a few thoughts by great men

"If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated." --- Voltaire , Le Sottisier

"Whatever you do, crush the infamy." --- Voltaire

"Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer." Kant

"To be beneficent when we can is a duty" Kant

"Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a general natural law." Kant

"Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them." Aristotle

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle

"As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent." Socrates

"I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. " Socrates

"Serenity, regularity, absence of vanity,Sincerity, simplicity, veracity, equanimity, Fixity, non-irritability, adaptability, Humility, tenacity, integrity, nobility, magnanimity, charity, generosity, purity. Practise daily these eighteen "ities" You will soon attain immortality." Socrates

"One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant." Locke

"I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. " Descartes

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." Descartes

"There is nothing so strange and so unbelievable that it has not been said by one philosopher or another." Descartes

"All I know is I'm not a Marxist." Karl Marx

"Catch a man a fish, and you can sell it to him. Teach a man to fish, and you ruin a wonderful business opportunity." Marx

"Democracy is the road to socialism." Marx

"I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package--and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, --refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

"Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another." Marcuse

"This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness . . . they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die." Kierkegaard

"One thing is to suffer; another to graduate and become a professor in someone else's suffering. The first is "the path" the second is "going around it" (wherefore the preposition "around" might serve as a motto for all lecturing and lecture-preaching), and perhaps "going-around" may end in going down and out." Kierkegaard

"Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough." Marx