Dr. Phoenix > Dr. Phoenix's Quotes

“All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“There will come a time when it isn't 'They're spying on me through my phone' anymore. Eventually, it will be 'My phone is spying on me'.”
― Philip K. Dick

“Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”
― Omar N. Bradley

“That's something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: The most interesting applications turn up on a battlefield, or in a gallery.”
― William Gibson, Spook Country

“What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”
― Steve Jobs

“The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.”
― David McCullough, Brave Companions: Portraits in History

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

“Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“Ethics change with technology.”
― Larry Niven, N-Space

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
― Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

“The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The point is not how we use a tool, but how it uses us.”
― Nick Joaquín, Culture and History

“Money can't buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you're being miserable.”
― Clare Boothe Luce

“The first duty of wine is to be red. Don't talk to me of your white wines.”
― Henry Murger

“Everyone forgets Icarus also flew.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
― George Orwell

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― Plato

“War is merely the continuation of politics by other means”
― Carl von Clausewitz

“Terrorism has made our world an integrated community in a new and frightening way. Not merely the activities of our neighbors, but those of the inhabitants of the most remote mountain valleys of the farthest-flung countries of our planet, have become our business. We need to extend the reach of the criminal law there and to have the means to bring terrorists to justice without declaring war on an entire country in order to do it. For this we need a sound global system of criminal justice, so justice does not become the victim of national differences of opinion. We also need, though it will be far more difficult to achieve, a sense that we really are one community, that we are people who recognize not only the force of prohibitions against killing each other but also the pull of obligations to assist one another. This may not stop religious fanatics from carrying out suicide missions, but it will help to isolate them and reduce their support.”
― Peter Singer, One World: The Ethics of Globalization

“Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

“For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war."

[Funeral Oration of Pericles]”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.”
― Thucydides

“Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
― Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

“Peace is an armistice in a war that is continuously going on.”
― Thucydides

“As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Women make up one half of society. Our society will remain backward and in chains unless its women are liberated, enlightened and educated.”
― Saddam Hussein, The Revolution and Woman in Iraq