth of that world view by the populations into which it is being exported. In other words a kind of cultural brainwashing is necessary for modern cultures to work at all. The consequences of the acceptance of this situation of brainwashing is further acceleration toward catastrophe."
- Terrence McKenna
"Stay away from needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon."
- Abbie Hoffman
""Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes."
- Robert Heinlein
“The human voice carries entirely too far as it is... And now you fellows come along and seek to complicate matters.”
- Mark Twain, speaks about the invention of the telephone.
"My power is discombobulatingly devastating I could feel is muscle tissues collapse under my force. It's ludicrous these mortals even attempt to enter my realm."
- Mike Tyson
( The full collection of Mike Tyson quotes, hilarity from start to end. ) "Nobody needs to tell me how to be black."
- Condoleeza Rice