Serious Thoughts
Selected by Thomas Ulatowski
~ George Washington ~
~ George Washington ~
“Promote as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.”
~ Mark Twain ~
“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.”
~ Robert H. Jackson ~
“There is no such thing as an achieved liberty; like electricity, there can be no substantial storage...”
“Lying has always been a highly approved Nazi technique.”
~ Theodore Roosevelt ~
“The joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life's burdens.”
“Our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests.”
~ George Marshall ~
“The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it.”
“The progress of science depends on facts and not fancies or prejudice.”
~ John Kenneth Galbraith ~
“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.”
“War remains the decisive human failure.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi ~
“Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time.”
“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
~ Richard Dawkins ~
“Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”
“Evolution is not a mater of opinion, it's a mater of fact.”
~ Dwight D. Eisenhower ~
“The supreme quality for a leader is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible...”
“Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.”
~ Abraham Lincoln ~
“Let us have faith that right makes might.”
“With malice toward none, with charity for all...”
~ Barack Obama ~
“Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they're defeated by better ideas.”
“A great nation doesn't shy from the truth. It strengthens us. It emboldens us.”
~ Karl Popper ~
“An open society rejects absolute authority.”
“Truth itself is beyond all human authority.”
~ Greta Thunberg ~
“We say no more blah, blah, blah.”
“Hope is not blah, blah, blah. Hope is telling the truth.”
~ Antony Flew ~
“Do I sincerely want to be right?”
“No man who is indifferent to argument and to evidence can claim to be concerned for truth.”
“Contradiction must be intolerable to anyone who really cares about truth.”
~ Christopher Hitchens ~
“I can tell you that of the suicide bombing population one hundred percent is faith-based.”
“Religion poisons everything.”
“Religion makes morally normal people say and do disgusting and wicked things.”
~ Christopher Hitchens ~
~ John Adams ~
“Let every sluice of knowledge be opened and set a-flowing.”
“‘Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud’ is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.”
“Facts are stubborn things.”
“Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.”
~ John Adams ~
~ John F. Kennedy ~
“Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education.”
“Only an educated and informed people will be a free people.”
“Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man.”
“I speak of peace ...as the necessary rational end of rational men.”
~ John F. Kennedy ~
~ Voltaire ~
“Love truth, but pardon error.”
“Opinions have caused more ills than the plague or earthquakes on this little globe of ours.”
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
~ Voltaire ~
~ John Locke ~
“To love truth for truth's sake is the seed-plot of all other virtues.”
“The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”
“He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood.”
“All wealth is the product of labor.”
~ John Locke ~
~ Stephen Hawking ~
“Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible.”
“Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking.”
“It doesn't have to be like this... With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded.”
“All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”
~ Stephen Hawking ~
~ George Santayana ~
“[W]hen experience is not retained ...infancy is perpetual.”
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.”
~ George Santayana ~
~ Buddha ~
“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
“What you think you become.”
“Happiness is a journey, not a destination.”
“Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love.”
“He who subdues himself shall be free.”
~ Buddha ~
~ Martin Luther King Jr. ~
“Our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of non-violence because our end is a community at peace with itself.”
“Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“True peace is the presence of justice.”
“Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr. ~
~ Will Rogers ~
“Last year we said, ‘Things can't go on like this,’ and they didn't, they got worse.”
“A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth.”
“When ignorance gets started it knows no bounds.”
“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”
“You can't say that civilization don't advance ...in every war they kill you in a new way.”
~ Will Rogers ~
~ Bertrand Russell ~
“Love is wise. Hatred is foolish.”
“I do like clarity and exact thinking.”
“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”
“War does not decide who is right--war decides who is left.”
“No human being that I can respect needs the consolation of things that are untrue!”
~ Bertrand Russell ~
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein ~
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.”
“Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.”
“Anything that can be said, can be said clearly. ...Anything that can be thought, can be thought clearly.”
