Hell
 | "Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice" - G.K. Chesterton |
| "Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself" -George Santayana |
| "I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell" - Harry Truman |
| "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just" - Jefferson |
| "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality" - Dante |
| "The problem with living to be 'true to yourself' is that you end up having to live with yourself." R Scott Richards |
| "To have been appointed by God to eternal suffering is a far more real, if more appalling, dignity than any possessed by even the most highly developed animal." - Glenn Tinder |
| "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" - Samuel
Johnson See also: |
| Responsibility |
Human nature
| "Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed" - Lincoln |
| "Most ignorance is vincible ignorance: we don't know because we don't want to know" - A. Huxley |
| "Understanding our true nature as people is the key to hope" - R. Scott Richards |
| "Without forgiveness life is governed by ... an endless cycle of resentment and retailation" - Roberto Assagioli |
| "Liberty too can corrupt, and absolute liberty can corrupt absolutely" - Getrude Himmelfarb |
| If only peace were as easy as turning on CNN, maybe all the "Bosnias" could have been prevented. - Laura Dickey (ldickey@silver.ucs.indiana.edu) |
Hypocrisy
| "The safest way to avoid hypocrisy is simple; eliminate the standards one might have trouble keeping" - R Scott Richards |
| "For of course the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it" - P.W. Bridgman |
| If you're hypocritical long enough, you are no longer a hypocrite. --Nietzche |
Information / free speech
From "J.D. Falk" jdfalk@cais.com:
| "Information is the currency of democracy." -Thomas Jefferson |
| "Information's pretty thin stuff unless mixed with experience." - Clarence Day |
| "The First Amendment was designed to protect offensive speech, because nobody ever tries to ban the other kind." - Mike Godwin, staff counsel, EFF |
| "The right to be heard does not include the right to be taken
seriously." --Hubert Humphrey |
Language / precision
| "How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms" - Aristotle |
| "A problem well stated is a problem half solved" - Charles Kettering |
| "Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves" - Lewis Carroll |
| "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg" - Lincoln |
| "Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!" - Tom Lehrer |
| "Confusion, remember, breeds contempt" - Gareth Harvey |
| "For of course the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it" - P.W. Bridgman |
| "In day-to-day life we demand precision. Sincere, subjective thinking doesn't prevent large lawsuits" - R Scott Richards |
| "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words." - Philip K. Dick |
| "Seek simplicity but distrust it." --A N Whitehead |
Love
| "It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor" - Eric Hoffer |
| "I define love thus: The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." - M Scott Peck |
| "It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses" - Dag Hammarsskjold |
| "Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood." - Louise Beal |
| "Love ain't nothin' but sex misspelled." - the title of a book by Harlan Ellison. |
| "If I am only for myself, what am I?" - Hillel From kharris@ozonline.com.au (Kevin Harris): |
| "Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope." - Josh Billings |
| ""Take away love, and our earth is a tomb." - Robert Browning |
| "The first duty of love is to listen." - Paul Tillich |
| "To love another person is to see the face of God." - Unknown |
| "Who wills, can. Who tries, does. Who loves, lives." - Unknown |
Lying
| "A liar loses the choice whether to conceal or falsify once challenged by the victim" - Paul Ekman |
| "Falsifying an emotion can cover the leakage of a concealed emotion... The smile is the mask most frequently employed" - Paul Ekman |
| "Liars tend to be most careful about their choice of words" - Paul Ekman |
| "No clue to deceit is reliable for all human beings, but singly and in combination they can help the lie catcher in judging most people" - Paul Ekman |
| "Most lies succeed because no one goes through the work to figure out how to catch them" - Paul Ekman |
| "People often mistake what I say for what I am thinking." -Idi Amin Dada |
| "No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth" - Jean Giraudoux |
Meaning
| ""Take away love, and our earth is a tomb." - Robert
Browning From vanhoose@gdl.msu.edu (Todd E Van Hoosear): |
| What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to
the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth
than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present
not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a
man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be
silent? -- Feynman, Richard (*) |
| Knowledge depth understanding truth meaning art mystery |
| Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. -- Hoffer, Eric |
| Passion meaning life |
| I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so
sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a
broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to
its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and
genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were
sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it
in my next excursion. -- Thoreau, Henry David (*) |
| life meaning simplicity meanness |
| All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. -- Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaevich (1828-1910) |
