Damian Mee > Damian's Quotes

“Why read this book to find out how to win friends? Why not study the technique of the greatest winner of friends the world has ever known? Who is he? You may meet him tomorrow coming down the street. When you get within ten feet of him, he will begin to wag his tail. If you stop and pat him, he will almost jump out of his skin to show you how much he likes you. And you know that behind this show of affection on his part, there are no ulterior motives: he doesn’t want to sell you any real estate, and he doesn’t want to marry you. Did you ever stop to think that a dog is the only animal that doesn’t have to work for a living? A hen has to lay eggs, a cow has to give milk, and a canary has to sing. But a dog makes his living by giving you nothing but love.”
― Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends and Influence People

“The memorable events of history are the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“To-day the claims of the masses are becoming more and more sharply defined, and amount to nothing less than a determination to utterly destroy society as it now exists, with a view to making it hark back to that primitive communism which was the normal condition of all human groups before the dawn of civilisation. Limitations of the hours of labour, the nationalisation of mines, railways, factories, and the soil, the equal distribution of all products, the elimination of all the upper classes for the benefit of the popular classes, &c., such are these claims. Little adapted to reasoning, crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act. As the result of their present organisation their strength has become immense. The dogmas whose birth we are witnessing will soon have the force of the old dogmas; that is to say, the tyrannical and sovereign force of being above discussion. The divine right of the masses is about to replace the divine right of kings.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“Certainly it is possible that the advent to power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilisation, a complete return to those periods of confused anarchy which seem always destined to precede the birth of every new society.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.”
― Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

“As a writer, I want to express my respect for the author. As fairy tales, these are very good.”
― Liu Cixin, Death's End

“I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself (or, with Lord Acton, as the highest political good), but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes: moral virtue, civilization, the arts and sciences, economic prosperity.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty Volumes I-IV

“Every socialist is a disguised dictator.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
― Isaac Newton, The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: Volume 5, 1709–1713

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and the strength, use it to create.”
― Maria Montessori

“Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.”
― Ludwig von Mises

“Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments.”
― Ludwig Von Mises

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“As a woman you are better off in life earning your own money. You couldn't prevent your husband from leaving you or taking another wife, but you could have some of your dignity if you didn't have to beg him for financial support.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel

“The only article Lady Fortuna has no control over is your behavior. Good luck.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“A mild degree of unpredictability in your behavior can help you to protect yourself in situations of conflict. Say”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”
― Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

“Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying “buyed,” “eated,” and “goed” because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.”
― Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

“But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.”
― Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. ”
― Alvin Toffler

“If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy. ”
― Alvin Toffler

“Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream,”
― Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

“You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.”
― Elon Musk

“Every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference