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Research Archive
It is the Editor's conviction that the quotes presented in this site should be read and thought about one at a time, and not skimmed through in their entirety, if the quotes are indeed to serve as food for thought. Nevertheless, there may be persons who wish to examine the whole list for analysis, review, etc. The complete list is therefore offered here in three segments. The segment below covers from Jan. 1 through Apr. 30.
THOUGHT FOR TODAY: Ideas that Expand Your Mind ============================================== 0101NEW YEAR'S DAY "The most important thing is to know what you are good at. Very few people know that, because it comes so easy. The second thing is to know when to change. Don't stay in a situation that corrupts. If you are no longer learning anything, if your work no longer challenges you, then get out. If you are a knowledge worker, figure on having a second career." --Peter Drucker 0102 "Never fear the want of business. A man who qualifies himself well for his calling, never fails of employment in it." --Thomas Jefferson 0103 "It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time." --Winston Churchill 0104 "Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character." --Albert Einstein 0105 "If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?" --Thomas Huxley 0106 "I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near." --Margaret Thatcher 0107 "There are no material rewards for spiritual excellence, and no material punishments for spiritual dereliction." --W. A. White 0108
BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS "As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters." --Edward Gibbon 0109 "The saint and the psychopath share the same kind of experience. It is just that the saint has the mysterious virtue of being able to transcend this experience, and the psychopath is broken or made murderous." --Norman Mailer 0110 "Disobedience is a right that belongs to every human being, and it becomes a sacred duty when it springs from civility, or, which is the same thing, love." --M. K. Gandhi 0111 "If, in the course of my life, it has been in any degree useful to the cause of humanity, the fact itself bears its full reward." --Thomas Jefferson 0112 "That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God." --Albert Einstein 0113 "The more dangerous form of censorship is internal, imposed by artists who are afraid of challenging established values." --Andrzei Wajda 0114 "One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity. Credulity is a greater evil in the present day than it ever was before, because, owing to the growth of education, it is much easier than it used to be to spread misinformation, and, owing to democracy, the spread of misinformation is more important than in former times to the holders of power." --Bertrand Russell 0115
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., BIRTHDAY "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." --Martin Luther King, Jr. 0116 "The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits that favor that theory." --Thomas Jefferson 0117
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S BIRTHDAY "I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction of the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own... I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly. The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong; and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right." --Benjamin Franklin 0118 "No one who accepts the sovereignty of truth can be a foot soldier in a party or a movement." --Anonymous 0119 "Consistency is not the hobgoblin of little minds -- it is the hallmark of a short life!" --Ben B. 0120 "A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak." --Anonymous 0121 "If you search you will see in everyone a fragment of yourself. Look carefully so as to see at last all that you might have been. Everyone lives something of yours. In you there are all those various possibilities." --Karel Capek 0122 "No one can escape being interesting. The human condition condemns us to being interesting as we struggle from one absurdity or humiliation to the next." --Anonymous 0123 "That's why we require a strong government... The savages all throughout society are only waiting for the lights to go out." --Gene Wolfe 0124 "Freedom implies complete solitude -- an inward state of mind that is not dependent on any stimulus, on any knowledge." --J. Krishnamurti 0125 "Businessmen have to trust one another because civilized life is otherwise impossible." --James Schroder 0126 "Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul." --Henry David Thoreau 0127 "When people are fanatically dedicated to a belief or a cause, it is because these beliefs and causes are in doubt, and they attempt to extinguish that doubt with their blind, fanatical dedication." --Anonymous 0128 "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." --Albert Einstein 0129 "You don't do any favors beating about the bush. You think you're being polite, but you're actually just being difficult." --Anonymous 0130 "How could we even begin to disarm greed and envy? Perhaps by being much less greedy and envious ourselves; perhaps by resisting the temptation of letting our luxuries become needs; and perhaps by even scrutinizing our needs to see if they cannot be simplified and reduced." --E. F. Schumacher 0131 "When you want to hurry things, that means you do not care about the things themselves, but want to get on to something different. A lust for newness replaces the enjoyment of this moment." -- Anonymous 0201
