Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it — even if I have said it — unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. – Buddha
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. – Adlai Stevenson, speech, Princeton, 1954
If they give you ruled paper, write the other way. – Juan Ramon Jimenez
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. – Max Beerbohm
Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. – Albert Camus
No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors. – William Faulkner
People still retain the errors of their childhood, their nation, and their age, long after they have accepted the truths needed to refute them. – Condorcet, Progress of the Human Mind, 1794
I believe more follies are committed out of complaisance to the world, than in following our own inclinations. – Mary Wortley Montagu
The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions. – Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871
The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed. – Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic, 1799
There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and willfully go wrong for fear of being controlled. РJean de La Bruy̬re, Characters, 1688
Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs. – Robert Peel
The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.” – Carl Sandburg
Habit rules the unreflecting herd. – William Wordsworth, Ecclesiastical Sonnets, 1822
The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them. – Albert Einstein, letter to Sigmund Freud, 1932 July 30th
The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone. – Henrik Ibsen
Yield to all and you will soon have nothing to yield. – Aesop, “The Man and His Two Wives,” Fables
Every man is a reformer until reform tramps on his toes. – Edgar Watson Howe, Country Town Sayings, 1911
Most of the things we do, we do for no better reason than that our fathers have done them or that our neighbors do them, and the same is true of a larger part than we suspect of what we think. – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model. – Vincent Van Gogh
