Introduction
The quotes of others.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what
worked with what sounded good. In area after area—crime, education, housing, race relations—the
situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that
this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Thomas Sowell, American economist
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov.
Civilization today reminds me of an ape with a blowtorch playing in a room full of dynamite. It looks
like the monkeys are about to operate the zoo, and the inmates are taking over the asylum.
Vance Havner (1901-1986)
The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation’s spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
The essence of modernity is the death of the spiritual. A modernist is someone who is more concerned about air pollution than soul pollution. A modernist is someone who wants clean air so he can breathe dirty words. A modernist cares about big things, like whales, more than little things, like fetuses.
Peter Kreeft
The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of
nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace,
more about killing than we know about living.
Omar Bradley
Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals
or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God.
Ravi Zacharias
If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised
morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.
C.S.Lewis
To reject moral absolutes is in essence to affirm that there are no essential differences between
Mother Theresa and Hitler.
Dr Steve Kumar
Just as the ancient empires of Greece and Rome collapsed when every indulgence of the flesh took over, we in our society today need to heed the warning.
Ruth Webb
There is no protection against the kinds of influences that are loose in a society that tolerates pornography.
Ted Bundy, serial sex murderer.
If God doesn't destroy Hollywood Boulevard, He owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.
Jay Leno, American comedian, actor, writer and producer.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence
in the end is rewarded.
Margaret Mead.
The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking which created them.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
The field of psychology today is literally a mess. There are as many techniques, methods and theories
around as there are researchers and therapists.
Roger Mills, psychologist
Men do not care how nobly they live, but only for how long, although it is within the reach
of every man to live nobly, but within no man's power to live long.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4BC-AD65)
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
William Gladstone (1809-1898)
Evil means corrupt good ends.
Quaker pacifists, 1955 document
An evil act cannot be justified by reference to a good intention.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from
those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), American politician and Army general
Consider the rights of others before your own feelings, and the feelings of others before your own rights.
John Wooden (1910-2010)
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
Doug Gwyn
To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of
the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
A people that values it's privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Wisdom is found only in truth.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
Force always attracts men of low morality.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Wherever you see persecution, there is more than a probability that truth lies on the persecuted side.
Hugh Latimer (1487-1555)
We don't determine truth by counting noses.
Dr Steve Kumar
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
Aristotle (385 BC-323 BC)
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people who want to be important.
T.S.Eliot (1888-1965)
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
George Elliott (1819-1880)
Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny.
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988)
An honest man, like true religion, appeals to the understanding, or modestly confides in the internal evidence of his conscience. The imposter employs force instead of argument, imposes silence where he cannot convince, and propagates his character by the sword.
The Letters Of Junius (1769-1771)
Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist, and never of itself.
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear.
Herbert Agar (1897-1980)
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
There is no truth sure enough to justify persecution.
John Milton (1608-1674)
Persecution, whenever it occurs, establishes only the power and cunning of the persecutor, not the truth and worth of his belief.
H.M.Kallen
It has become a settled principle that nothing which is good and true can be destroyed by persecution, but that the effect ultimately is to establish more firmly, and to spread more widely, that which it was designed to overthrow. It has long since passed into a proverb that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church."
Albert Barnes (1798-1870)
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
An injustice committed against anyone is a threat to everyone.
Montesquieu (1689-1755)
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick
themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.
Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)
I would rather lose in a cause that will some day win, than win in a cause that will some day lose.
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924)
Those who believe absurdities end up committing atrocities.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
To announce truths is an infallible receipt for being persecuted.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
Ultimately, the only power to which man should aspire is that which he exercises over himself.
Elie Wiesel
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been
tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall — think of it, always.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent
suffer.
Sir William Blackstone (1723-1780)
Condemn no man for not thinking as you think: Let every one
enjoy
the full and free liberty of thinking for himself: Let every man use
his own judgment, since every man must give an account of himself to
God. Abhor every approach, in any kind or degree, to the spirit of
persecution. If you cannot reason or persuade a man into truth, never
attempt to force him into it. If love will not compel him to come in,
leave him to God, the Judge of all.
John Wesley (stated 1872)
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not
justice.
Desmond Tutu
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men
do nothing.
Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Francois Voltaire (1694-1778)
I know that most men can seldom accept even the most obvious truth if it would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Overcoming poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)
Once torture has become acclimatized in a legal system it spreads like an infectious disease. It saves the labour of investigation. It hardens and brutalizes those who have become accustomed to use it.
Sir William Holdsworth (1871-1944)
History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
If we condone torture, we yield the moral high ground to our enemies and encourage anyone who hates us to stoop to using that subhuman level against us. We reap whatever we sow.
Rick Warren
The coward wretch whose hand and heart can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start from the slightest pain or equal foe.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands
in times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say “This is my country.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Right is its own defense.
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
Do not expect justice where might is right.
Plato (428 B.C. - 347 B.C.)
The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Don't pray that God's on our side, pray that we're on His side.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t goin’ away.
Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
You can have such an open mind that it is too porous to hold a conviction.
George Crane (1901-1995)
Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.
Alan Barth (1906-1979)
In any field, the Establishment is seldom in pursuit of the truth, because it is composed of those who sincerely believe that they are already in possession of it.
E. T. Jaynes (1922-1998)
The great enemy of the truth, is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F Kennedy
Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals -- the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The men who radically altered history, the great scientists and mathematicians, are seldom mentioned,
if at all.
Martin Gardner (1914-2010)
The deliberate torture of one human being by another is a sin against our Creator, in whose image we all have been created. This practice should not be condoned or allowed by any government. It must be condemned by all people of faith, wherever it exists, without exception.
Archbishop Demetrios, Primate, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
The use of torture is dishonourable. It corrupts and degrades the state which uses it and the legal system which accepts it.
Leonard Hoffmann
Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.
President Barack Obama
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Martin Luther King Jr (1929-1968)
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
John Dalberg-Acton (1834-1902)