| Life love meaning comprehension understanding |
| I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of
humanity, and I saw that not two, or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands,
millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were both able to
live and to die. All these men were well acquainted with the meaning of life
and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died,
and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing. -- Tolstoy, Leo Nikolaevich (1828-1910) |
| life death suffering humanity meaning struggle |
Mind / intellect
| "By annihilating the desires you annihilate the mind." - Claude Adrian Helvetius |
| "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use" - Galileo |
Pridefulness / conceit
| "There cannot be a God, because if there were one, I would not believe that I was not he" - Nietzsche |
| "The constitution not only is, but ought to be, what the judges say it is" - Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes |
| "Tolerance is the assumption of superiority" - Wendell Wilkie |
| "Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pains of stupidity" - Frank Leahy |
| "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways" - Isaiah 55:8 |
| "I am so smart I make myself sick" - Judy Stein |
| "Many refuse to accept the reality of a personal God because they are unwilling to submit to His authority" - Kurt Bruner |
| "The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognizes no authority higher than its own and no value higher than its judgement of truth. - Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged" |
| "The arch-flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self" - Francis Bacon |
| He is a self-made man, very much in love with his creator. --Benjamin Disraeli, about one of the Liberal Party's leaders, John Bright. |
Purpose
| "The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it" - William James |
| "Great minds have purposes, others have wishes" - Washington Irving |
| "Some men see things as they are, and say, 'Why?' I dream of things
that never were, and say, 'Why not?'" - George Bernard Shaw |
Religion
| "We major in spiritual sentiment and virtually dismiss the importance of spiritual content" - R. Scott Richards |
| "But if God is gone and man is no longer master, then who is master?" - Milan Kundera |
| "Man thinks, God laughs" - Jewish proverb |
| "Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion" - Wilhelm Stekel |
| "Don't be agnostic. Be something." - Robert Frost |
| "There cannot be a God, because if there were one, I would not believe that I was not he" - Nietzsche |
| "The no-mind not-thinks non-thoughts about no-things" - Buddha |
| "Your mandate for spiritual adancement must firstly, contain no logical thought, and secondly, use lots of silly words." - Gareth Harvey |
| "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways" - Isaiah 55:8 |
| "Many refuse to accept the reality of a personal God because they are unwilling to submit to His authority" - Kurt Bruner |
| "The true religion is built upon the rock; the rest are tossed, upon
the waves of time." - Francis
Bacon Thanks to r@asu.edu: |
| Religion is the opiate of the masses. --Marx |
| Religion is a mass psychosis. --Freud |
| If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. ? |
| Without God, all things are possible. --Dostoevsky |
| God is dead. --Neitzsche |
| If God does exist, I don't think he's vengeful; I just think he's an underacheiver. --Woody Allen |
| Why hast thou forsaken me? --Jesus |
| If God dropped acid, would he see people? --Steven Wright |
| If I was God, I wouldn't let them do that to my kid. --Tom Hulce (in a line from a film of his) |
| If there really is a heaven, then how come you don't see more old people practicing the harp? --Mark Twain |
| Only the fool hath said there is no God. --Somewhere in the Bible. |
- ["The fool says in his heart: "there is no God" Psalm 14:1]
Reality
| "Reality is what refuses to go away when I stop thinking about it" - Philip K. Dick |
| "The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort." - M Scott Peck, M.D. |
| "Reality is nothing but a collective hunch." --Jane Wagner See also: |
| Denial |
| Truth |
Responsibility
| "For a person to feel responsible for his actions, he must sense that the behavior has flowed from the self." -Stanley Milgram |
| "Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on." |
| "Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization or entity. But this means we then give away our power to that entity." - M Scott Peck |
| "The price of greatness is responsibility" - Churchill |
| "While we are free to choose our actions, we are not free to choose the consequences of our actions" - Stephen Covey |
| "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" -- Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| "Having a passionate committment to social justice does not excuse you from knowing what in the hell you're talking about" -- Corollary #1 |
| "Responsibility is the one thing people dread most of all. Yet it is the one thing in the world that develops us" - Frank Crane |
| "A society can't operate if everyone has rights and no-one has responsibilities" - Roger Conner |
| "Men do less than they ought unless they do all they can" - Thomas Carlyle |
School
| "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school I wonder how I can think at all" - Paul Simon |
| "There are only two places where time takes precedent over the job to be done; school and prison" - William Glasser |
| "A child miseducated is a child lost." - J.F. Kennedy |
| "The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn
