
The Do Good Gauge by Scott Nesler is licensed under a
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The Do Good Gauge
Measuring the Democratic Value of an Intelligent Argument
Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad. -- Thomas Paine
David S Allen ![]() | ... the values of corporations, which emphasize efficiency, maximizing profits, scientific reasoning, and winning as opposed to understanding, have become the values of the public sphere. -- Democracy, Inc Introduction (Page 2) |
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David S Allen ![]() | As historians and social critics have noted, inherent in corporate liberalism is the idea that the corporation, not the individual, is at the center of protection. -- Democracy, Inc -- Introduction Page 7. |
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David S Allen ![]() | Discourse democracy seeks to identify ways to make possible an open dialogue among citizen through the creation of public space absent governmental and corporate interference. -- Democracy, Inc. Introduction (Page 2) |
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David S Allen ![]() | Discourse is viewed as necessary for citizens to come together and realize what problems they have in common without losing individual identity, to resist forces within society that seeks to divide people, and to begin treating others with respect and dignity. The democracy we live in today is fundamentally at odds with those beliefs. One only needs to listen to political talk shows in the United States to realize that concept such as understanding, respect, and civility are not central elements of political culture. Perhaps the never have been. But if we are serious about revitalizing public live in the United States, we have to give people a reason and opportunity to get involved. -- Democracy, Inc -- Introduction -- Page 8. |
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David S Allen ![]() | Over time, the stories journalist tell about their place in democracy have changed from claiming rights enjoyed by all citizens to rights enjoyed by a privileged professional group. -- Democracy, Inc. -- Introduction -- Page 10 |
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David S Allen ![]() | The "consumer" has replaced the "citizen" in American society. -- Paraphrase of passage from page 10 of Democracy, Inc. |
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David S Allen ![]() | The structure of public life seems so entirely natural to most Americans that few question the fundamental assumptions of modern corporate ideology, including the idea that media content should be driven solely by questions of popularity, that larger corporations will provide better and more efficient service than smaller corporations, that technology can solve society's problems, and that an ideological individualism that values confrontation, winning, and capitalism is prefereable to an ideological community that values discourse and understanding. -- Democracy, Inc. - Introduction - Page 7 |
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David S Allen ![]() | What if democracy is not about attracting an audience, making money, and winning? What if democracy is more accurately defined as the need to find a common ground, as the exchange of ideas between citizens in attempt to reach understanding? - Democracy, Inc. (Page 2) |
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David S. Allen ![]() | Meaning, under discourse theory, is discursively redeemed; it does not exist solely in the author's intent but in the complex linguistic relationship between speaker and hearer. The key to creating that ethical discourse is allowing all citizens who want to participate to do so. -- Democracy, Inc. (Page 40) |
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David S. Allen ![]() | Reliance on expert knowledge does not come without cost, however. Not only does it devalue the role of the public in democracy, it also leads to the formation of powerful occupational groups that attempt to secure for themselves an area of knowledge that will insure their power. -- Democracy, Inc (Page 52) |
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James Allen ![]() | In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result. |
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Henri Frederic Amiel ![]() | Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life. |
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Walter Annenberg ![]() | All I ever seek from good deeds is a measure of respect. |
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Agile Programming as described on Wikipedia ![]() | There are many specific agile development methods. Most promote development iterations, teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project. |
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Media Democracy as described on Wikipedia ![]() | ... that the health of the democratic political system depends on the efficient, accurate, and complete transmission of social, political, and cultural information in society; that the media are the conduits of this information and should act in the public interest; that the mass media have increasingly been unable and uninterested in fulfilling this role due to increased concentration of ownership and commercial pressures; and that this undermines democracy as voters and citizens are unable to participate knowledgeably in public policy debates. Without an informed and engaged citizenry, policy issues become defined by political and corporate elites. |
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Richard Bach ![]() | Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. |
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George Bancroft ![]() | The exact measure of the progress of civilization is the degree in which the intelligence of the common mind has prevailed over wealth and brute force. |
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Jeremy Bentham ![]() | As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends. |
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Jeremy Bentham ![]() | It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong. |
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Jeremy Bentham ![]() | The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong. |
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Annie Besant ![]() | Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. |
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Bible - Mathew 7:2 ![]() | For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. |
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David Bohm ![]() | A change in meaning is a change in being. |
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David Bohm ![]() | During the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, TV, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each part of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts. Yet, in spite of this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale... |
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Napoleon Bonaparte ![]() | History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. |
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Napoleon Bonaparte ![]() | What is history but a fable agreed upon? |
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David Brooks ![]() | When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas. |
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Whitney A Brown ![]() | The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down. |
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Lenny Bruce ![]() | Communism is like one big phone company. |
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Lenny Bruce ![]() | If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses. |
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Lenny Bruce ![]() | The "what should be" never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no "what should be," there is only what is. |
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Lenny Bruce ![]() | The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them. |
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Budda ![]() | However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them? |
