Quotes

Millard Fillmore photo

“An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.”

Millard Fillmore (1800–1874) American politician, 13th President of the United States (in office from 1850 to 1853)

Speech http://books.google.com/books?id=Ihs8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA407&dq=honorable+defeat (13 September 1844), Buffalo, New York, quoted in the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser (14 September 1844). Fillmore had lost the Whig nomination for governor of New York. The newspaper summary was: "He entreated them to enter the contest with zeal and enthusiasm; but as they valued the sacredness of their cause, and the stability of their principles, to resort to no unfair means: that an honorable defeat was better than a dishonorable victory."
1840s

“It was always easier for me to love than to praise.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

Siempre me fue más fácil amar que elogiar.
Voces (1943)

Samuel Johnson photo

“Example is always more efficacious than precept.”

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 29

Charlotte Brontë photo

“Better to be without logic than without feeling.”

Source: The Professor (1857), Ch. XXIV

Martin Firrell photo

“Calamitous collapse is better than mediocre defeat!”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

Quoted in The London Evening Standard (9 August 2001).

“It is better to give away the wool than the sheep.”

Stefano Guazzo (1530–1593) Italian writer

Dell'Honore, p. 313.
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 294.

John Locke photo

“Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world”

Sec. 70
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Context: Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

Paul Glover photo

“The world is coming to a beginning rather than an end.”

Paul Glover (1947) Community organizer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; American politician

http://www.paulglover.org/metroeco.html (Metropolitan Ecology syllabus, section 7, Temple University), April 2007
Context: “The world is coming to a beginning rather than an end. We have the knowledge, tools, creativity, and capital to proceed. Our challenge is merely to begin where we live, with whatever capabilities are at hand.”

Herodotus photo

“Men trust their ears less than their eyes.”

Book 1, Ch. 8.
The Histories

Charles Sanders Peirce photo

“To "postulate" a proposition is no more than to hope it is true.”

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist

The Doctrine of Necessity Examined (1892)
Context: When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer has usually been that the proposition is a "presupposition " or postulate of scientific reasoning. Well, if that is the best that can be said for it, the belief is doomed. Suppose it be " postulated " : that does not make it true, nor so much as afford the slightest rational motive for yielding it any credence. It is as if a man should come to borrow money, and when asked for his security, should reply he "postulated " the loan. To "postulate" a proposition is no more than to hope it is true. There are, indeed, practical emergencies in which we act upon assumptions of certain propositions as true, because if they are not so, it can make no difference how we act. But all such propositions I take to be hypotheses of individual facts. For it is manifest that no universal principle can in its universality be compromised in a special case or can be requisite for the validity of any ordinary inference.

Eliezer Yudkowsky photo

“It is so much worse than you think.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

Predictible Fakers (January 2009) http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/01/predictible-fakers.html
Context: My experience is that journalists report on the nearest-cliche algorithm, which is extremely uninformative because there aren’t many cliches, the truth is often quite distant from any cliche, and the only thing you can infer about the actual event was that this was the closest cliche.... It is simply not possible to appreciate the sheer awfulness of mainstream media reporting until someone has actually reported on you. It is so much worse than you think.

George Orwell photo

“[E]ven stupidity is better than totalitarianism.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"As I Please," Tribune (10 March 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

Robert Gibbs photo

“There's no safer investment in the world than in the United States.”

Robert Gibbs (1971) 28th White House Press Secretary

Press Briefing, March 13, 2009 http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Briefing-by-WH-Press-Secretary-Gibbs-3-13-09/

Miguel de Unamuno photo

“There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

Recalled by Walter Starkie from a conversation he had with Unamuno, as related in the Epilogue of Unamuno http://books.google.com/books?id=u8DG-eCTtM4C&lpg=PR1&dq=Unamuno&pg=PA240#v=onepage&q=%22There%20is%20no%20tyranny%20in%20the%20world%20more%20hateful%20than%20that%20of%20ideas%22&f=false.
Context: There is no tyranny in the world more hateful than that of ideas. Ideas bring ideophobia, and the consequence is that people begin to persecute their neighbors in the name of ideas. I loathe and detest all labels, and the only label that I could now tolerate would be that of ideoclast or idea breaker.

Meher Baba photo

“There is no greater romance in life than this adventure in realization.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

Message at Pickfair, Beverly Hills, California (1 June 1932), as quoted in Life Is A Jest (1974) edited by A. K. Hajra <!-- or 6 January? 1932 Me p100-101 -->
General sources
Context: Life becomes meaningful and all activities are purposeful only on the basis of faith in the enduring reality. … The greatest romance possible in life is to discover this Eternal Reality in the midst of infinite change. Once, one has experienced this, one sees oneself in everything that lives, one recognises all of life as his life, everybody's interests as his own. One is no longer bound by habits of the past, no longer swayed by the hopes of the future — One lives in and enjoys each present moment to the full. There is no greater romance in life than this adventure in realization.

John Lennon photo

“We're more popular than Jesus now”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

One of the most controversial statements Lennon ever made, this was published in England's Evening Standard newspaper (4 March 1966) as part of an interview with writer Maureen Cleave.
Context: Christianity will go.. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Robert A. Heinlein photo

“It is better to be a lively frump than a stylish corpse.”

Source: The Number of the Beast (1980), Chapter XXIII : “The farce is over.”, p. 212

Tom Wolfe photo

“I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph”

On Ken Kesey, in Ch. I : Black Shiny FBI Shoes
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
Context: He talks in a soft voice with a country accent, almost a pure country accent, only crackling and rasping and cheese-grated over the two-foot hookup, talking about —
"—there's been no creativity," he is saying, "and I think my value has been to help create the next step. I don't think there will be any movement off the drug scene until there is something else to move to —"
— all in a plain country accent about something — well, to be frank, I didn't know what in the hell it was all about. Sometimes he spoke cryptically, in aphorisms. I told him I had heard he didn't intend to do any more writing. Why? I said.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph," he said.
He talked about something called the Acid Test and forms of expression in which there would be no separation between himself and the audience. It would be all one experience, with all the senses opened wide, words, music, lights, sounds, touch —
lightning.

Giordano Bruno photo

“Nature is none other than God in things…”

Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer

As quoted in Elements of Pantheism (2004) by Paul A. Harrison
Context: Nature is none other than God in things... Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; Whence all of God is in all things... Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.

Jim Starlin photo

“I'd rather do comics than novels.”

Jim Starlin (1949) Comic creator

Interview at comicbookresources.com (28 July 2000) http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=194
Context: I've made more money in novels than I did in my entire career in comics. The few years I did novels, they paid off so well, I don't have to be a slave to doing comics. But I'd rather do comics than novels. If I wanted to do it just for the money, I'd run off and do another novel. I just don't have the juice for it. I'm really not interested in it. It's a love for what this medium is.