Topic |
Quotation |
Source |
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Bullies
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All men, and all women even more so, are bullies. Precisely to the degree in which a person is weak, advantage will be taken by the other side; whether between labourer and boss, or husband and wife, or parent and child, or master and pupil, or governor and governed | John Stewart Collis. From The Labourer's Theory of Knowledge, Section 30 of Part Two of While Following the Plough (1946), reprinted as Book One of The Worm Forgives the Plough (Vintage Books, 2009, p. 116) |
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Bureaucracy
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Bureaucracy is the death of all sound work | Albert Einstein (The World As I See It, Covici Friede Inc., 1934, p. 231) |
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Counting
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Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted | William Bruce Cameron (Informal Sociology, Random House, 1963, p. 13) |
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Doubt
|
When in doubt or difficulty, sleep upon it | Flora Thompson's Mr. Finch (Still Glides the Stream, OUP, 1948, p. 159) |
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Education
| There is too much education altogether, especially in American schools. The only rational way of educating is to be an example of what to avoid, if one can't be the other sort | Albert Einstein (The World As I See It, Covici Friede Inc., 1934, p. 259) |
|
Happiness
| The best recipe for happiness is not to have leisure enough to wonder whether we are miserable | C.E.M. Joad (Modern Political Theory, OUP, 1927, p. 113) |
|---|---|---|
| The trouble with happiness is that it can't be sought directly. It is only a precious by-product of other worthwhile activities | Benjamin Spock (Problems of Parents, Houghton Mifflin, 1962, p. 290) | |
|
Knowing
| A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven | Richard Feynman (Nobel Lecture, 1965) |
| You've got to summer and winter a man before you can pretend to know him | Old country maxim quoted by
Flora Thompson (Lark Rise to Candleford, OUP, 1945, p. 543) |
|
| Biologists have to know a lot of facts, while physicists seem to know almost nothing | John Maynard Smith (Games, Sex and Evolution, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988, p. 225) | |
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Liberty
| Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seem good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest | John Stuart Mill (On Liberty, Penguin Classics, 1985, p. 72, first published in 1859) |
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Miracles
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A faith in miracles grades seamlessly into excuses for inaction | George Monbiot (Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, South End Press, 2007, p. 206) |
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Oxbridge
|
What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford, broadly speaking, is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it | A.A. Milne (It's Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer, 3rd edition, Methuen, London, 1939, p. 131) |
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Pigs
|
I like pigs. Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you, but pigs treat you as an equal | Sir Winston Churchill. Apparently recalled by his granddaughter Lady Emma Soames during a visit to Chartwell in 1990 |
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Realism
| The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails | William Arthur Ward |
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Research
| If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble | Sir Peter Medawar. From a New Statesman review of Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation in 1964 |
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Riches
| The measure of a man's riches is the fewness of his wants | Attributed to Jack Mulholland by David Attenborough (Life on Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster, Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 182) |
| Behind every great fortune there lies a crime. | Attributed to Honoré de Balzac by C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 95) | |
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Thought
|
A moment's thought would have shown him. But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process | A.E. Housman. Quoted by Antony Flew (Thinking About Thinking, (Fontana/Collins, 1975, p. 5) |
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Time
|
All times are times of transition | Flora Thompson (Lark Rise, OUP, 1939, Chap. 4, p. 57) |
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War
|
Now I will tell you something very profound which I have learned after many years. War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars. And all decent people | Ben Ferencz. At approximately 10:56 in the CBS 60 Minutes segment What the Last Nuremberg Prosecutor Alive Wants the World to Know (first broadcast in 2017) |