Nick > Nick's Quotes

“The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”
― Charles de Gaulle

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

“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
― James Madison, The Federalist Papers

“History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution

“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation– the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the "impossible," come true.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“You don't know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it. I don't blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself. I never did harm any man since I was born in the world. My voice is always for peace.”
― Joseph Smith Jr.

“If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
― George S. Patton

“There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”
― Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Vol. 3: American Statesmen

“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

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
― Mahatma Gandhi, All Men Are Brothers: Autobiographical Reflections

“You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― George Santayana, Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies

“It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli

“In God we trust; all others bring data.”
― W. Edwards Deming

“Everyone has a plan 'till they get punched in the mouth”
― Mike Tyson

“Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo - If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell.”
― Virgil, The Aeneid

“no punishment, in my opinion, is too great, for the man who can build his greatness upon his country's ruin”
― George Washington

“The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution in which all good things coexist, seems to me not merely unobtainable--that is a truism--but conceptually incoherent. ......Some among the great goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.”
― Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind