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"The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club."
- Humorist Dave Barry, born 1947
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"In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant."
- General Charles de Gaulle, 1890 - 1970
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"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal -- that you can gather votes like box tops -- is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process."
- Politician Adlai E. Stevenson, 1900 - 1965
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"A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is."
- Critic Pauline Kael, 1919 - 2001
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"Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done."
- Author Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910
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"Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices -- just recognize them."
- Journalist Edward R. Murrow, 1908 - 1965
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"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."
- Artist Andy Warhol, 1928 - 1987
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"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
- Author Marcel Proust, 1871 - 1922
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"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."
- President James Madison, 1751 - 1836
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"If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies."
- Diplomat Moshe Dayan, 1915 - 1981
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"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
- Writer Tom Robbins , born 1936
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"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
- President Abraham Lincoln , 1809 - 1865
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"Anger as soon as fed is dead - 'Tis starving makes it fat."
- Poet Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886
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"All the gods are dead except the god of war."
- Writer Eldridge Cleaver , 1935 - 1998
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"Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins."
- Writer Ayn Rand, 1905 - 1982
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"No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent."
- President Abraham Lincoln, 1809 - 1865
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"Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble."
- Writer Joseph Campbell, 1904 - 1987
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"If we fight we are too few. If we die we are too many."
- Mohawk Chief Tiyanoga (a.k.a. King Hendrick), 1680 - 1755
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"There are not enough Indians in the world to defeat the Seventh Cavalry."
- General George Armstrong Custer, 1839 - 1876
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"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things."
- Journalist Russell Baker, born 1925
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"America is two Mack trucks colliding on a superhighway because all the drivers are on amphetamines."
- Songwriter Phil Ochs, 1940 - 1976
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"Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct."
- Thomas Jefferson , 1743 - 1826
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"As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever."
- Attorney Clarence Darrow, 1857 - 1938
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"The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots."
- Psychologist Erich Fromm, 1900 - 1980
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"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons."
- Author Thomas Hardy, 1840 - 1928
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"I've always been suspicious of collective truths."
- Playwright Eugène Ionesco, 1912 - 1994
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"Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build it."
- Politician Sam Rayburn , 1882 - 1961
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"Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines."
- Baseball player Satchel Paige, 1906 - 1982
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"It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach."
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt , 1882 - 1945
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"I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries."
- Director Frank Capra, 1897 - 1991
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"Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction."
- Poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749 - 1832
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ON A MILITARY GRAVEYARD
"Stranger, when you come to Washington
Tell them that we lie here
Obedient to their orders."
Poet Kenneth Rexroth, 1905 - 1982
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"All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue."
- Writer Franz Kafka , 1883 - 1924
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"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones."
- Composer John Cage, 1912 - 1992
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"The liberties of none are safe unless the liberties of all are protected."
- Judge William O. Douglas, 1898 - 1980
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"You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance."
- Composer Charles Ives, 1874 - 1954
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"Dream as if you'll live forever; live as if you'll die tomorrow."
- Actor James Dean , 1931 - 1955
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"He who rides the sea of the Nile must have sails woven of patience."
- Author William Golding, 1911 - 1993
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"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."
- Revolutionary Samuel Adams, 1722 - 1803
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"The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past."
- Author Robertson Davies, 1913 - 1995
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"From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life."
- Athlete Arthur Ashe , 1943 - 1993
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"Why something in the public interest such as television news can be fought over, like a chain of hamburger stands, eludes me."
- Writer Jimmy Breslin, born 1930
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"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back."
- Pianist Arthur Rubinstein, 1887 - 1983
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"As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill."
- Activist Helen Keller, 1880 - 1968
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"Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love."
- Writer Saul Bellow, 1914 - 2005
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"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."
- Writer Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1809 - 1894
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"A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own."
- Author Thomas Mann, 1875 - 1955
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"Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds."
- Justice Thurgood Marshall, 1908 - 1993
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"We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave."
- Author Pearl S. Buck, 1892 - 1973
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"The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist."
- Sociologist Marshall McLuhan, 1911 - 1980
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"The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity -- the more energetically meaning is sought."
- Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel, born 1936
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"It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don't want victories anymore."
- Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, 1898 - 1978
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"There is no such thing as security. There never has been."
- Writer Germaine Greer, born 1939
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"The only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it."
- Philosopher John Locke, 1632 - 1704
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"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree."
- Martin Luther King, 1929 - 1968
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"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
- Anthropologist Margaret Mead, 1901 - 1978
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"The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied, or reoccupied, by our real problems - the problems of life and of human relations."
