AsAbove SoBelow > AsAbove's Quotes

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
― Aristotle

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. They are an ordered more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted. In that world, people and things have their well-known places, and do certain expected things. We feel at home there. We fit in. We are members.

[...]

It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense or our own value, our own position, and our own rights. [...] They are the fortress of our traditions, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy.”
― Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

“It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and it has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman she is beautiful, you offer her great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem... What's love, darling, if it's not self-sacrifice?”
― Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

“Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.”
― Aristotle, The Philosophy of Aristotle

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Mark Twain

“The truly free man is the one who can turn down an invitation to dinner without giving an excuse.”
― Jules Renard, The Journal of Jules Renard

“If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right.”
― Jules Renard

“Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.”
― Henry Kissinger

“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”
― Adam Smith

“I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself”
― Winston S. Churchill

“When you want to fool the world, tell the truth. ”
― Otto von Bismarck

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.”
― Jean Monnet

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“An empty stomach is not a good political adviser.”
― Albert Einstein

“Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions.”
― Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

“Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity, in the comparison and conciliation of differences.”
― Mikhail S. Gorbachev

“We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them. The United States cannot tolerate anyone acting independently. Every US president has to have a war.”
― Mikhail S. Gorbachev

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell

“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?”
― Howard Zinn

“Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“People learn to love their chains”
― George R.R. Martin

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened.”
― Anatole France

“Beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.”
― Plato

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”
― Hubert Reeves

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
― Frederick Douglass

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
― Hannah Arendt