In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.--Orson Welles (1915 - 1985), The Third Man, 1949
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the relevation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"
I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.--Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900 - 1965), Speech during 1952 Presidential Campaign
The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of truth--that the error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it is cured on one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.--H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)
They have exiled me now from their society and I am pleased, because humanity does not exile except the one whose noble spirit rebels against despotism and oppression. He who does not prefer exile to slavery is not free by any measure of freedom, truth and duty.--Kahil Gibran, Spirits Rebellious
Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.--Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
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