things" - Chesterton Education is very important. School, however, is another matter. |
Self / self-reliance / self-respect
| "In his private heart no man much respects himself" - Mark Twain |
| "Egotism is the anaesthetic that dulls the pains of stupidity" - Frank Leahy |
| "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" - Hillel |
| "The problem with living to be 'true to yourself' is that you end up
having to live with yourself." R Scott Richards |
Stupidity
| "Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas"- Milan Kundera |
| "There is one quality greater than hardness of heart, and that is softness of head" - T. Roosevelt |
| "If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head" - Randolph Bourne |
| "There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools" - Nicolas Chamfort |
| "If there are no stupid questions, then what sort of questions do stupid people ask?" - Dogbert |
| "The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he." -- Karl Kraus |
| "Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity" -- Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| "Having a passionate committment to social justice does not excuse you from knowing what in the hell you're talking about" -- Corollary #1 |
| "If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish
thing" - Anatole France See also: Plato defines stupidity (somewhere on the web - I've lost it; but I would like to point your attention to a cute little essay about Stupidity which I believe every student should read on first joining his University). |
Tolerance
| "I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance" - Coleridge |
| "Tolerance is the assumption of superiority" - Wendell Wilkie |
| "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions" -
Chesterton |
Truth
| "The biggest liar in the world is 'they say'" - Douglas Malloch |
| "Our society finds truth too strong a medicine to digest undiluted. In its purest form, truth is not a polite tap on the shoulder. It is a howling reproach." - Ted Koppel |
| "To navigate by a landmark tied to your own ship's head is ultimately impossible" - Paul Ramsey |
| "For of course the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it" - P.W. Bridgman |
| "Truth will come sooner out of error than from confusion" - Francis Bacon |
| "The insidious error lulling us into a false sense of completion is the worst kind of bug" - Jim Louderback |
| "Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry" - Henry Ward Beecher |
| "The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading" - Bertrand Russell |
| "If you don't know where you are going, you will probably wind up somewhere else" - Laurence J Peter |
| "A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets" - Athur C Clarke |
| "If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing" - Anatole France |
| "No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth" - Jean Giraudoux |
| "If you hold to my teaching, you are truly my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" - Jesus |
| "Sometimes sarcasm helps us think more clearly" - Dogbert |
| "Boy, the truth gets vicious when you corner it" - Dogbert |
| "You say that you have a great respect for truth. Is that why you always place yourself at such a respectful distance from it? - Escriva |
| "In day-to-day life we demand precision. Sincere, subjective thinking doesn't prevent large lawsuits" - R Scott Richards |
| "Truth can be a dangerous thing. It is quite patient and relentless"- R Scott Richards |
| "Sincerity is a worthless virute unless it is invested in truth" - R Scott Richards |
| "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg" - Lincoln |
| "Spiritual maturity is a lifelong process of replacing lies with truth" - Kurt D. Bruner |
| Prov 23:23 Buy truth, and do not sell it, Get wisdom and instruction and understanding. |
| Zech 8:16 'These are the things which you should do: speak the truth to one another; judge with truth and judgment for peace in your gates. |
| Prov 3:3 Do not let kindness and truth leave you; Bind them around your neck, Write them on the tablet of your heart. |
| "The true religion is built upon the rock; the rest are tossed, upon the waves of time." - Francis Bacon |
| "Time's great glory is to calm contending kings, unmask falsehood,
and bring truth to light." --Shakespeare (thanks to r@asu.edu) From: tmcmasters@aol.com (TMcmasters) |
| "It takes two to speak truth - One to speak, and another to hear." - Henry David Thoreau |
| "Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails." - Clarence Darrow |
| "Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness
realized by man ever dies, or can die." - Thomas Carlyle See also: |
| Denial |
| Reality |
| Francis Bacon: Of Truth |
The Man In The Glass
- By ?
- When you get what you want in your struggle for self
- And the world makes you king for a day Just go to the mirror and look
- at yourself And see what that man has to say.
- For it isn't your father or mother or wife
- Who judgement upon you must pass.
- The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
- Is the one staring back from the glass.
- Some people may think you a straight shooting chum
- And call you a wonderful guy.
- But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
- If you can't look him straight in the eye.
- He's the fellow to please, never mind all the rest.
- For he's with you clear up to the end.
- And you've passed your dangerous difficult test
- If the man in the glass is your friend.
- You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
- And get pats on the back as you pass.
- But your final reward will be heartaches and tears
- If you've cheated the man in the glass.
-