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Budda ![]() | There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it. |
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Budda ![]() | Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good. |
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Jacob Burckhardt ![]() | Save us from the simplifiers. |
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Caine ![]() | Faced with two evils, must not every man choose? |
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Caine ![]() | Hate is the tomb you weave. It will not save you from your suffering. |
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Caine ![]() | When you cease to strive to understand then you will know without understanding. |
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Italo Calvino ![]() | For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue between two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe that the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said. -- Invisible Cities |
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Italo Calvino ![]() | The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. -- Invisible Cities |
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George Canning ![]() | I can prove anything by statistics except the truth. |
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George Carlin ![]() | By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. |
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George Carlin ![]() | Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist. |
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Dale Carnegie ![]() | Your purpose is to make your audience see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt. Relevant detail, couched in concrete, colorful language, is the best way to recreate the incident as it happened and to picture it for the audience. |
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George Washington Carver ![]() | How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these. |
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George Washington Carver ![]() | When you can do the common things of life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. |
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George Washington Carver ![]() | Where there is no vision, there is no hope. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Education must provide the opportunities for self-fulfillment; it can at best provide a rich and challenging environment for the individual to explore, in his own way. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | One conception of democracy has it that a democratic society is one in which the public has the means to participate in some meaningful way in the management of their own affairs and the means of information are open and free ... An alternative conception of democracy is that the public must be barred from managing of their own affairs and the means of information must be kept narrowly and rigidly controlled. -- Media Control - The Spectacular Achievement of Propaganda |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | The concept of “democratizing the media” has no real meaning within the terms of political discourse in the United States. In fact, the phrase has a paradoxical or even vaguely subversive ring to it. Citizen participation would be considered an infringement on freedom of the press, a blow struck against the independence of the media that would distort the mission they have undertaken to inform the public without fear or favor... this is because the general public must be reduced to its traditional apathy and obedience, and driven from the arena of political debate and action, if democracy is to survive. -- Chapter 1: Democracy and the Media," Necessary Illusions |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | Unlimited economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege, a fact that has not gone unnoticed among liberal economists. |
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Noam Chomsky ![]() | You never need an argument against the use of violence, you need an argument for it. |
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Winston Churchill ![]() | Great and good are seldom the same man. |
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Winston Churchill ![]() | History is written by the victors. |
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Winston Churchill ![]() | History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. |
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Winston Churchill ![]() | It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. |
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Confucius ![]() | Men's natures are alike, it is their habits that carry them far apart. |
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Confucius ![]() | To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle. |
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Ward Cunningham ![]() | I wouldn't think to start a program from first principles. If I want to make a program, I want to find the people who know kind of how to do it, and say, come sit with me, come help me get started. Let's talk to each other. |
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Ward Cunningham ![]() | Scott -- You seem to have a technical solution to what I might call "dysfunctional divergence" of thought. Blogs encourage divergence, perhaps to the point of dysfunction. Wikis encourage convergence, else edit wars produce dysfunction. There is surely opportunity to invent in the middle ground. -- In reference to the Do Good Gauge |
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Ward Cunningham ![]() | There is a programming smell here… which is kind of like the smell in your refrigerator, you know. There's a sign that there's something wrong, but you can't quite put your finger on it. But you know if you leave it there, its only going to get worse. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | After all, science is essentially international, and it is only through lack of the historical sense that national qualities have been attributed to it. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. |
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Marie Curie ![]() | There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth. |
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Barbara Deming ![]() | The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions. |
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John Dewey ![]() | The media's job is to interest the public in the public interest. |
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Fredrick Douglas ![]() | Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. |
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Freeman Dyson ![]() | Heretics who question the dogmas are needed... I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Any fool can know. The point is to understand. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them! |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | If I give you a pfennig, you will be one pfennig richer and I'll be one pfennig poorer. But if I give you an idea, you will have a new idea, but I shall still have it, too. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it? |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | It is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult and the good easy. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Measured objectively, what a man can wrest from Truth by passionate striving is utterly infinitesimal. But the striving frees us from the bonds of the self and makes us comrades of those who are the best and the greatest. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | One thing I have learned in a long life: All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike - and yet it is the most precious thing we have. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Problems cannot be solved by the level of awareness that created them. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close political cohesion. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in the United States is closely connected with this. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | Truth is what stands the test of experience. |