NATIONAL FREEDOM DAY "In everything that lies outside the provision of the necessaries of life, there must be individualism, personal initiative, variety. The fight for freedom is not to be won by any mere change in our economic system. It is to be won only by a constant resistance to the tyranny of officials, and a constant realization that mental freedom is the most precious of goods." --Bertrand Russell 0202 "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good you'll have to ram them down people's throats." --Howard Aiken 0203 "Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane." --R. D. Laing 0204 "If you are on the side of what is right, even if you are defeated, in the end you will win, because the spirit of right is eternal." --Anonymous 0205 "The truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have." --Eric Fromm 0206
RONALD REAGAN BIRTHDAY "There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination and wonder." --Ronald Reagan "It is dangerous and unhealthy not to follow your creative impulses." -- Anonymous 0207 "Dreams, ideas, and plans not only are an escape, they give me purpose, a reason to hang on." --Steven Callahan 0208 "It's what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one's made of... You are -- your life, and nothing else." --Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit. 0209 "Belief is a form of security, a bastion against the discovery of truth." - -Anonymous 0210 "Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear." --Thomas Jefferson 0211
THOMAS EDISON BIRTHDAY "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." --Thomas Alva Edison "Greatness in man is unrelenting, concentrated focus on a goal." --Anonymous 0212
LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." --Abraham Lincoln 0213 "In the United States, loving for many people entails a risk. Many people look upon a person who loves as a sucker. They want to make people love them, so that they can exploit them." --Fritz Perls 0214
VALENTINE'S DAY "A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." --Albert Einstein 0215 "If life's meaning were explained to us, we probably wouldn't understand it. To think that man can find it is absurd. We can live without understanding what the world is or who we are." --Jorge Luis Borges. 0216 "A true confession would be a chronicle of the humiliations that make up 75 percent of every human being's emotional life." --George Orwell 0217 "Give me your tired, your poor; Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free: The wretched refuse of your teeming shore --the fact that the lower classes of Europe were able to come to America and make this nation the greatest on earth proves that there was and is nothing inherently inferior about those classes. They only needed an opportunity to do what they were capable of." --Anonymous 0218 "I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life." --Corazon Aquino 0219 "Certainly, no girl has ever been ruined by a book, but the path to ruin has been mapped by books, and no one can say how many have traveled a path made plain for them by an irresponsible book." -- Anonymous 0220 "Don't buy a work of art unless you can't live without it." --William S. Paley 0221
MALCOLM X ASSASSINATION "Bigotry doesn't help anybody, including the bigot. It's a waste of energy, a waste of your mind. Listen, I don't judge a man because of the color of his skin, I don't judge people because they're white... I judge you because of what you do and what you practice. I'm not against people because they're Jews. I'm against racists." --Malcolm X 0222
WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY "It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; -- that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immoveable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our Country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts." --George Washington 0223 "A people do not establish democracy merely by voting and choosing a government. Democracy is a form of tension between opposing forces that is ongoing and that helps map a path freely chosen by the people." --Anonymous 0224 "How does one come by one's morality? Surely by reading the poets." --Virginia Woolf 0225 "The important thing is not to stop questioning." --Albert Einstein 0226 "The best historians submit to their material rather than enforce their will upon it." --Barbara Tuchman 0227 "Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. You can't create until you're willing to subordinate the creative impulses to the constriction of a form." --Anonymous 0228 "Any progress in knowledge, any worthwhile achievement, depends on our attempts to transcend one particular viewpoint and develop