Quotes

Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States.

Rep. Dick Cheney (R-Wyoming) October 1996

...as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know.

Donald Rumsfeld

And let no state suppose that it can choose sides with complete safety. Indeed, it had better recognize that it will always have to choose between risks, for that is the order of things.

Machiavelli

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Francis Bacon

Those who have knowledge, don't predict. Those who predict, don't have knowledge.

Lao Tzu

With the enemy's approach to Moscow, the Moscovites' view of their situation did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as always happens with people who see a great danger approaching.

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

Leo Tolstoy, "War and Peace"

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.

Gerry Spence

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly.

Michel de Montaigne

No man is more a slave than he who thinks himself free where he is not.

Goethe