Pioneers

"Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought."
--Ludwig von Mises
(1881-1973) Economist and social philosopher

Beliefs II

"The most formidable chains are forged from beliefs. Ah, beliefs! Beliefs tear out the eyes and leave us blind and groping in the dark. If I believe in one proposition, I have become locked behind the door of that belief, and all other doors to learning and freedom, although standing open and waiting for me to enter, are now closed to me. If I believe in one God, one religion, yes, if I believe in God at all, if I have closed my mind to magic, to spirit, to salvation, to the unknown dimension that exist in the firmament, I have plunged my mind into slavery. Test all beliefs. Distrust all beliefs."
--Gerry Spence,
"Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life"

Remembers

"A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers."
--John F. Kennedy
May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963

Second III

"Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life, I find."
--John F. Kennedy

Liberty XI

"But Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment: "Stay, thou art so fair." And our liberty, too, is endangered if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future."
--John F. Kennedy,
"Address in the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt" June 25, 1963

Artist V

"It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society - in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may."
John F. Kennedy,
"Remarks at Amherst College upon receiving an Honorary Degree,"
October 26, 1963

Incidence

"The fact that the general incidence of leukemia has doubled in the last two decades may be due, partly, to the increasing use of x-rays for numerous purposes. The incidence of leukemia in doctors, who are likely to be so exposed, is twice that of the general public. In radiologists … the incidence is ten times greater."
--Isaac Asimov (1965),
as quoted in Isaac Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations (1988), 233.

Blossom

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
--Anais Nin (1914-1977)
French-born American novelist, dancer

Beasts

"What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
--Arthur Conan Doyle,
"The Stark Munro Letters" (1894)

Listen II

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

"Why, what did she tell you?"

"I don't know, I didn't listen."

--Douglas Adams,
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

All-Out

"Instead of involving themselves in an all-out attempt to stamp out racism from their white society, liberals waste a lot of time trying to prove to as many blacks as they can find that they are liberal."
--Steve Biko,
"I Write What I Like: Selected Writings"

Cradles

"I would never rob your cradles to feed the dogs of war"
--Huey Long

Conjures

"No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed."
--Sigmund Freud,
"Dora : An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" (1905)

Litigation

"Litigation: A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage."
--Ambrose Bierce,
"The Devil's Dictionary"

Remedy II

"All who drink of this remedy recover in a short time, except those whom it does not help, who all die. Therefore, it is obvious that it fails only in incurable cases."
--Claudius Galenus of Pergamum (Galen)

Enjoyment

"What I do know is, in little more than 30 years, we have gone from a nation where the 'quiet enjoyment' of one’s private property was a sacred right, to a day when the so-called property 'owner' faces a hovering hoard of taxmen and regulators threatening to lien, foreclose, and 'go to auction' at the first sign of private defiance of their collective will ... a relationship between government and private property rights which my dictionary defines as 'fascism.'"
--Vin Suprynowicz
(1950-) American columnist, author
Source: Live Free or Die: How Many More Carl Dregas?, September 21, 1997.

Prevent

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy -- these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."
--John Taylor Gatto (1937-)
American school teacher of 29 years, author, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
Source: "The Underground History of American Education", 2001

Urge II

"It would seem that something which means poverty, disorder and violence every single day should be avoided entirely, but the desire to beget children is a natural urge."
--Phyllis Diller

Proud

"We are the proud parents of a child whose self esteem is sufficient that he doesn't need us promoting his minor scholastic achievements on the back of our car."
--George Carlin,
proposed bumper sticker

Saddles

"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,
by the grace of God."
--Thomas Jefferson

Adequacy

"What is adequacy? Adequacy is no standard at all."
--Winston Churchill

Fiction II

"The trouble with fiction... is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense."
--Aldous Huxley,
"John Rivers" in The Genius and the Goddess (1955).

Credibility

"The Democratic Party has lost much of it credibility with working class and low-income people. It retards progress toward presenting a genuine alternative."
--Paul Wellstone (1944 - 2002)
Essay entitled "Commentary on Electoral Strategy," co-authored with Tom O'Connell, undated

Saints II

"Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln's bowels, whose 'frequency,' he tells us, 'cannot be documented.' But, of course, they can. 'Truth-teller' Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called bluemass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence 'wrong.'"
--Gore Vidal,
United States - Essays 1952-1992 (1992),
"Lincoln and the Priests of Academe"

Paradise III

"If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief.:
--Franz Kafka,
"The Zürau Aphorisms" (1931, posthumous)

Conversation

"What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation".
--Anatole France

Bandits

"Every national border in Europe," El Eswad added ironically, "marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. Patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others."
--Robert Anton Wilson,
The Earth Will Shake: The History of the Early Illuminati (The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles Vol. 1) (1982), p. 100

Alter

"Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined...or one great figure...or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it."
--Philip K. Dick,
"The Man in the High Castle" (1962)

Hair

"All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances."
--Napoléon Bonaparte,
Letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs, Passariano (September 26, 1797), as quoted in Napoleon as a General (1902) by Maximilian Yorck von Wartenburg, p. 269

Caffeine

"If you want to understand a society, take a good look at the drugs it uses. And what can this tell you about American culture? Well, look at the drugs we use. Except for pharmaceutical poison, there are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in."
--Bill Hicks

Lifelessness III

"Political correctness has ripped through America, turning life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into lifelessness, suppression and the pursuit of mediocrity."
--Nick Adams,
"Retaking America--Crushing Political Correctness"