an expanded consciousness that takes in the world more fully." -- Anonymous 0229 "Sometimes life is so exquisitely difficult that its demands on our character raise us to the very heights of what it means to be human. If a patient came to me with a complaint of such grandeur, I'd send him away. I'd tell him his difficulty is worth living for, suffering for, even dying for." --An anonymous psychiatrist 0301 "Men are as oppressed by macho mythology as women are." --Erica Jong 0302 "Schizophrenia is not a disease but a choice, made by someone who opts to become a dependent, exploitative, or predatory person." -- Thomas Szasz 0303 "If language is as inextricably tied up with consciousness as it seems to be, then the continuing diminishment of our inclination to use it to express in letters the times in which we live could mean that an element of human consciousness itself is on the verge of disappearing." --Anonymous 0304 "The free intellect is the chief engine of human progress." --Bertrand Russell 0305 "A correct view makes all the events of life constructive." -- Anonymous 0306
MICHAELANGELO'S BIRTHDAY "The consummate artist has that perfect self-confidence so that whatever his other roles in life, he knows that he can do what no one else has done before him, what no one else could possibly be doing now. And what comes with that self-confidence is an essential indifference to what the voices of the time may say about him. He knows what his value is and that the future will agree." --Anonymous 0307 "When someone lands a job, receives a promotion, or wins a contest solely because of an external attribute such as inherited physical beauty, the result is often anxiety, doubt, and questions about self- worth." --Baumeister 0308 "More and more I come to value charity and love of one's fellow being above everything else... All our lauded technological progress -- our very civilization -- is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal." --Albert Einstein 0309 "Don't talk about projects you contemplate and work that is in progress. It dissipates the energy you need to do them." --Michael Crichton 0310 "You aren't born with your self. You are born facing a mass of possibilities, a mass of other people's ideas and preconceptions -- and you have to mold a self by working through those raw materials." - -from V. S. Naipaul 0311 "My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair." --Thomas Jefferson 0312 "Some critics argue that one is as likely to be helped by the advice of an empathetic friend or corporate counselor as by an expensive and academically pedigreed analyst or psychologist." --Robyn M. Dawes 0313 "Instead of leading to unity, wholeness, rational purpose and conscious direction, American history simply drifted with the course of events and the movement of power, often taking unexpected turns, while ideas had little capacity to shape a changing reality in the image of some ideal, and theory quietly fell by the wayside as Americans did what they desired to do and could get away with." --John Patrick Diggins 0314 "I can deal with real troubles; it is the imaginary ones that get me down." --Keats 0315 "Life becomes extremely valuable once you pass 60. You become more uniquely yourself, more whole. You stop obsessing about what your mother did or did not do to you before age four, or obsessing about your nose or your thigh. You become liberated from the things that tore you up before." --Betty Friedan 0316 "He who lets his spirit be broken by adversity certainly has no success. But if adversity only bends a man, it creates in him a power to react that is bound in time to manifest itself." --I Ching 0317 "If I decided I wanted to do something, I'd do it. Someone would have to stop me, because I will not stop myself. Whatever I do in life, I want to do it to the absolute maximum." --Nikki Giovanni 0318 "In most American science classes students learn scientific concepts and facts that they feed back on tests. They do not learn methods of research, and they do not perform any research." --Joseph Berger 0319 "When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force... It is contrary to our manhood if we obey laws repugnant to our conscience." --M. K. Gandhi 0320 "Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition." --Freedom From Religion Foundation 0321 "However sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, class, religion, or all four. However far it may expand, the progression inevitably rests on unequal power and airtight roles within the family." --Gloria Steinem 0322 "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." --Albert Einstein 0323 "To acquire wisdom is to move from cocksure ignorance to thoughtful uncertainty." --Anonymous 0324 "The evolution of consciousness culminates in an all-inclusive consciousness that functions in the context of the infinite and the eternal." --Phiroz Mehta 0325 "A good model is one that does not account for all of the data, for some of the data are bound to be wrong. Try to squeeze it all into a theory and you'll get a teetering architecture that is bound to fall." --Francis Crick 0326 "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." --Max Planck 0327 "I am weary of Philosophers, Theologians, Politicians, and Historians. They are an immense mass of absurdities, vices, and lies." --John Adams 0328 "I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses." --Johann Kepler 0329 "Question everything, dismiss nothing." --Anonymous 0330 "What is written without effort is, in general, read without pleasure.' - Samuel Johnson 0331 "The quality of a man's life has got to be a measure of his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor." --Vince Lombardi 0401