- Economist John Maynard Keynes, 1883 - 1946
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"There are years when nothing happens and years in which centuries happen."
- Author Carlos Fuentes, born 1928
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"Happy, happy Christmas, that can wing us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home."
- Author Charles Dickens, 1812 - 1870
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"Independence? That's a middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."
- Playwright George Bernard Shaw, 1856 - 1950
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"To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."
- Philosopher George Santayana, 1863 - 1952
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"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other."
- Mother Teresa, 1910 - 1997 
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"On Thanksgiving Day we acknowledge our dependence."
- Statesman William Jennings Bryan , 1860 - 1925
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"The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom."
- Writer Isaac Asimov, 1920 - 1992
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"Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others."
- President John F. Kennedy, 1917 - 1963
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"Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
- John Quincy Adams, 1767 - 1848
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"Anger is the enemy of non-violence, and pride is a monster that swallows it up."
- Mohandas Gandhi, 1869 - 1948
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"Always the beautiful answer. Who asks a more beautiful question?"
- Poet E.E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962
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"One of the greatest tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts."
- Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790
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"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1870 - 1924
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"Nothing worse could happen to one than to be completely understood."
- Psychologist Carl Jung, 1875 - 1961
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"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
- Author Gore Vidal, born 1925
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"The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize."
- Author Saul Bellow, born 1914
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"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept."
- Photographer Ansel Adams, 1902 - 1984
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"If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution."
- President Dwight Eisenhower, 1890 - 1969
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"All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it."
- Writer Michael Herr, born 1940
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"One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition."
- Futurist Alvin Toffler, born 1928
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"If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don't ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers."
Statesman Nelson Mandela, born 1918
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"I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone."
- Journalist H.L. Mencken, 1880 - 1956
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"The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."
- President Franklin Roosevelt, 1882 - 1945
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"On account of being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years, no matter what it does."
- Humorist Will Rogers, 1879 - 1935
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"The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize."
- Author Saul Bellow, born 1915
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"Marriage is a mistake every man should make."
- Comedian George Jessel, 1898 - 1981
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"Let the people think they govern and they will be governed."
- William Penn, 1644 - 1718
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"Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin."
- President Dwight Eisenhower, 1890 - 1969
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"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."
- Author Anais Nin, 1903 - 1977
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"Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it. "
- Author Alice Walker, born 1944
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"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
- Philosopher Voltaire, 1694 - 1778
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"War is the unfolding of miscalculations."
- Journalist Barbara Tuchman, 1912 - 1989
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"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting...but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's the evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."
- Author Kurt Vonnegut, born 1922
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"I just don't know why they're shooting at us. All we want to do is bring them democracy and white bread. Transplant the American Dream. Freedom. Achievement. Hyperacidity. Affluence. Flatulence. Technology. Tension. The inalienable right to an early coronary sitting at your desk while plotting to stab your boss in the back."
- Alan Alda, as Hawkeye on M*A*S*H
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"Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations...The root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame."
- Author Dorothy Sayers, 1893 - 1957
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"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake."
- Activist Jeannette Rankin, 1880 - 1973
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"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right."
- Author Laurens van der Post, 1906 - 1996
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"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."
- Poet T. S. Eliot, 1888 - 1965
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"Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it."
- Poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803 - 1882
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"One of the things I keep learning is that the secret to being happy is doing things for other people."
- Activist Dick Gregory, born 1932
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"...The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do."
- Author James Baldwin, 1924 - 1987
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"The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another."
- Author Simone de Beauvoir, 1908 - 1986
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"America was not established to create wealth but to realize a vision, to realize an ideal -- to discover and maintain liberty among men."
- President Woodrow Wilson, 1856 - 1924
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"We must be careful that the people who make $5,000 a year are not pitted against those who make $25,000 a year by those who make $900,000."
- Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, born 1936
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"Every man prays in his own language, and there is no language that God does not understand."
- Composer Duke Ellington, 1899 - 1974
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"I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people."
- Artist Vincent Van Gogh, 1853 - 1890
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"I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy."
- Anne Frank, 1929 - 1945
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"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
- Author George Eliot, 1819 - 1880
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"God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying."
- Civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, 1912 - 1987
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"Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now -- always."
- Humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, 1875 - 1965
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"Never interrupt someone doing what you said couldn't be done."
- Aviator Amelia Earhart, 1898 - 1937
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"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
- Author Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910
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