“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
“The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
This has been attributed to Orwell on the internet, but the earliest source citing him as author appears to be a post from Jsnip4 on the RealistNews.net forum (15 February 2011) http://www.realistnews.net/Thread-realist-news-was-the-capital-gains-tax-just-removed-regarding-bullion. Prior to this, the statement occurred, without attribution to Orwell, in an opinion piece by columnist Selwyn Duke http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/duke/090506, "Stopping Truth At The Border: Banning Michael Savage From Britain" (6 May 2009) https://web.archive.org/web/20150701002957/http://www.conservativecrusader.com/articles/stopping-truth-at-the-border-banning-michael-savage-from-britain.
Misattributed
“We are the change we have been waiting for.”
“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.”
“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.”
"The Philosophy of Composition" (published 1846).
“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”
As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3
“Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out.”
Variant: Science advances one funeral at a time.
“No burden is so heavy for a man to bear as a succession of happy days.”
Max Müller, as quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood
Misattributed
“For once touched by love, everyone becomes a poet”
196
The Symposium
“Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much”
Variant: Kind words don't cost much. Yet they accomplish much.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Variant: All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone.
Source: Pensées
“To understand is to forgive.”
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”
Often misattributed to Twain, this is actually by Blaise Pascal, "Lettres provinciales", letter 16, 1657:
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
Translation: I have only made this [letter] longer, because I have not had the opportunity to make it shorter.
Misattributed
Source: The Provincial Letters
“It is better to know something about everything then everything about something”
“Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.”
Source: The Black Obelisk
“Anything you can settle with money is cheap.”
Source: Arch of Triumph: A Novel of a Man Without a Country