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Albert Einstein ![]() | We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. |
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T.S. Elliot ![]() | I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates. |
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T.S. Elliot ![]() | It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words. |
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T.S. Elliot ![]() | Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. |
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T.S. Elliot ![]() | There is no absolute point of view from which real and ideal can be finally separated and labeled. |
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T.S. Elliot ![]() | There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him. |
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T.S. Elliot ![]() | Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him; wherever he goes. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Before we acquire great power we must acquire wisdom to use it well. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it nothing great was ever achieved. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Genius always finds itself a century too early. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | It is said that the world is in a state of bankruptcy, that the world owes the world more than the world can pay. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Our best thoughts come from others. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | The faith that stands on authority is not faith. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | To be great is to be misunderstood. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are. |
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Ralph Waldo Emerson ![]() | We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. |
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Arthur Erickson ![]() | Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms. |
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Euripides ![]() | Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing. |
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Typical Father ![]() | If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. |
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Enrico Fermi ![]() | It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge. |
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Enrico Fermi ![]() | There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you've made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you've made a discovery. |
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Alexander Fleming ![]() | It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject; the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to enterprise, thought, and perception of an individual. |
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Alexander Fleming ![]() | One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. |
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Alexander Fleming ![]() | When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did. |
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Jim Fleming ![]() | Is there an acceptable place, a meeting point between what is sacred and what is profane where we can all agree? |
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Henry Ford ![]() | The fear of loosing what you have blocks all avenues of innovation and advancement. |
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Benjamin Franklin ![]() | An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. |
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Benjamin Franklin ![]() | Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one. |
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Benjamin Franklin ![]() | Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them. |
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Benjamin Franklin ![]() | Since I cannot govern my own tongue, tho' within my own teeth, how can I hope to govern the tongues of others? |
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Milton Friedman ![]() | The only relevant test of the validity of a hypothesis is comparison of prediction with experience. |
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Thomas Friedman ![]() | All of us are smarter than any one of us. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | A trimtab is a nautical device that acts as a small rudder used to turn the larger rudder of giant ships, offering tremendous leverage in terms of steering and changing the direction of the ship. Fuller, drawing upon his naval experience, saw the trimtab as a powerful metaphor for effective individual leadership: small and strategically placed interventions can cause large-scale and profound change. -- Leadership By Design: How One Individual Can Change the World. The Leadership Principles of Buckminster Fuller. Medard Gabel and Jim Walker, 2006. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | All of humanity now has the option to "make it" successfully and sustainable, by virtue of our having minds, discovering principles and being able to employ these principles to do more with less. -- Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Always go along with the truth as you know it. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | At the present cosmic moment, muscle, cunning, fear, and selfishness are in powerful control of human affairs. We humans are here in Universe to exercise the Universe-functioning mind. Only mind can apprehend, abide by, and be led by truth. If human mind comes into control of human affairs, the first thing it will do is exercise our option to "make it". |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Computers can remember accurately and can cope with and integrate the vast amounts of all known, relevant information on complex problems, uncopeable with prior to the computer. What we had prior to the computer were respected opinions and only-selfishness-conditioned reflexes on how to cope. Though an opinion might be wrong, there was no practical and convincing way to prove it. Unchallenged , the opinions became respected precedent, then exceptionless concepts, and sometimes even civil and academically accepted social law. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Dare to be naive. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Humans have learned scientifically that the exact truth can never be attained or told. We can reduce the degree of tolerated error, but we have learned physically, as Heisenberg discovered, that exactitude is prohibited, because most exquisite physical experiment has shown that "the act of measuring always alters that which is measured". |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | I see what has to be done and noone is attending to then I dedicate my self to doing it. As soon as I see someone doing what I'm doing, I walk away from it. All that matter is that it is being attended to. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | It's never too late for the truth. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction. -- -- The Wellspring of Reality |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Revolution by design and invention is the only revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, and all political systems anywhere. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | The earth is like a spaceship that didn't come with an operating manual. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | The youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies. The youth of Earth are moving intuitively toward an utterly classless, raceless, omnicooperative, omniworld humanity. Children freed of the ignorantly founded educational traditions and exposed only to their spontaneously summoned, computer-stored and -distributed outflow of reliable-opinion-purged, experimentally verified data, shall indeed lead society to its happy egress from all misinformedly conceived, fearfully and legally imposed, and physically enforced customs of yesterday. They can lead all humanity into omnisuccessful survival as well as entrance into an utterly new era of human experience in an as-yet and ever-will-be fundamentally mysterious Universe. -- The Wellspring of Reality |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | Today's news consists of aggregates of fragments. Anyone who has taken part in any event that has subsequently appeared in the news is aware of the gross disparity between the actual and the reported events. The insistence by reporters upon having advance "releases" of what, for instance, convocation speakers are supposedly going to say but in fact have not yet said, automatically discredits the value of the largely prefabricated news. We also learn frequently of prefabricated and prevaricated events of a complex nature purportedly undertaken for purposes either of suppressing or rigging the news, which in turn perverts humanity's tactical information resources. All history becomes suspect. Probably our most polluted resource is the tactical information to which humanity spontaneously reflexes. -- The Wellspring of Reality |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | While it takes but meager search to discover that many well-known concepts are false, it takes considerable search and even more careful examination of one's own personal experiences and inadvertently spontaneous reflexing to discover that there are many popularly and even professionally unknown, yet nonetheless fundamental, concepts to hold true in all cases and that already have been discovered by other as yet obscure individuals. That is to say that many scientific generalizations have been discovered but have not come to the attention of what we call the educated world at large, thereafter to be incorporated tardily within the formal education processes, and even more tardily, in the ongoing political-economic affairs of everyday life. Knowledge of the existence and comprehensive significance of these as yet popularly unrecognized natural laws often is requisite to the solution of many of the as yet unsolved problems now confronting society. Lack of knowledge of the solution's existence often leaves humanity confounded when it need not be. -- The Wellspring of Reality |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | While my contemporaries were looking how to make a living, I decided to focus on what needed to be done for society. |
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Buckminster Fuller ![]() | You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. |
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Galileo Galilei ![]() | Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so. |
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Mohanda Gandhi ![]() | Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress. |
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Mohanda Gandhi ![]() | I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. |
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Mohanda Gandhi ![]() | Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. |
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Alberto Giacometti ![]() | In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession. |
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Bernard Goldberg ![]() | The evening news is a concept whose time has come and gone. |
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Alan Greenspan ![]() | The true measure of a career is to be able to be content, even proud, that you succeeded through your own endeavors without leaving a trail of casualties in your wake. |
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Arlo Guthrie ![]() | Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person's point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people. |
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Arlo Guthrie ![]() | I'd rather have friends who care than friends who agree with me. |
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Woody Guthrie ![]() | Left wing, chicken wing, it don't make no difference to me. |
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Woody Guthrie ![]() | Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow. |
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Eoghan Harris ![]() | Factualism is fancy foreplay, it rarely penetrates the truth. Factualism is media masturbation. |
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Loris Harrow ![]() | Notice what no one else notice, and you'll see what no one else knows, What you get is what you get, what you do with what you get, that's more the point. -- City of Ember |
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Orrin G. Hatch ![]() | For almost two decades we alternated as Chairman and Ranking Members of the Senate Labor Committee, now called the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. During this time we were able to come together in a bipartisan fashion to craft some of this nation's most important health legislation. -- Referring to Ted Kennedy. |
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Orrin G. Hatch ![]() | In the current climate of today's United States Senate it is rare to find opportunities where both sides can come together and work in the middle to craft a solution for our country's problems. Ted Kennedy, with all of his ideological verbosity and idealism was a rare person who at times could put aside differences and look for common solutions. Not many ever got to see that side of him, but as peers and colleagues we were able to share some of those moments. |
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Vaclav Havel ![]() | As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it. |
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Hesiod ![]() | Observe due measure, for right timing is in all things the most important factor. |
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Cullen Hightower ![]() | A true measure of your worth includes all the benefits others have gained from your success. |
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Cullen Hightower ![]() | The true measure of your worth includes all the benefits others have gained from your success . |
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Napolean Hill ![]() | Action is the real measure of intelligence. |
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Adloph Hitler ![]() | What good fortune for governments that the people do not think. |
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Abbie Hoffman ![]() | You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists. |
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Phil Jackson ![]() | Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. |
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Phil Jackson ![]() | Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts. |
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Phil Jackson ![]() | I gave it my body and mind, but I have kept my soul. |
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Phil Jackson ![]() | Wisdom is always an overmatch for strength. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master! |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | I hope we shall… crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. -- wrote Jefferson (to George Logan, 1816. FE 10:69) |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | If ignorance is bliss, why aren't more people happy? |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | Never spend your money before you have it. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | Nothing gives a person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | Power is not alluring to pure minds. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it. |
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Thomas Jefferson ![]() | With all the imperfections of our present government, it is without comparison the best existing, or that ever did exist. |
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Ralph Johnson ![]() | Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable. |
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Ralph Johnson ![]() | Software is not limited by physics, like buildings are. It is limited by imagination, by design, by organization. In short, it is limited by properties of people, not by properties of the world. |
