“Human beings can control their own acts, but not the consequences of their acts to themselves or to others. Society can subject the distribution of wealth to whatever rules it thinks best: but what practical results will flow from the operation of those rules, must be discovered, like any other physical or mental truths, by observation and reasoning.”
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, quoted in Thomas Sowell, Classical Economics Reconsidered
“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr., quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email Jan. 18 2022; other online sources attribute it to “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” (31 March 1968) (for instance https://quotepark.com/quotes/723559/history/)
“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people’s lives…”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“You sit in the park and you watch the grass die... /You ask how I know of Toledo, Ohio/ Well I spent a week there one day/ They’ve got entertainment to dazzle your eyes/ Go visit the bakery and watch the buns rise”
John Denver “Toledo” quoted on the Wall St. Journal’s “OpinionJournal” Jan. 15, 2003
“The situation is not as bad as it seems – it’s worse.”
A Greek Olympic official quoted in Maclean’s July 7, 2000
“History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.”
Abba Eban (it was emailed by a friend without further attribution, and is widely cited online but again without any specific reference that I could find to when and where he said it)
Ralph von “Koenigswald’s discoveries [of early humans called the Solo People in Java] might have been even more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals ten cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.”
Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything