Growth for the sake of growth is the 
ideology of the cancer cell.
Edward Abbey

The future comes one day at a time
Dean Acheson

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than 
to live up to them.
Alfred Adler

If at first you don’t succeed, you’re 
running about average.
M.H. Alderson

I have not seen any problem, however 
complicated, which when you looked at it 
in the right way, did not become still more 
complicated.
Paul Anderson

The worst form of inequality is to make
unequal things equal.
Aristotle

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to 
be true.
Francis Bacon

War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin

Money is a terrible master, but an 
excellent servant.
P.T. Barnum

Every man has a right to his opinion,
but no man has a right to be wrong with 
his facts.
Bernard Baruch

Art is I, science is we.
Claude Bernard

Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes, 
fools by their own.
H.G. Bohn

Crime is contagious.  If the government 
becomes a lawbreaker,
it breeds contempt for the law.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Genius does what it must; talent does 
what it can.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The best effect of any book is that it 
excites the reader to self activity
Thomas Carlyle

Man is what he believes.
Anton Chekhov

Some see private enterprise as a 
predatory target to be shot;
others as a cow to be milked, but few are 
those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling 
the wagon.
Winston Churchill

As always, victory finds a hundred fathers, 
but defeat is an orphan.
Count Ciano

A faith that cannot survive collision with 
the truth is not worth many regrets.
Arthur C. Clarke

The tendencies of democracies are, in all 
things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, 
knowledge, and principles of the majority 
form the tribunal of appeal.
James Fennimore Cooper

Fraud and falsehood dread examination.  
Truth invites it.
Thomas Cooper

Nothing in life is to be feared.  It is only to 
be understood.
Marie Curie

The hottest places in hell are reserved for 
those who in times of great moral crisis
maintained their neutrality.
Dante

He who allows oppression shares the 
crime.
Erasmus Darwin

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self; 
for what we wish, we readily believe.
Demosthenes (350BC)

A state is better governed if it has but few 
laws, and those laws strictly enforced.
Rene Descarte

Those in power want only to perpetuate it.
William O. Douglas


The most beautiful thing we can 
experience is the mysterious.  
He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer wonder and stand 
rapt in awe is as good as dead;
his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein

Perfection of means and confusion of 
ends seems to characterize our age.
Albert Einstein

No man thoroughly understands a truth 
until he has contended against it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not the employer who pays the 
wages---he only handles the money.  
It is the product that pays the wages.
Henry Ford

Creative minds have always been known 
to survive any kind of bad training.
Anna Freud

When I am working on a problem, I never 
think about beauty.  I Think only of how to 
solve the problem.  But when I have 
finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I 
know it is wrong.
Buckminster Fuller

The service we render others is really the 
rent we pay for our room on Earth.
Sir Wilfred Grenfell

Universal education is the most corroding 
and disintegrating poison that liberalism 
has invented for its own destruction.
Adolf Hitler

Many of the insights of a saint stem from 
his experience as a sinner.
Eric Hoffer

Nothing in the world, not all the armies, is 
so powerful as an idea whose time has 
come.
Victor Hugo

Facts do not cease to exist because they 
are ignored.
Aldous Huxley

In nature there are neither rewards or 
punishments; there are only 
consequences.
George Iles
I’m a great believer in luck and I find the 
harder I work the more I have of it.
Thomas Jefferson

The natural progress of things is for liberty 
to yield and government to gain ground.
Thomas Jefferson

The road to hell is paved with good 
intentions.
Samuel Johnson

Love doesn’t make the world go around,
love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
Franklin P. Jones

Experience is what enables you to 
recognize a mistake when you make it 
again.
Franklin  P. Jones

Our task is not to fix the blame for the 
past, but to fix the course for the future.
John F. Kennedy

It may be those who do most, dream 
most.
Stephen Leacock

Tact is the ability to describe others as 
they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

Those who suppress freedom always do so 
in the name of law and order.
John Lindsay

Corrupt, stupid grasping functionaries will 
make at least as big a muddle of 
socialism as stupid, grasping and 
acquisitive employers can make of 
capitalism.
Walter Lippmann

Truth in science can be defined as the 
working hypothesis best suited to open the 
way to the next better one.
Konrad Lorenz

An individual has not started living until he 
can rise above the narrow confines of  his
individualistic concerns to the broader 
concerns of humanity.
Martin Luther King Jr.


