This page is really only here for my personal reference. These are just
quotes that have struck or inspired me in some way. I used to have a little
book I wrote quotes in, but it seemed logical for me to create this
page just to keep the quotes close to hand, because in truth, the moment
I got a computer I pretty much stopped using pens right then and there.
"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your
interests right now than people dying in Africa."
Mark Zuckerberg.
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"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have
nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because
you have nothing to say."
Edward Snowden.
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"Our own information is being weaponized against us with military efficiency.
Every day, billions of dollars change hands and countless decisions are made on the
basis of our likes and dislikes, our friends and families, our relationships and
conversations, our wishes and fears, our hopes and dreams. These scraps of data,
each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded
and sold."
Tim Cook.
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"To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour."
William Blake.
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"Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time, Why should I strive
to set the crooked straight?"
William Morris.
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"We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry."
John Webster.
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"Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth
a pound of knowledge."
John Wesley.
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"All that we see or seem, Is but a dream within a dream."
Edgar Allan Poe.
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"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes
hasten to their end."
William Shakespeare.
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"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets
his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told
by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
William Shakespeare.
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"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from
mediocre minds."
Albert Einstein.
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"Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty
to purchase power."
Benjamin Franklin.
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Often attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but thought to actually be the
words of Richard Jackson [more].
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"Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean
to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly
to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic
to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is
unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency
or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either
event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president
or anyone else."
Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States.
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"Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost."
Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States.
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"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his
enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a
precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine.
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"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
Aesop.
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"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still
putting on its shoes."
Mark Twain.
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"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Sir Winston Churchill.
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"The future isn't what it used to be."
Anonymous.
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"The sands of time are almost up, we have but a grain to go ."
Anonymous.
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"Imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen,
sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel,
makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons
and self-replicates. Well, why don't we knock that down and write on it? "
William McDonough
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"In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but
the silence of our friends."
Martin Luther King Jr.
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"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
Martin Luther King Jr.
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"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided
missiles and misguided men."
Martin Luther King Jr.
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"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he
who helps to perpetrate it."
Martin Luther King Jr.
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"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
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"You need faith for the same reasons that it's so hard to find."
Josh Ritter.
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"Give me a firm place to stand and I will move the earth."
Archimedes.
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"When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth
with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you
will always long to return."
Leonardo da Vinci.
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"I long for scenes where man has never trod,
A place where woman never smil'd or wept,
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept."
John Clare. (From the poem 'I am')
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"The prevention of free enquiry is unavoidable so long as the purpose
of education is to produce belief rather than thought, to compel the young
innocent minds, to hold positive opinions on doubtful matters rather than
to let them see the doubtfulness and be encouraged to independence of
mind. Education ought to foster the wish for truth and not the conviction
that some particular creed is truth."
Bertrand Russell
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"Getting it wrong is part of getting it right."
Charles Handy
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"Minds are like parachutes: they only function when open."
Thomas Robert Dewar
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"This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they
used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over
a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They'd search
all around till they'd found a stone that would balance the weight of
the hog and they'd put that on the other end of the plank. Then they'd
guess the weight of the stone."
John Dewey
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"Nobody grew taller by being measured"
Phillip Gammagee
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"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the
service of others."
Mahatma Gandhi
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"The end of privacy as we know it is closer than you may think. Privacy
definitions are very different between nation states and cultures, however, one
thing that is common is that privacy is becoming less and less of an option for
most citizens. In public, almost everyone is being watched and monitored 24/7
with thousands of cameras using your expressions, fashion, walk, directions,
interactions, and speech to determine what you need, what you might be thinking,
who you are going to meet, who is nearby, and even algorithms that determine
what your next action might be."
Joseph Carson
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"The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people,
but we're now creating a surveillance society where the smartest way to survice is to go
back to being voiceless."
Jon Ronson