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“We are the richest country in the world. We spend more on health care than any other country. Yet we have the worst health care in the Western world. Come on. We can do better than this.”

Michael Moore (1954) American filmmaker, author, social critic, and liberal activist

As quoted in Sicko is Socko, Richard, Corliss, Time, 19 May 2007 http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1623337,00.html, <br class="br">2007

“Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas … the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification … has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.”

John Locke book An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Book III, Ch. 9, sec. 4
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)

“I'd rather be a sparrow than a snail
Yes I would, if I could, I surely would
I'd rather be a hammer than a nail
Yes I would, if I only could, I surely would”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

El Condor Pasa (If I Could)
Song lyrics, Bridge over Troubled Water (1970)

“God deserves more love than the world gives him. Men, too, need more love than they receive from the world. Our community wants to take her place where these two needs meet.”

Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905–1988) Swedish Catholic theologian

Our Task: A Report and a Plan (1984)

“The playing field is more sacred than the stock exchange, more blessed than Capital Hill or the vaults of Fort Knox. The diamond and the gridiron - and, to a lesser degree, the court, the rink, the track, and the ring - embody the American dream of Eden.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 5, Social Hygiene, p. 125

“In Cuba, there is no fear of a racial war. Men are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. Cubans are more than whites, mulattos or Negroes. On the field of battle, dying for Cuba, the souls of whites and Negroes have risen together into the air.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

My Race (1893)

“A heart-memory is better than a mere head-memory. Better to carry away a little of the love of Christ in our souls, than if we were able to repeat every word of every sermon we ever heard.”

Francis de Sales (1567–1622) French bishop, saint, writer and Doctor of the Church j

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 373.

“Whenever a man and a woman come to words or blows, fools are quick to attribute it to the differences between the sexes. The sexes differ much less than they wish to believe, and such differences as are real tend less to promote strife than to prevent it.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Volume 2, Ch. 23
Fiction, The Book of the Short Sun (1999–2001)

“Certainly it is not so easy to pay something as it is to pay nothing, but it is easier to pay a large sum than it is to pay a larger one. And it is easier to pay any sum when we are able than it is to pay it before we are able.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)

“There is nothing about which a young Christian should be more anxious than maintaining the spirit, the love, the practice of private prayer j and nothing which should more seriously alarm him than any disposition to neglect it.”

John Angell James (1785–1859) British abolitionist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 470.

“People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint.”

Eric Hoffer book The True Believer

Section 93
The True Believer (1951), Part Three: United Action and Self-Sacrifice
Context: People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief of the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. They willingly abdicate the directing of their lives to those who want to plan, command and shoulder all responsibility.

“The present generation believes that it knows more about Jesus Christ than any preceding generation knew. Yet we are equally confident that our grandchildren's children will understand Jesus far better than we do.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

Source: Something More, A Consideration of the Vast, Undeveloped Resources of Life (1920), p. 43
Context: The present generation believes that it knows more about Jesus Christ than any preceding generation knew. Yet we are equally confident that our grandchildren's children will understand Jesus far better than we do. There is something more in him than we have been able to fathom.

“Taste is one of the weaker words in our language. It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing; certainly it conveys no suggestion of potency. It savors of accomplishment, in the fashionable sense, not of power to accomplish in the creative sense.”

Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect

Source: Kindergarten Chats (1918), Ch. 10 : A Roman Temple
Context: Taste is one of the weaker words in our language. It means a little less than something, a little more than nothing; certainly it conveys no suggestion of potency. It savors of accomplishment, in the fashionable sense, not of power to accomplish in the creative sense. It expresses a familiarity with what is au courant among persons of so-called culture, of so-called good form. It is essentially a second-hand word, and can have no place in the working vocabulary of those who demand thought and action at first hand. To say that a thing is tasty or tasteful is, practically, to say nothing at all.

“I am firmly convinced, as I have already said, that to effect any great social improvement, it is sympathy rather than self-interest, the sense of duty rather than the desire for self-advancement, that must be appealed to.”

Henry George (1839–1897) American economist

Source: Social Problems (1883), Ch. 21 : Conclusion
Context: I am firmly convinced, as I have already said, that to effect any great social improvement, it is sympathy rather than self-interest, the sense of duty rather than the desire for self-advancement, that must be appealed to. Envy is akin to admiration, and it is the admiration that the rich and powerful excite which secures the perpetuation of aristocracies.

“The teacher usually learns more than the pupils. Isn't that true?
"It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."”

Douglas Adams book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

“There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

1963 interview, used in The Century of the Self (2002)
Context: My argument with so much of psychoanalysis, is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact, possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.

“The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Ibid., p. 110
The Book of Disquiet
Original: A superioridade do sonhador consiste em que sonhar é muito mais prático que viver, e em que o sonhador extrai da vida um prazer muito mais vasto e muito mais variado do que o homem de acção. Em melhores e mais directas palavras, o sonhador é que é o homem de acção.

“Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II, 14

“Philosophy has taught me to rely on my own convictions rather than on the judgements of others and to concern myself less with whether I am well thought of than whether what I do or say is evil.”
Docuit me ipsa philosophia a propria potius conscientia quam ab externis pendere iuditiis, cogitareque semper, non tam ne male audiam, quam ne quid male vel dicam ipse vel agam.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola book Oration on the Dignity of Man

25. 160; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

“We had adopted a kind of solar uniformitarianism," solar physicist John (Jack) Eddy suggested in retrospect. "As people and as scientists we have always wanted the Sun to be better than other stars and better than it really is.”

John A. Eddy (1931–2009) American astronomer

Source: Changing Sun, Changing Climate? by Spencer Weart http://www.aip.org/history/climate/solar.htm#M_27_