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James Joyce ![]() | Mistakes are the portals of discovery. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | Mistakes are, after all, the foundations of truth, and if a man does not know what a thing is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if he knows what it is not. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers. |
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Carl Jung ![]() | Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. |
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Franz Kafka ![]() | By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired. |
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Franz Kafka ![]() | By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself. |
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Master Kan ![]() | Deal with evil through strength - but affirm the good in man through trust. In this way we are prepared for evil, but we encourage good. |
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Andy Kaufman ![]() | I just want real reactions. I want people to laugh from the gut, be sad from the gut-or get angry from the gut. |
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Andy Kaufman ![]() | What's real? What's not? That's what I do in my act, test how other people deal with reality. |
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Edward Kennedy ![]() | Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’. I dream things that never were and say ‘why not? -- In eulogy to his brother Robert Kennedy. |
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John Maynard Keynes ![]() | Ideas shape the course of history. |
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John Maynard Keynes ![]() | The biggest problem is not to let people accept new ideas, but to let them forget the old ones. |
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John Maynard Keynes ![]() | The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. |
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John Maynard Keynes ![]() | There is no harm in being sometimes wrong- especially if one is promptly found out. |
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John Maynard Keynes ![]() | Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking. |
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Genghis Khan ![]() | It is not sufficient that I succeed - all others must fail. (The antithesis of the Do Good Gauge) |
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Coretta Scott King ![]() | Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated. |
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Martin Luther King ![]() | The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. |
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Martin Luther King ![]() | The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. |
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Martin Luther King ![]() | We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. |
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Michael Korda ![]() | The freedom to fail is vital if you're going to succeed. Most successful people fail from time to time, and it is a measure of their strength that failure merely propels them into some new attempt at success. |
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Charles Kuralt ![]() | I think all those people I did stories about measured their own success by the joy their work was giving them. |
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Anne Lamott ![]() | I am very devout, but I don't have certainty or conviction. The opposite of faith isn't doubt; it's certainty. |
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Anne Lamott ![]() | You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. |
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Ann Landers ![]() | Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good. |
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Peter Latham ![]() | Fortunate indeed, is the man who takes exactly the right measure of himself, and holds a just balance between what he can acquire and what he can use. |
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Comte de Lautreamont ![]() | Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! Luminous triangle! Whoever has not known you is without sense! |
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Henry Lawson ![]() | We shall never be understood or respected by the English until we carry our individuality to extremes, and by asserting our independence, become of sufficient consequence in their eyes to merit a closer study than they have hitherto accorded us. |
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Stephen Leacock ![]() | In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies. |
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Jim Lehrer ![]() | As I say, I'm a discourse advocate. What form it comes is less important to me than the fact that there is discourse. |
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Jim Lehrer ![]() | Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That's just my basic view of my function as a journalist. |
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John Lennon ![]() | There's nothing you can do that can't be done. Nothing you can sing that can't be sung. Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game. It's easy. All you need is love. |
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Edward Levi ![]() | The concept of reason itself appears as an artificial attempt to separate intellectual powers from the frustrations, emotions, and accidents which cause events; the concept of reason is viewed as facade to prevent change. |
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Henry R. Luce ![]() | I became a journalist to come as close as possible to the heart of the world. |
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R Jeffrey Lustig ![]() | Since ancient times statesmen have attempted to create a policy that could harness private interests to the public welfare. The corporation succeeds, by contrast, in harnessing the vast public to a private interest. It subordinates plurality to singularity, the many to the few. -- David S. Allen, Democracy, Inc. (Page 4), Reference to R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory 1890-1920. |
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- Life is a Highway Lyrics ![]() | Well, life's like a road that you travel on There's one day here and the next day gone Sometimes you bend, sometimes you stand Sometimes you turn your back to the wind |
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Thomas E Mann ![]() | In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties. |
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Guglielmo Marconi ![]() | Every day sees humanity more victorious in the struggle with space and time. |
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Orison Swett Marden ![]() | You cannot measure a man by his failures. You must know what use he makes of them. What did they mean to him. What did he get out of them. |
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Mary McAleese ![]() | The extent to which all people in our society are made to count, and believe that they count, is not just a measure of decency; it makes sound economic sense. |
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Bill McCartney ![]() | All coaching is, is taking a player where he can't take himself. |
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Robert W McChesney ![]() | As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society. |
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Robert W McChesney ![]() | Basically what they're saying is, if you want to be on TV, if you want to be a credible candidate, you've got to buy ads. And if you're not buying ads, you're not a credible candidate, we don't cover you. |
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Robert W McChesney ![]() | The number one lobby that opposes campaign finance reform in the United States is the National Association of Broadcasters. |
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Dmitri Mendeleev ![]() | It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man - social and political - and to the entire universe as a whole. |
