Washington Irving: Quote for June 5, 2011

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

-- Washington Irving

Categories: Washington Irving

Nicholas G. Carr: Quote for June 4, 2011

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

-- Nicholas G. Carr

from: > Is Google Making Us Stupid? (The Atlantic, July-August 2008)

Categories: Nicholas G. Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid?

E. M. Forster: Quote for June 3, 2011

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

-- E. M. Forster

Categories: E. M. Forster

Albert Ellis: Quote for June 2, 2011

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.

-- Albert Ellis

Categories: Albert Ellis

Florence Nightingale: Quote for June 1, 2011

People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too. Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect. Variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients, are actual means of recovery.

-- Florence Nightingale

Categories: Florence Nightingale

Fred M. Vinson: Quote for May 31, 2011

Wars are not acts of God. They are caused by man, by man-made institutions, by the way in which man has organized his society. What man has made, man can change.

-- Fred M. Vinson

Categories: Fred M. Vinson

Joshua Chamberlain: Quote for May 30, 2011

Heroism is latent in every human soul - However humble or unknown, they (the veterans) have renounced what are accounted pleasures and cheerfully undertaken all the self-denials - privations, toils, dangers, sufferings, sicknesses, mutilations, life-long hurts and losses, death itself - for some great good, dimly seen but dearly held.

-- Joshua Chamberlain

Categories: Joshua Chamberlain

Russell Baker: Quote for May 29, 2011

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong.

-- Russell Baker

Categories: Russell Baker

Charles Austin Beard: Quote for May 28, 2011

One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

-- Charles Austin Beard

Categories: Charles Austin Beard

Jesse Livermore: Quote for May 27, 2011

Everything happened as I had foreseen. I was dead right and – I lost every cent I had! I was wiped out by something that was unusual. If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn’t be any fun in life.

-- Jesse Livermore

Categories: Jesse Livermore

Francis de Sales: Quote for May 26, 2011

Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.

-- Francis de Sales

Categories: Francis de Sales

Hannah Arendt: Quote for May 25, 2011

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

-- Hannah Arendt

Categories: Hannah Arendt

Will Durant: Quote for May 24, 2011

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

-- Will Durant

Categories: Will Durant

Swami Rama: Quote for May 23, 2011

The poor long for riches, the rich long for heaven, but the wise long for a state of tranquility.

-- Swami Rama

Categories: Swami Rama

Arthur Schopenhauer: Quote for May 22, 2011

They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

Categories: Arthur Schopenhauer