“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”
“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”
“One must always be prepared to learn something totally new.”
~ Ludwig Wittgenstein ~
~ Thomas Jefferson ~
“A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
“He who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors.”
“Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.”
“I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
“Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them.”
~ Thomas Jefferson ~
~ George Orwell ~
“Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.”
“Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.”
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
~ George Orwell ~
~ David Crosby ~
“Peace is not an awful lot to ask.”
~ Tom Johnston ~
“Without love, where would you be now?”
~ Franklin D. Roosevelt ~
“I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.”
~ Ethan Allen ~
“Reason...must be the standard by which we determine the respective claims of revelation; for otherwise we may as well subscribe to the divinity of the one as of the other...”
~ Aristotle ~
“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
“The secret to humor is surprise.”
“The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor...”
“Friends hold a mirror up to each other... that helps them improve themselves as persons.”
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.”
“[T]he hardest victory is over self. ...Through discipline comes freedom.”
“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
~ Aristotle ~
~ John Tyndall ~
“It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.”
~ Cicero ~
“Let your desires be ruled by reason.”
~ Confucius ~
“The Superior Man is all-embracing and not partial. The inferior man is partial and not all-embracing.”
~ Benjamin Franklin ~
“[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom.”
“If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins...”
“All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones.”
“The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.”
“In the affairs of this world men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it.”
“There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self...”
“He that does not like civil Society ...let him retire & live among Savages.”
“He can have no right to the Benefits of Society who will not pay his Club.”
“If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately.”
~ Benjamin Franklin ~
~ Bernard Baruch ~
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
~ Sam Harris ~
“No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable...”
~ W. E. B. Du Bois ~
“Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States.”
~ Bill Maher ~
“Lies are all around you. Develop a better bullshit detector!”
“I think flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative.”
“I don't respect thinking that is dangerous, prejudicial, childish, and could get me killed.”
“The plain fact is: religion must die for mankind to live.”
“This country is not overrun with rebels & free thinkers. It's overrun with sheep & conformists.”
“Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking.”
“My personal savior is common sense.”
“I think religion is a neurological disorder.”
“Fascism is when corporations become the government.”
“To a coward, courage always looks like stupidity.”
~ Bill Maher ~
~ John McCain ~
“It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.”
~ Harry S. Truman ~
“We must be careful not to permit ourselves to be moved by personal prejudices or religious bigotry.”
~ Steven Pinker ~
“There will never be a good reason to reject reason.”
~ Brad Raffensperger ~
“Integrity Counts.”
~ Tom Paine ~
“He that rebels against reason is a real rebel.”
“Mingling religion with politics may be disavowed and reprobated by every inhabitant of America.”
“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”
“The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct.”
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
“In America, the law is king.”
“It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.”
“He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”
“Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.”
“Independence is my happiness...Reason obeys itself.”
“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected.”
~ Tom Paine ~
~ Socrates ~
“False words are not only evil in themselves ...they infect the soul with evil.”
~ Sophocles ~
“Reason is God's crowning gift to man.”
~ Jonathan Swift ~
“Reason itself is true and just.”
~ James Clerk Maxwell ~
“Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.”
~ Robert G. Ingersoll ~
“Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself. It is a question of honesty.”
“Logic is the child of a clear head and a good heart.”
“In all ages hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns on the heads of thieves, called kings.”
“Science built the Academy, superstition the inquisition.”
“We are satisfied that there can be but little liberty on earth while men worship a tyrant in heaven.”
“And why does this same God tell me how to raise my children when he had to drown his?”
“If there be an infinite Being, he does not need our help.”
“There will never be a generation of great men until there has been a generation of free women.”
“The way to be happy is to make others so.”
“I do not believe in the civilizing effects of falsehood.”
“[B]y religion I mean superstition... The effect of all superstition has been to render man barbarous.”
“Theology is not what we know about God, but what we do not know about Nature.”
“Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man.”