The Great Quotes thread

[Kryztian]

[Eva2]

I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

Frederick Douglass

[pueblo]

"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing."

- Voltaire

[Bill Ryan]

He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral. Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.

St Thomas Aquinas (1225—1274)

[norman]

A bad question is not a bad question, it is an attempt to impose false vocabulary - Sasha Latypova

[Tintin]

[pueblo]

"What is, is God."

- Ramana

[Vicus]

"The Kennedy assassination has demonstrated that most of the major events of world significance are masterfully planned and orchestrated by an elite coterie of enormously powerful people who are not of one nation, one ethnic grouping, or one overridingly important business group. They are a power unto themselves for whom those others work. Neither is this power elite of recent origin. Its roots go deep into the past."

- Col. L. Fletcher Prouty

[Ewan]

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know,
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
Each bell that tolls reminds us of our own mortality.
We are one.
As it goes for one it goes for us all. ~John Donne

[Bill Ryan]

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.

Voltaire, May 1767

[Kryztian]

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech; which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. This sacred privilege is so essential to free governments, that the security of property, and the freedom of speech always go together; and in those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call any thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation, must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to public traitors. Freedom of speech is ever the symptom, as well as the effect of a good government. ~ Benjamin Franklin

[Frankie Pancakes]

I realize this thread is suggested to be Great quotes by the famous.
Here is a quote from a not famous...Eric Peters.

when I felt that scratch in my throat and my nose began to run a little but, I found I could not help thinking . . .

This is a measure of what’s been done to many of us – probably most if not all of us. Can anyone of us just catch a cold anymore without thinking, just a little bit, that it might be something more than just that?

Can we mention to anyone that we caught a cold without them thinking – even if they don’t say so out loud – that it might be something more than that?

God damn the people who did this to us.