Mark > Mark's Quotes

“I have shown you this evening autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar in fact that you cannot tell one apart from the other. Among such phenomena, how can we draw a line of demarcation and say, here the physical ends and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist.
It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self made records, and perceived in them one phase of a pervading unity that bears within it all things - the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon our earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us - it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago: "They who see but one, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth - unto none else, unto none else!”
― Jagadis Chandra Bose, Response in the Living and Non-Living

“Every man has within him his own Pathmos. He is free to venture, or not to venture, upon that terrifying promontory of thought from which one can see into the shadows. If he refrains from doing so, he continues to live an ordinary life, with ordinary thoughts, ordinary virtues, ordinary beliefs and ordinary doubts – and it is well that he should. It is clearly best for his internal peace of mind. For if he ventures on to this summit, he is lost. He will have glimpsed the mighty waves of the Marvelous – and no one can look upon that ocean with impunity… He persists in contemplating this alluring abyss, in exploring the unexplored, in remaining detached from life on the Earth, and in his efforts to penetrate a forbidden world, to touch the untouchable, to gaze on the invisible he returns again and again to the edge of the precipice, leans over, takes one step down and then another – and that is how one penetrates the impenetrable and loses oneself in a limitless extension of infinity.”
― Victor Hugo

“the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.”
― Voltaire

“Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.”
― Alan Barth

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
― Thomas Sowell

“When i tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do.”
― William Blake

“I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”
― Étienne de La Boétie

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
― Frederic Douglass

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
― Epicurus

“The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.”
― Sydney J. Harris, PIECES OF EIGHT

“Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads or you shall learn nothing.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“The great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth; one, the above way of production and exchange, he called the “economic means.” The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others. This is the method which Oppenheimer termed “the political means” to wealth.”
― Murray N. Rothbard, The Anatomy of the State

“..if fairness is important, what is really fair? We may say something like, "People have a right to food, a right to housing, and a right to a good job for decent pay." But from an economist's perspective, all those rights involve making finite goods meet infinite wants. Unless the fair society generates tremendous economic growth--which societies that put fairness first have trouble doing--the goods will come from redistribution. Try rephrasing the rights statement thus: "People have a right to my food, a right to my housing, and a right to my good job for my decent pay.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
― Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

“Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”
― Michael Rivero

“It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“If you have strongly held opinions, you are opinionated; if you don't, you lack conviction: either way, there is something wrong with you.”
― Thomas Szasz

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods

“If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.”
― Lyall Watson

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.”
― Beverly Sills