Quotes

For some reason, these touch me in some way. Make of that what you will.

• Reality is whatever doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.
            — Philip K. Dick

• We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions — bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality.
  Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another seeks to degrade all nationalities.
  Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races.
  Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.
            — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, 1932–1945
                 November campaign address in 1940 in Brooklyn, NY

• The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
            — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, 1932–1945
                 Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937

• The moral test of a government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; the twilight of life, the elderly; the shadows of life, the sick, needy and the handicapped.
            — Hubert Humphrey, U.S. Senator from Minnesota, 1949–1964, 1971–1978;
                 38th Vice President of the United States, 1964–1968

• To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
            — Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, 1901–1909

• Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
            — Robert Jackson, U. S. Supreme Court Justice
                 in West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette (1943)

• I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
            — James Madison

• We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men—not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
            — Edward R. Murrow, See It Now, March 9, 1954

• All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.
            — I. F. Stone, In a Time of Torment, 1961–1967

• Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.
            — Fred Rogers

• Life is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.
            — Virginia Satir

• Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
            — Robert Louis Stevenson

• Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information.
            — Kurt Vonnegut

• No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
            — John Donne