Collected Quotes


While animals are content with existence and reproduction, men desire also to expand, and their desires in this respect are limited only by what imagination suggests as possible. Every man would like to be God, if it were possible; some few find it difficult to admit the impossibility.
-- Bertrand Russell, The Impulse to Power

"Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who didn't."
-- Ben Franklin

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;who errs, and comes short again and again (but)....who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
-- Theodore Roosevelt (Paris, 1910)

"We will walk on your corpses and crush your skulls, and you will swim in your own blood."
-- Sadam Hussein

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine."
-- Ayn Rand, Spoken by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged

Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as a pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years finds,
and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
-- William Ernest Henley, 1875

"What we obtain too cheep, we esteem too lightly... it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
--Thomas Paine

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche

"Do we after all seek rest, peace, and pleasure in our inquiries? No, only truth--even if it be the most abhorrent and ugly."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, in a letter to his sister