We are prone to judge success by the 
index of our salaries or the size of our 
automobiles, rather than by the quality of 
our service and relationship to humanity.
Martin Luther King Jr.

The road to affluence is paved with good 
inventions.
Charles J.C. Lyall

Knowledge consists not of facts 
themselves but the understanding of the 
relationships among facts.
Charles J.C. Lyall

Lord, grant that I may always desire more 
than I can accomplish
Michelangelo

If you steal from one, it’s plagiarism; if you 
steal from many, it’s research.
Wilson Mizner

Trend is not destiny.
Lewis Mumford

Our major obligation is not to mistake 
slogans for solutions.
Edward Morrow

If liberty means anything at all, it means 
the right to tell people what they do not 
want to hear.
George Orwell

Chance favors the trained mind.
Loius Pasteur

What is honored in a country will be 
cultivated there.
Plato

Concentrated power has always been the 
enemy of liberty.
Ronald Reagan

If you are afraid of being lonely, don’t try 
to be right.
Jules Renard

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get 
run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers

No one can make you feel inferior without 
your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt


Do what you can, with what you have, 
where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt

One’s friends are that part of the human 
race with which one can be human.
Santayana

Liberty means responsibility.  That is why 
most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

Appearance overpowers even the truth.
Simonides of Ceos

Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but is 
profoundly inconvenient.
Rev. Sydney Smith

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates

All warfare is based on deception.
Sun Tzu

The more corrupt the state, the more 
numerous the laws.
Tacitus

If you can’t convince them, confuse 
them.
Harry S. Truman

Money won’t buy happiness, but it will pay 
the salaries of a large research staff to 
study the problem.
Bill Vaughan

As long as people believe in absurdities, 
they will commit atrocities.
Voltaire

Be obscure clearly.
E.B. White

It requires a very unusual mind to make an 
analysis of the obvious.
Alfred North Whitehead


The truth is rarely pure, and never simple.

Only the shallow know themselves.

You are who you are, regardless of who 
you think you are.
All 3 by Oscar Wilde
A great deal of formal ethics is clever 
evasion.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

All empty souls tend toward extreme 
opinions.
William Butler Yeats

Unknown attribution, but still great:

Some people handle the truth carelessly.  
Others never touch it at all.

Money can’t buy love, but it improves 
your bargaining position.

No single snowflake ever feels responsible 
for the avalanche.

Bonus quotes:

I tremble for my country when I reflect 
that God is just.
Thomas Jefferson

A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an 
architect can only advise his client to 
plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright

It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.
Howard Ruff

Faced with the choice between changing 
one’s mind, and proving that there is no 
need to do so, almost everybody gets 
busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The promised land always looks better 
from a distance.
Pat Healy

No matter what you believe, you always 
find some people on your side that you 
wish were on the other side.
Jascha Heifetz

When we all think alike, no one thinks very 
much.
Walter Lippmann

After all is said and done, a hell of a lot 
more is said than done.
Clark Olmstead

Regulation is the substitution of error for 
chance.
Fred Emery

Loneliness is something you can’t walk 
away from
William Feather

There is more to life than increasing its 
speed.
Mohandas K. Gandhi

A president cannot always be popular.
Harry S. Truman

Criticize behavior, not people.
Paul Rubin

Customers want 1/4” holes, not 1/4” drills.
MBA Magazine

Example is leadership.
Albert Schweitzer

All progress depends on the unreasonable 
man.
George Bernard Shaw

Quality is what the customer says he 
needs, not what our tests indicate is 
satisfactory.
Tom Peters

The road to hell is paved with good 
excuses.
Walter Shawlee 2

It is what it is.
Bob Sibson

+This short intellectual coffee break is 
brought to you by the interesting people at 
SPHERE RESEARCH CORPORATION, who 
happen to collect quotes, and also 
believe the following to be true:

}Letting a powerful idea 
loose in the world is like 
letting light into a darkened 
room.  It remains 
unchanged, but it looks 
completely different.~