After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill.
Anyone can be tolerant of those who are tolerant.
Cynicism and naivety lie cheek by jowl in the American imagination; if the United States is one of the most venal nations on Earth, it is also one of the most earnestly idealistic.
Evil may be 'unscientific' but so is a song or a smile.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs.
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.
If it is true that we need a degree of certainty to get by, it is also true that too much of the stuff can be lethal.
If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
In the deep night of metaphysics, all cats look black.
It is false to believe that the sun revolves around the earth, but it is not absurd.
It is true that too much belief can be bad for your health.
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
Nothing in human life is inherently private.
People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are colored indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.
Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.
The humanities should constitute the core of any university worth the name.
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do.
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
Those who sentimentally indulge humanity do it no favors.
We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.
Found 25 occurence(s) in 52,045 quotation(s).
Categories: Quotes of the day
KGB Quotation Database Search page design and software
contributed by Rafal Sulejman.
