Alexey > Alexey's Quotes

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”
― Seneca

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. (...) The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
― Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

“It used to be the boast of free men that, so long as they kept within the bounds of the known law, there was no need to ask anybody’s permission or to obey anybody’s orders. It is doubtful whether any of us can make this claim today.”
― Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

“The causes which ruined the Republic of Athens illustrate the connection of ethics with politics rather than the vices inherent to democracy. A State which has only 30,000 full citizens in a population of 500,000, and is governed, practically, by about 3000 people at a public meeting, is scarcely democratic. The short triumph of Athenian liberty, and its quick decline, belong to an age which possessed no fixed standard of right and wrong. An unparalleled activity of intellect was shaking the credit of the gods, and the gods were the givers of the law. It was a very short step from the suspicion of Protagoras, that there were no gods, to the assertion of Critias that there is no sanction for laws. If nothing was certain in theology, there was no certainty in ethics and no moral obligation. The will of man, not the will of God, was the rule of life, and every man and body of men had the right to do what they had the means of doing. Tyranny was no wrong, and it was hypocrisy to deny oneself the enjoyment it affords. The doctrine of the Sophists gave no limits to power and no security to freedom; it inspired that cry of the Athenians, that they must not be hindered from doing what they pleased, and the speeches of men like Athenagoras and Euphemus, that the democracy may punish men who have done no wrong, and that nothing that is profitable is amiss. And Socrates perished by the reaction which they provoked.”
― John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, The History of Freedom, and Other Essays

“In one sense there will be something difficult even for God — namely, that which He has not done — not because He could not, but because He would not, do it. For with God, to be willing is to be able, and to be unwilling is to be unable; all that He has willed, however, He has both been able to accomplish, and has displayed His ability.”
― Tertullian, Against Praxeas

“How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in home, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice . . . Nothing divides them either in flesh or in spirit . . . They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. Side by side they visit God's church and partake God's banquet, side by side they face difficulties and persecution, share their consolations. They have no secrets from one another; they never shun each other's company; they never bring sorrow to each other's hearts . . . Seeing this Christ rejoices. To such as these He gives His peace. Where there are two together, there also He is present.”
― Tertullian

“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

“It is better to offer no excuse than a bad one.”
― George Washington

“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit.”
― Ayn Rand

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
― James Sherman

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success.”
― Charles T. Munger, Value Investing: A Value Investor's Journey Through the Unknown...

“Every man lives by exchanging.”
― Adam Smith

“Timid men prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of Liberty.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Often the masses are plundered and do not know it.”
― Frédéric Bastiat

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to Heaven from Earth but to set up Heaven on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Man cannot live without joy. That is why one deprived of spiritual joys goes over to carnal pleasures.”
― Saint Thomas Aquinas

“I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.”
― Vincent Willem van Gogh

“Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. ”
― Clarence Thomas

“If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
― Oliver Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell's Letters And Speeches: With Elucidations By Thomas Carlyle: In Three Volumes, Volume 2

“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
― Warren Buffett

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
― Thomas Sowell

“If you see a fraud and don't say fraud, you are a fraud.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
― Cicero