Quotes

The budget should be balanced. Public debt should be reduced. The arrogance of officialdom should be tempered, and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC to 43 BC)

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.

Henry Ford

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

John Stuart Mill, 1867

If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right will make no difference.

Abraham Lincoln

We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth… For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it.

Patrick Henry

A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there. . . . And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.

Michael Crichton, died November 4, 2008

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."

H L Mencken

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H L Mencken

We cant solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein