Favorite Quotes

Also see: Favorite Moby Dick Quotes and Favorite Camus Quotes

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”–from The Sun Also Rises, by Hemingway

“The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.” –Albert Camus

“To know and not to do is not to know.”

“What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label ‘Liberal?’ …[I]f by a ‘Liberal’ they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind,someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a ‘Liberal,’ then I’m proud to say I’m a ‘Liberal.’” –John F. Kennedy

“When the rich make war it’s the poor that die.” –Jean-Paul Sartre

“What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers?” –The Stranger, by Camus

“There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” –Moby Dick, by Melville

“Life has no meaning a priori . Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose.”–Jean-Paul Sartre

“Christianity, along with all other theistic belief systems, is the fraud of the age. It serves to detach the species from the natural world, and likewise each other. It supports blind submission to authority. It reduces human responsibility to the effect that God controls everything, and in turn, awful crimes can be justified in the name of the divine pursuit. And most importantly, it empowers those who know the truth but use the myth to manipulate and control societies. The religious myth is the most powerful device ever created, and serves as a psychological soil upon which other myths can flourish.”–Zeitgeist

“Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.” –Albert Camus

“War corrupts everyone who engages in it, [and] it poisons the minds and souls of people on all sides…[There is] a process by which [those fighting]..become unthinking killers of innocent people.” — Howard Zinn

“[In the idea of just war], a cause may be just, an injustice may have taken place, but that doesn’t mean that the use of war to remedy that injustice is itself just.” — Howard Zinn

“We accept the fact that we will always have poor people around us, and that poverty is part of human destiny. This is precisely why we continue to have poor people around us…We wanted to go to the moon, so we went there. We achieve what we want to achieve. If we are not achieving something, it is because we have not put our minds to it. We create what we want…We create the world in accordance with our mindset.” — Muhammad Yunus

“The thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.” — Kierkegaard

“The Most Personal Question of Truth:-What am I really doing, and what do I mean by doing it?” — Nietzsche

“There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. ” — Borges, The Immortal

“It is good to rely upon others. For no one can bear this life alone.” — Holderlin

“One of the most important truths about us is that we have the capacity to be open minded: the capacity to live nondefensively with the question of how to live.” — Lear, Open Minded

“A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: “I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.” — Brecht

“Nobody ever made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he thought he could do only a little.” — Edmund Burke

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

“The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is a condition of the heart — not something that comes ‘upon the earth’ or after death’…The ‘kingdom of God’ is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come ‘in a thousand years ’ — it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere…” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

“I know more about life because I have so often been on the verge of losing it; and precisely for that reason I get more out of life than any of you.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

“[I]t’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.” — John Galt of Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

“Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about ‘teaching you how to think’ is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: ‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” — David Foster Wallace

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” — George Bernard Shaw

“He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.“ – Albert Camus