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Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillispie ![]() | (MD) Why can't I play like you? (DG) Because you don't hear it that way. |
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Paul Elmer More ![]() | We are born knowing nothing and with much striving we learn but a little; yet all the while we are bound by laws that hearken to no plea of ignorance, and measure out their rewards and punishments with calm indifference. |
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Steve Nash ![]() | I am a huge believer in giving back and helping out in the community and the world. Think globally, act locally I suppose. I believe that the measure of a person's life is the affect they have on others. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Admiration and pity are the extremes in gauging success. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Can we fathom more than a subatomic point of view? |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Certainty needs not faith, doubt has faith of mistakes. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Complex problems are not guilty or innocent. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Explanation is more convergent than criticism. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Hindsight is 20/20. Forethought needs not corrective lenses. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | I don't feel this is my intent, though respect that words often misrepresent thought. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | I worry about the fate of the citizens when hate, fear, ignorance, and chaos becomes the most effective methods for political change. Respect, coherency, and community should be given equal opportunity. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | If your desire is stagnation, finding an argument which is 180 degrees opposed to yours will help. If your desire is to move your argument in a specified direction, finding a similar argument within 15 degrees of separation is a better pool to recruit from. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | In search of commonality, we often emphasize what is not, instead of what is. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | It's a fact that facts are misused. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | It's difficult getting to the root of a problem when the focus is on the fruit. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Proselytize is another word for the inability find commonality. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Shoot, ready, aim is not a formula for success. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Sometimes we become so focused on the syntax of words that meaning is lost. Understanding is an iterative process often involving fuzzy logic. Don't let words get in the way of understanding. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Terminology to one is jargon to another. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The best argument of an average individual is better than the average argument of the best op-ed journalist. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The Do Good Gauge will provide an opportunity for the populace to develop their own points of view, thus producing a wider perspective of the truth. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The fault nor the solution is with the two party system. The solution resides in the pragmatic and generous spirit of a populace armed with the tools and the media to express their point of view in a respectful and intelligent light. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The great debates of Buckley/Chomsky score closer to the Lincoln/Douglas than Aykroyd/Curtain. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The lack of a common language is a barrier. Even with the same dialect, each technology contains its own obtrusive jargon. Joining together a diverse group in a common language requires time and resources which many are not motivated to provide. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The problem is not our governance, it is that the vast majority of the citizens don't know how to play the game. Ideologies serving a minuscule point of view have figured out how to pool their resources to gain favor in the system. There is no single ideology representative of the populace. Until the whole starts intelligently collaborating towards a common good expect to continue interpreting the system as irrational. Internet technology can alter this irrational exuberance of power. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The time to change the minds of a herd is not during a stampede off a cliff. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | The world is not flat nor is an argument. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | Those who control the media have a monopoly in the debate. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | We must guard against the tenacity of arguments with hidden agendas. |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | What do you have when everyone in the room listens? "Silence" |
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Scott Nesler ![]() | You can't force a point of view. You can only guide it with the clarity of your perspective. |
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Peter Neumann ![]() | Remember, extremism in the nondefense of moderation is not a virtue. |
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Isaac Newton ![]() | I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. |
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Isaac Newton ![]() | If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. |
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Isaac Newton ![]() | Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. |
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Isaac Newton ![]() | To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. |
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Richard M Nixon ![]() | Solutions are not the answer. |
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Richard M Nixon ![]() | The press is the enemy. |
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Richard M Nixon ![]() | We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another - until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices. |
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Richard M Nixon ![]() | We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy. |
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Richard M Nixon ![]() | You've got to learn to survive a defeat. That's when you develop character. |
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Donald Norman ![]() | I think there is a tendency in science to measure what is measurable and to decide that what you cannot measure must be uninteresting. |
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William D. Novelli ![]() | We can't make the perfect the enemy of the good. |
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Barack Obama ![]() | There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is the United States of America. |
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Barack Obama ![]() | When each of us looks beyond our own short-term interests to the wider set of obligations we have to each other - that's when we succeed. |
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J. Robert Oppenheimer ![]() | No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows. |
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J. Robert Oppenheimer ![]() | There are children playing in the streets who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago. |
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J. Robert Oppenheimer ![]() | When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. |
