Mike (the Paladin) > Mike (the Paladin)'s Quotes

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#1

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke

tags: evil

2960 likes

#2

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”
― Heinrich Heine

tags: books, censorship

721 likes

#3

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis

tags: freedom, morality, politics, wisdom

1430 likes

#5

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”
― Groucho Marx

tags: books, humor, reading, television

23100 likes

#6

“Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
― Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

tags: animals, books, dogs, friends, humor

37986 likes

#7

“Nothing can illustrate these observations more forcibly, than a recollection of the happy conjuncture of times and circumstances, under which our Republic assumed its rank among the Nations; The foundation of our Empire was not laid in the gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition, but at an Epoch when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period, the researches of the human mind, after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, the Treasures of knowledge, acquired by the labours of Philosophers, Sages and Legislatures, through a long succession of years, are laid open for our use, and their collected wisdom may be happily applied in the Establishment of our forms of Government; the free cultivation of Letters, the unbounded extension of Commerce, the progressive refinement of Manners, the growing liberality of sentiment... have had a meliorating influence on mankind and increased the blessings of Society. At this auspicious period, the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be entirely their own.

[Circular to the States, 8 June 1783 - Writings 26:484--89]”
― George Washington, Writings

tags: america, foundation, founding, founding-father, george-washington, government, happiness, ignorance, knowledge, mankind, mind, philosophers, research, rights, sages, superstition, use

131 likes

#8

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
― Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs of the life & writings of Benjamin Franklin

tags: freedom, liberty, privacy, safety, security

3385 likes

#9

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

tags: lies, lying, memory, truth

92277 likes

#10

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

tags: frost, glitter, gold, lost, poetry, roots, strength, strong, wander, wither

58093 likes

#11

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”
― Mark Twain

tags: individuality, majority, minority, pause, reflect, wisdom

43920 likes

#12

“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
― Mark Twain

tags: aliteracy, attributed-no-source, literacy

41024 likes

#13

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

tags: body-soul, misattributed-to-c-s-lewis

21116 likes

#14

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

tags: books, dragons, fairy-tales, inspirational, paraphrasing-g-k-chesterton

45225 likes

#15

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

16963 likes

#16

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

tags: attributed-no-source, children, fairy-tales

25181 likes

#17

“Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.

[Epitaph, upon his instructions to erect a 'a plain die or cube ... surmounted by an Obelisk' with 'the following inscription, and not a word more…because by these, as testimonials that I have lived, I wish most to be remembered.' It omits that he had been President of the United States, a position of political power and prestige, and celebrates his involvement in the creation of the means of inspiration and instruction by which many human lives have been liberated from oppression and ignorance]”
― Thomas Jefferson

tags: declaration-of-independence, epitaph, greatness, religious-freedom, university-of-virginia

94 likes

#18

“May it [American independence] be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately... These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.

[Letter to Roger C. Weightman on the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 24 June 1826. This was Jefferson's last letter]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

tags: american-independence, chains, freedom-of-opinion, hope, ignorance, light-of-science, monkish, reason, science, superstition

145 likes

#19

“Security without liberty is called prison.”
― Benjamin Franklin

136 likes

#20

“Americans used to roar like lions for liberty; now we bleat like sheep for security.”
― Norman Vincent Peale

42 likes

#22

“An armed society is a polite society.”
― Robert A. Heinlein

tags: gun-control, second-amendment

74 likes

#23

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who comes near that precious jewel. Unfortunately, nothing
will preserve it but downright force. When you give up that force, you are ruined.

”
― Patrick Henry

42 likes

#24

“The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting, and I know I’m not going to make very many friends saying this, but it’s about our right, all of our right to be able to protect ourselves from all of you guys up there.”
― Suzanna Gratia Hupp

6 likes

#25

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
― Samuel Adams

tags: liberty, tyranny

348 likes

#26

“Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men.”
― St. Augustine

24 likes

#28

“good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”
― Plato

tags: laws, people

897 likes

#29

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.”
― Elmer T Peterson

tags: democracy, misattributed-to-de-tocqueville

288 likes

#30

“He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.”
― Thomas Paine

81 likes

#31

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.”
― John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy

tags: ethics, fight, foreign-policy, injustice, inspirational, justice, morality, motivational, patriotic, safety, selfish, tyranny, war, will

376 likes

#33

“The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs... In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

[Letter to James Smith discussing Jefferson's hate of the doctrine of the Christian trinity, December 8 1822]”
― Thomas Jefferson, Letters of Thomas Jefferson

tags: absurdities, athanasian, athanasian-creed, gullibility, martyrs, reason, the-trinity, trinitarian, trinity

175 likes