Lesser Known Quotations

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up“ John F.Kennedy (1917-63)

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)

“The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.” Casey Stengel, US Baseball Manager (1890-1975)

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” George Carlin (1937-2008)

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” Don Marquis (1878-1937)

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” Clarence Darrow (1857-1938)

“Equality is the soul of of liberty; there is in fact no liberty without it.” Fanny Wright, Scottish feminist writer (1795-1852)

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

“Never write a letter to your mistress and never join the Carlton Club.” The Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)

“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

“All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now, where’s this omelette of yours?” Panait Istrati (1884-1935), visiting Stalin’s Soviet Union in the 1930s

“The human being who has become free, spits on the contemptible type of well-being dreamt of by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats. The free man is a warrior.” Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

“Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.” Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.“ J.K. Galbraith (1908-2006)

“Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyhow.” Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)

“A shiver ran along the Labour front bench looking for a spine to crawl up.” Oliver Brown (1903-76), commenting on the SNP’s shock win in the Hamilton by-election in 1967.

“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” Abraham Lincoln (1809-65)

“The trade unions are a long-established and essential part of our national life. We take our stand by these pillars of our British society as it has gradually developed and evolved itself, of the right of individual labouring men to adjust their wages and conditions by collective bargaining, including the right to strike.“ Winston Churchill (1874-1965), addressing the 1947 Conservative Party Conference

“Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion… The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.” J. William Fulbright (1905-95), chairman, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 1959-74 and an early supporter of the Vietnam War who turned against it

“It is bad governments, not bad people, who cause revolutions.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

“Don’t forget that in the history of the world, there was an election in which Christ and Barabbas were being judged, and the people chose Barabbas.” Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), on why elections are a bad thing

“The problem with the world today is that the intelligent are full of self-doubt while the fools are full of confidence.” Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

“[This was] a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire… What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?” Zbigniew Brzezinski (1928-), on US encouragement of the Afghan-Soviet War 1979-89

“A patron is one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in water and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help.” Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), on patronage of the arts by the rich.

“At no time in history has the distinction between tourists and conquerors been so blurred as it was in late nineteenth-century Africa.” Daniel R. Headrick (1941- ) on explorers like H.R. Stanley

“In long experience I find that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.” Harold Macmillan (1894-1986)

“Unless we can see the expediency of equality of income, we are not socialists; we are only pitiers of the poor and rebels against unpleasantness.” George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy, that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)

“Charity is a cold, grey, loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes.” Clement Attlee (1883-1967)

“I will not get into a pissing competition with that skunk.” Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), on Senator Joe McCarthy

“We have always found the Irish to be a bit odd. They refuse to be English.” Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows. It is possible that equality is to be contrasted, not with liberty, but only with a particular interpretation of it.” Richard Tawney (1880-1962)

“When the rich rob the poor, you can be certain it is business.” Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“How best can we use the common enemy?” General James Wolfe (1727-59), to a fellow-English officer on how to deploy Scottish troops against the French

“We English, who are a marvellous people, are really very generous to Scotland… Someone has to speak up for we English, we’re the most underestimated people in the United Kingdom.” Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013), speaking in Torquay in 1990

“The continent (Africa) may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge anymore.” Boris Johnson (1964-), writing in The Spectator in 2002

“A language is a dialect which owns an army and a navy.” Max Weinreich (1894-1969)

“We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.” Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-68)

“I have been very lucky and very blessed. This country is a blessed nation. We [the British] are special, the world knows it, in our innermost thoughts, we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.” Tony Blair (1953-), on leaving office in 2007, and despite heaping scorn on the idea of Scottish independence as divisive nationalism

“Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), US President 1912-20, regarded historically as a progressive liberal, speaking to a delegation of black professionals visiting the White House

“Martin Luther King said he had dream, not that he had a fully costed plan to incrementally improve the democratic rights of minority groups in a way that would not antagonise the white Anglo-Saxon establishment.” Iain Macwhirter, writing in The Herald, 8 August 2015

“Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.”“A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.” Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915)

“It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973), on why he kept J. Edgar Hoover as FBI Director

“Man is the being whose plan it is to become God.” Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“What narrow innocence it is for one to be good only according to the law.” Seneca (4 BC-65 AD)

“A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

“Historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them.” Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying, ‘Now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair… This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973), on Affirmative Action (following his Civil Rights Legislation).

“All history is a record of the power of minorities, and of minorities of one.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Lesser Known Quotations

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