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George Orwell ![]() | The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | My mind is my own church. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | Reason obeys itself; and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | To say that any people are not fit for freedom, is to make poverty their choice, and to say they had rather be loaded with taxes than not. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | Virtues are acquired through endeavor, Which rests wholly upon yourself. So, to praise others for their virtues can but encourage one's own efforts. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | We can only reason from what is; we can reason on actualities, but not on possibilities. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | We have it in our power to begin the world over again. |
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Thomas Paine ![]() | When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon. |
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Amanda Palmer ![]() | Everyone got to stop thinking there's an answer. The answer is there's an infinite number of answers. -- The Dresdon Dolls |
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Sebastien Paquet ![]() | I learned from physics that it is often best not to rush in to solve a problem. The time you invest in really understanding a problem is typically given to you back several-fold: - It simplifies the problem at hand; - It creates new learning in your mind, which will make subsequent similar problems easier to tackle. Second, computer science taught me that there are many ways to skin a cat. Programming is essentially a communication challenge. It is about clarifying initially fuzzy concepts and relations and representing them in code. The way you do this determines how much or how little trouble you're setting yourself up for -- From his blog What Physics and Computer Science Taught Me about Thinking |
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Randy Pausch ![]() | I'm a scientist who sees inspiration as the ultimate tool for doing good. |
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Jean-Luc Picard ![]() | If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are. |
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Jean-Luc Picard ![]() | Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged. |
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Jean-Luc Picard ![]() | You can commit no mistake and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life. |
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Daniel Pink ![]() | It's in our nature to seek purpose. But that nature is now being revealed and expressed on a scale that is demographically unprecedented and, until recently, scarcely imaginable. The consequences could rejuvenated our business and remake our world. -- Drive, Chapter 6. Purpose. |
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Robert Pirsig ![]() | Any effort which has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster. |
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Robert Pirsig ![]() | One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry cannot be true, it can only be advantageous. |
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Robert Pirsig ![]() | The truth knocks on your door and you say, go away I'm looking for the truth, and it goes away. Puzzling. |
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Master Po ![]() | Superstition is like a magnet. It pulls you in the direction of your belief. |
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John Charles Polanyi ![]() | It is this, at its most basic, that makes science a humane pursuit; it acknowledges the commonality of people's experience. |
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Dennis Prager ![]() | Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example? |
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The Pragmatic Programmer ![]() | Conventional wisdom says that once a project is in the coding phase, the work is mostly mechanical, transcribing the design into executable statements. We think that this attitude is the single biggest reason that many programs are ugly, inefficient, poorly structured, unmaintainable, and just plain wrong. |
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Franklin Roosevelt ![]() | It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. |
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Franklin Roosevelt ![]() | Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. |
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Franklin Roosevelt ![]() | Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth. |
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Franklin Roosevelt ![]() | We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization. |
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Bertrand Russell ![]() | I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. |
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Bertrand Russell ![]() | The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. |
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Carl Sagan ![]() | We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. |
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Sallust ![]() | Every bad precedent originated as a justifiable measure. |
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Robert H. Schuller ![]() | You can often measure a person by the size of his dream. |
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Charles Schulz ![]() | There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker. |
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Albert Schweitzer ![]() | To the question whether I am a pessimist or an optimist, I answer that my knowledge is pessimistic, but my willing and hoping are optimistic. |
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Pete Seeger ![]() | I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I am proud that I never refuse to sing to an audience, no matter what religion or color of their skin, or situation in life. |
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Pete Seeger ![]() | I have sung in hobo jungles, and I have sung for the Rockefellers, and I am proud that I have never refused to sing for anybody. |
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Pete Seeger ![]() | I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. |
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Pete Seeger ![]() | I still call myself a communist, because communism is no more what Russia made of it than Christianity is what the churches make of it. |
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Pete Seeger ![]() | One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties. |
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Nassau William Senior ![]() | The time I trust will come, perhaps within the lives of some of us, when the outline of this science will be clearly made out and generally recognized, when its nomenclature will be fixed, and its principles form a part of elementary instruction. |
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Anna Howard Shaw ![]() | Think of submitting our measure to the advice of politicians! I would as soon submit the subject of the equality of a goose to a fox. |
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Sargent Shriver ![]() | Respect for another man's opinion is worthy. It is the realization that any opinion is valuable, for it is the sign of a rational being. |
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Upton Sinclair ![]() | It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. |
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Blog Comment Slashdot ![]() | The problem isn't that Beck and Limbaugh are conservative. It is that they are intellectually dishonest. William F. Buckley was conservative as hell, but you had to admire his intellect, education and ability to present a cogent argument. Beck is a buffoon who uses every logical fallacy in the book. As soon as Limbaugh says, "I don't just make this stuff up;" you know he's just making it up. |
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Winston Smith ![]() | A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. -- George Orwell's 1984 |
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Todd Solondz ![]() | When part of what you're trying to get at is the truth hidden under a taboo, or when you want to nail a hypocrisy, laughter is a very useful tool. I want to show the painful side of existence, but there is no question I also want to make people laugh. |
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Art Spiegelman ![]() | With any work worth its salt, you have to trust the author enough to take its measure. And if you apply too many preconceptions, you are not taking its measure. |
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Johannes Stark ![]() | Many scientists will have to contribute to the solution of the great problem; they will have to follow up and measure all those phenomena in which the atomic structure is directly expressed. |
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Maurice Strong ![]() | One of the things that I've always thought I would like to do is to develop an environmental index. Then people can measure their own environmental performance on an index as they do in other ways. |
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Deirdre Sullivan ![]() | My real battle is doing good versus doing nothing at all. |
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John J. Sweeney ![]() | For globalization to work for America, it must work for working people. We should measure the success of our economy by the breadth of our middle class, and the scope of opportunity offered to the poorest child to climb into that middle class. |
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Henry David Thoreau ![]() | I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, to life itself than this incessant business. |
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Henry David Thoreau ![]() | A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. |
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Henry David Thoreau ![]() | Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. |
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Henry David Thoreau ![]() | Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. |
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Henry David Thoreau ![]() | Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. |
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Henry David Thoreau ![]() | There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. |
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Edward Thorndike ![]() | Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable. |
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Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind) ![]() | All I want is to prevent the clock-stoppers from dumping a load of medieval nonsense into the United States Constitution. |
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Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind) ![]() | An idea is a greater monument than any cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters |
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Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind) ![]() | As long as the pre-requisite for that shining paradise is ignorance, bigotry, and hate.....I say to Hell with it! |
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Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind) ![]() | Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, backward, through the glorious ages of that sixteenth century, when bigots burned the man who dared to bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind. |
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Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind) ![]() | Realizing that I may prejudice the case of my client, I must tell you that right has no meaning for me whatsoever, but truth has meaning as a direction. |
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Spencer Tracy (Inherit the Wind) ![]() | Then why did God plaint us with the power to think? Mr. Brady, why do you deny the one faculty of man that raises him above the other creatures of the earth: the power of his brain to reason? |
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Edward Tufte ![]() | The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly - to develop strategies of seeing and showing. |
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Mark Twain ![]() | Don't let schooling interfere with your education. |
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Mark Twain ![]() | Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. |
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Mark Twain ![]() | There are lies, damned lies and statistics. |
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Neil deGrasse Tyson ![]() | After all, what nobler thought can one cherish than that the universe lives within us all? |
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Neil deGrasse Tyson ![]() | When Ignorance lurks, so too do the frontiers of discovery and imagination. |
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Unattributed ![]() | There is no right to be heard. |
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Unattributed ![]() | You don't know what you don't know until somebody tells you. |
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Karl Urban ![]() | That's always an interesting concept when you try to make your dream into a reality and you come up against the facts of exactly what it is you're attempting to do. |
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Sim Van der Ryn ![]() | The best design experience occur when no one can claim credit for the solution – when the solution grows and evolves organically out a particular situation, process, and pattern of communication. |
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Voltaire ![]() | As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. |
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Voltaire ![]() | Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do. |
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Voltaire ![]() | The best is the enemy of the good. |
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Jimmy Wales ![]() | Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing. |
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Jimmy Wales ![]() | My original concept was to provide a free encyclopedia for every single person in the world. |
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Jimmy Wales ![]() | People are not fundamentally bad. It only takes the smallest of correctives to take care of that tiny minority that wants to disrupt the community. |
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Jimmy Wales ![]() | The goal is to give people a free encyclopedia to every person in the world, in their own language. Not just in a 'free beer' kind of way, but also in the free speech kind of way. |
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Henry A. Wallace ![]() | This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. |
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George Washington ![]() | If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. |
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H.G. Wells ![]() | There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection. |
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Oscar Wilde ![]() | Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. |
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Robert Anton Wilson ![]() | Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper. |
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Robert Anton Wilson ![]() | Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia. |
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John Wooden ![]() | Don't measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability. |
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Elizabeth Wordsworth ![]() | If all good people were clever, and all clever people were good, the world would be nicer than ever, we thought that it possibly could. But somehow, 'tis seldom or never that the two hit off as they should; For the good are so harsh to the clever, the clever so rude to the good. |
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Howard Zinn ![]() | Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane. |
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Howard Zinn ![]() | Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. |
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Howard Zinn ![]() | If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves. |
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