Search

Fred Phelps, writing to the Ambassador to the United States from the People's Republic of China, February 26, 1997.
About the Westboro Baptist Church http://www.adl.org/special_reports/wbc/print.asp. Anti-Defamation League.
1990s
Context: In our experience, no modern country is more repressive of human rights than the USA. The vaunted First Amendment is nothing but empty words on paper…we will journey to China at our expense, and tell our story of modern American repression of human rights, upon invitation.

Veganism: The Fundamental Principle of the Abolitionist Movement, http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/veganism-the-fundamental-principle-of-the-abolitionist-movement/
Context: There is no meaningful distinction between eating flesh and eating dairy or other animal products. Animals exploited in the dairy industry live longer than those used for meat, but they are treated worse during their lives, and they end up in the same slaughterhouse after which we consume their flesh anyway. There is probably more suffering in a glass of milk or an ice cream cone than there is in a steak.

about comments posted to Daily Kos blog posts
Context: The hate websites on both the left and the right— I object to. You know I object to. Now, you're a little bit more a libertarian about this in our previous conversations. But I say this. There's no difference between the KKK and the Nazis, who have websites, than the Daily Kos. Because the Daily Kos is basically saying, "We're allowing this kind of thing to come on." It's good that Tony Snow has a recurrence of cancer; we hope he dies. We're sorry the assassination attempt against Dick Cheney failed; let them try again. And on and on and on and on.

The Rubaiyat (1120)
Context: We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. II : The Fellow-Craft, p. 40
Context: Work only can keep even kings respectable. And when a king is a king indeed, it is an honorable office to give tone to the manners and morals of a nation; to set the example of virtuous conduct, and restore in spirit the old schools of chivalry, in which the young manhood may be nurtured to real greatness. Work and wages will go together in men's minds, in the most royal institutions. We must ever come to the idea of real work. The rest that follows labor should be sweeter than the rest which follows rest.

Vol. 3, pg. 21, translated by W.P. Dickson
The History of Rome - Volume 3
Context: It is no easy task for a state any more than for a man to become reconciled to insignificance; it is the duty and right of the ruler either to renounce his authority, or by the display of an imposing material superiority to compel the ruled to resignation.

Letter to Dr. James Kerr Love (1910), published in Helen Keller in Scotland: a personal record written by herself (1933), edited by James Kerr Love. Paraphrasing of this statement may have been the origin of a similar one which has become attributed to her:
Context: The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus — the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.

Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 150.
Context: Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

IV. 1. as quoted by Florian Cajori (1899)
On the Heavens

Source: Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968), p. 225
Context: It is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself as fully as what it is.

Attributed to Napoleon in Napoleon (1941) by Yevgeny Tarle, this is a variant of an ancient proverb often attributed to many military and political figures, including Alexander the Great, and the even earlier figure Chabrias (Χαβρίας).
Misattributed

The Black Coat (2013)

La libéralité consiste moins à donner beaucoup qu'à donner à propos.
Aphorism 47; Variant translation: Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.
Les Caractères (1688), Du Coeur

Interview with reporters, as quoted in "Carter condemns abortion culture" in The Washington Times (3 November 2005) http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051103-111740-7148r.htm
Post-Presidency

Book IX, Ch. 10
Amelia (1751)

Source: Burning All Illusions (1996), p. 1

Vorkosigan Saga, Shards of Honor (1986)
Context: Leadership is mostly a power over imagination, and never more so than in combat. The bravest man alone can only be an armed lunatic. The real strength lies in the ability to get others to do your work.

Source: Drenai series, The Swords of Night and Day, Ch. 21
Context: Winning is not everything, Stavut. Men like to think it is. Sometimes it is more important to stand against evil than to worry about beating it... Evil will always have the worst weapons. Evil will gather the greatest armies. They will burn, and plunder, and kill. But that's not the worst of it. They will try to make us believe that the only way to destroy them is to become like them. That is the true vileness of evil. It is contagious.

"A Walk in the Garden" online https://web.archive.org/web/20080316123630/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_archive/shepard6/shepard61.html
A Walk in the Garden (2003)
Context: Things Specialist Charles N. Wilson Wants You To Know
· · · · · 
1: Everything I've ever known has been no more than a powerful conviction.
2: Nothing motivates like sex and death and sound effects.
3: Politics is the Enemy.
4: Jesus and Mohammed would probably hang out together.