Favorite Quotes

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them
pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."

- Sir Winston Churchill

• America
  
• Attire
  
• Change
  
• Character
  
• Courage
  
• Determination
  
• Education
  
• Happiness
  
• Mistakes
• Patience
• Pride
• Research
• Silence
• Thought
  

America:

• "America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." - Alexis de Tocqueville

• "Through our scientific genius we have made this world a neighborhood. Now, through our moral and spiritual development, we must make of it a brotherhood." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Attire:

• "Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." - Henry David Thoreau

Change:

• "The search for static security -- in the law and elsewhere -- is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts."
  - Justice William O. Douglas

• "When you're finished changing, you're finished."
  - Benjamin Franklin

• "Life has a habit of not staying hitched. You got to ride it like you find it."
  - Woody Guthrie

Character:

• "Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh."
  - W.H. Auden

• "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."
  - Sir Winston Churchill

• "In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principles, stand like a rock."
  - Thomas Jefferson

• "Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they're capable of being."
  - Goethe

• "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."
  - Abraham Lincoln

• "It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men do when they don't have to."
  - Walter Linn

Courage:

• "I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
  - Sir Winston Churchill

• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
  I took the one less traveled by,
  And that has made all the difference."
  - Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

• "Doubt is a pain too lovely to know that faith is his brother."
  - Kahlil Gibran

• "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."
  - Nelson Mandela

Determination:

• "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
  - Sir Winston Churchill

• "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it."
  - Sir Winston Churchill

• "He who stops being better stops being good."
  - Oliver Cromwell

• "When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."
  - Eugene Debs

• "The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just."
  - Abraham Lincoln

• "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world -- it's the only thing that ever has."
  - Margaret Mead

• "Life may change, but it may fly not;
  Hope may vanish, but can die not;
  Truth be veiled, but still not burneth;
  Love repulsed, -- but it returneth."
  - Percy Bysshe Shelley

• "Moderation is a fatal thing: Nothing succeeds like excess"
  - Oscar Wilde

• "You can measure a man by the opposition it takes to discourage him."
  - Unknown

Education:

• "I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well."
  - Alexander the Great

• "It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning."
  - Claude Bernhard

• "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
  - Mark Twain

• "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
  - William Butler Yeats

Happiness:

• "Laughter is the shock absorber that eases the blows of life."
  - Yogi Berra

• "We can be right, or we can be happy."
  - "A Course in Miracles"

• "What we obtain too cheap, we esteem to lightly; it is the dearness only that gives everything value."
  - Thomas Paine

Mistakes:

• "There is no waste of time like making excuses."
  - Benjamin Desreali

• "We should learn from the mistakes of others. We don't have time to make them all ourselves."
  - Groucho Marx

• "Man is the only animal that blushes--or needs to."
  - Mark Twain

• "To err is nature; to rectify error is glory."
  - George Washington

Patience:

• "He that can have patience can have what he will."
  - Benjamin Franklin

• "In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience."
  - W. B. Prescott

Pride:

• "Vanity: my favorite sin."
  - Al Pacino, "The Devil's Advocate"

• "It is often better not to see an insult then to avenge it."
  - Seneca

Research:

• "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." - Wernher von Braun

Silence:

• "Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken."
  - Orson Rega Card

• "I have never developed indigestion from eating my words."
  - Sir Winston Churchill

• "Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep saying it."
  - Robert Frost

• "Silence is an argument carried out by other means."
  - Che Guevara

• "`Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."
  - Abraham Lincoln

• "You have not converted a man because you have silenced him."
  - John Morley

• "It's better to swallow words than to have to eat them later."
  - Franklin D. Roosevelt

• "I have made a pact with my tongue, not to speak when my heart is disturbed."
  - St. Francis de Sales

Thought:

• "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened."
  - Sir Winston Churchill

• "What luck for the rulers that men do not think."
  - Adolf Hitler

• "No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers."
  - Thomas Merton

• "You can't reason someone out of something they weren't reasoned into."
  - Jonathan Swift

snoeren@mit.edu