Category: Quote of the Week

“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.” — Max Beerbohm

“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.” — Mark Twain

“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organic design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution.” — Stephen Jay Gould

“The disease of modern character is specialization…The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself.” — Wendell Berry

“If man is not governed by God, he will be ruled by tyrants.” — William Penn

“When after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd.

“The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd.

“I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined with some of the outward forms of freedom and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)

“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American… There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag… We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language… and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.” — Teddy Roosevelt, 1907

“Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.” — George Orwell