APRIL FOOL'S DAY "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible." --Bertrand Russell 0402 "Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority." --Thomas Huxley 0403 "To make laws that man cannot and will not obey, only serves to bring all law into contempt." --Elizabeth Cady Stanton 0404 "Waiting to discover which way the wind is blowing is an excellent way to learn how to be a follower, but not how to become a leader." -- Roger Enrico 0405 "If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking." --George S. Patton 0406 "The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career." --Albert Einstein 0407 "You ought to do what you want to do. The worst thing to do would be to get involved with a person or subject or school that you don't find congenial. Most of the Hitler and Stalin scholars I know are depressed people. I suppose that kind of thing has to be done, but I don't want to do it. I want to have fun. --Arthur S. Link 0408 "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. to be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." --Thoreau 0409 "Art is the essence of awareness." --Louise Nevelson 0410 "Anything truly revolutionary is created by a few who see what is true and are willing to live according to that truth." --J. Krishnamurti 0411 "The richer a society, the more impossible it becomes to do worthwhile things without immediate pay-off." --E. F. Schumacher 0412 "Cultural questions have little interest for practical men, who regard money and power as the proper ends for nations as for individuals." -- Bertrand Russell 0413
THOMAS JEFFERSON'S BIRTHDAY "All we can do is make the best of our friends, love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad; but no more think of rejecting them for it, than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two." --Thomas Jefferson 0414 "Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but by perseverance." --Samuel Johnson 0415
HENRY JAMES' BIRTHDAY "Evidently the country that produced Hawthorne and James no longer wishes to believe in the human soul. Discontinuity, random parades of shocking events, constitute the phenomenology of American popular fiction." --Anthony Burgess 0416 "Any society organized around a blueprint is inherently totalitarian." --Karl Popper 0417 "An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains." --Henri- Fr_d_ric Amiel 0418 "If you go out looking for friends, you're going to find they're very scarce. If you go out to be a friend, you'll find them everywhere." -- Anonymous 0419
OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBING "The second argument of principle against the method of minority violence is that abandonment of law, when it becomes widespread, lets loose the wild beast, and gives a free rein to the primitive lusts and egotisms which civilization in some degree curbs." --Bertrand Russell 0420 "The point is to develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition and to guide the child over to important fields for society. Such a school demands from the teacher that he be a kind of artist in his province." --Albert Einstein 0421 "Until we know what others think they know, we cannot truly understand their acts." --Walter Lippman 0422 "My experience has shown me that we win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party." --M. K. Gandhi 0423 "Discard conceptual images about age, about anything! If you start to believe them, they will infect your mind, and you will start to live them and to act them out in everything you think and do." --Anonymous 0424 "To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price." --E. F. Schumacher 0425 "A scholar always builds on other people's work; therefore it is necessary that he know and fully understand the work of others before he can make a contribution himself. But not all the advancement of knowledge comes from scholars." --Anonymous 0426
CHERNOBYL MELTDOWN DAY "As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss." --Noam Chomsky 0427 "No staff is better than the range of differences that the men who compose it represents." --Jacques Barzum 0428 "It is not only he who speaks contrary to what he knows who lies, but even more he who speaks contrary to what he does not know." -- Nietzsche 0429 "It is this colossal opportunity to escape from life that brings yokels swarming to the cities, not any mere lust for money." --H. L. Mencken 0430 "The way to develop a good organization is simple and straightforward: promote the good people, and let the worthless ones go. Mediocre organizations find various excuses for doing just the opposite." --Anonymous
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