Oscar Arias Sanchez

I cannot accept that to be realistic means to tolerate misery, violence and hate. I do not believe that the hungry man should be treated as subversive for expressing his suffering. I shall never accept that the law can be used to justify tragedy, to keep things as they are, to make us abandon our ideas of a different world. Law is the path of liberty, and must as such open the way to progress for everyone.
Henry Geldzahler

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of arts audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
The Club of Rome,

Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today's problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.
Kinski, Klaus

Words today block meanings. Words are losing their value these days. People don't communicate what they mean.

Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.

Goldwin Smith

Levin, Bernard

No amount of manifest absurdity could deter those who wanted to believe from believing.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

The artist helps us to forget the bonds with the world, and reveals to us the invisible connections by which we are bound up with eternity. True art withdraws our thoughts from the mere machinery of life, and lifts our souls above the meanness of it. It releases the self from the restless activities of the world, and takes us out "of the noisy sick- room of ourselves." It disengages the mind from its imprisonment in the web of customary associations and routine ideas. The secret of all art lies in self-forgetfulness. The poet or the artist sets free the poet or the artist in us. And this he can do only if his artistic creation is born of self-forgetful joy. The true artist lifts himself above all worldly passions and desires, into the spiritual mood where he waits for the light. He turns away from all other objects, identifies himself with the particular subject he

wishes to interpret, merges his consciousness in it, and loses himself. He calls out to the object whose beauty he wishes to be revealed :... Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit ! be thou me, impetuous one. (quoting Shelley)
Reza Aslan

Religion is, by definition, interpretation; and by definition, all interpretations are valid. However, some interpretations are more reasonable than others.
John Basil Barnhill

Where the people fear the government you have tyranny. Where the government fears the people you have liberty.
Prabhuji

An authentic religious person is not he who has found God but he who never abandons his search. Sri Ramakrishnananda Babaji Maharaja, who is respectfully and lovingly called Prabhuji
E.T.A. Hoffmann

Music speaks, where words fail.

Elaine Dundy

What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive and has never put in an honest day's work in its life.
Hermann Gmeiner

Every big thing in world only comes true, when somebody does more than he has to do.
Tomas Transtrmer

We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones.
Mark Kac

Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world which they share with others and in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place.
Henry Winkler

Self-image is the beginning and ending of living. Life is not first lived and then understood; it is poorly lived till understood.
Max Weber George A. Gordon

One can say that three preeminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Life is a series of relapses and recoveries.

George Ade

The more we study human nature, the less we think of men - the more of man.
Benot Mandelbrot

Theodore Tilton

It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all othersand we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it. So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers.

John Wisdom

Philosophers should be continually trying to say what cannot be said.

Theo Warner Never thirst for knowledge. You'll always be thirsty. Elena Katerli

It seems to me that in each Communist there is a kind of particle of Stalin. In any true Communist, of course. And this helps him to be sure and calm, to know what to do, to what everything will lead if he acts as the Party commands. A Communist is a leader in everything and everywhere, a teacher of life for the people.
Adolf Freiherr Knigge

Whoever lives continually in a state of dissipation and distraction, becomes a stranger in his own heart.
John Steven Davies

Art washes away from our souls the dust which is everyday life.
The things we fear most in organizations -- fluctuations, disturbances, and imbalances -- are the primary sources of creativity.
Kaloust Guedel Margaret J. Wheatley

The artists' imagination is bound to simplicity and as a rule is in conflict with common sense.

John Barth

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.
Prison, with its daily rhythm, with the transfer and the defense, does not leave any time; prison dissolves time: This is the principal form of punishment in a capitalist society.
Will Cuppy Negri, Antonio

Great authors should be read, and not met.

We would not listen to those who were wont to say the voice of the people is the voice of God, for the voice of the mob is near akin to madness.
Julia Metz Alcuin

Hypocrisy has its own elegant symmetry.

John Foster Hall

John Foster Hall We are all on earth to help others. What on earth the others are here for, I can't imagine.
Keir Hardie

To claim for socialism that it is a class war is to do it an injustice and indefinitely postpone its triumph. Socialism offers a platform broad enough for all to stand upon. It makes war upon a system, not upon a class. Religion without mystery ceases to be religion.
William T. Manning

Art is about arranging certain stuff, in a certain order, in a certain place, with a certain end in mind.
Fulke Greville

Walter Hamady

The mind of man is this world's true dimension; and knowledge is the measure of the mind.
Marshall W. Fishwick

The nihilist rejects not only his own existence but also the existences that confirm it: If I cant be anything, Ill be nothing. He rejects existence without being eliminate it. Like the playwright Samuel Beckett, he comes to the zero point and zero times anything equals zero.
Edmund Husserl

Philosophers, as things now stand, are all too fond of offering criticism from on high instead of studying and understanding things from within.

Sigmund Neumann

Sigmund Neumann

The modern demagogue realizes that what the mass man longs for is an emotional outlet for active participation The suppression of fear is, in fact, the chief aim of dictatorial organization. The introduction of uniforms fulfills this purpose, as does the observance of strict discipline.
Roger Williams

The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.
Otto Kahn

Liberty in the wild and freakish hands of fanatics has once more, as frequently in the past, proved the effective helpmate of autocracy and the twin brother of tyranny.
Carl J. Friedrich

The lure of secrecy consists for the possessor of a secret partly in the possibility of betraying it. It gives the possessor of a secret a certain sense of exclusivity whereby he is set apart from ordinary mortals.
H. Cord Meyer

The course of History reflects a continual contest between limited, orderly processes of development and historical accident.
Julien Benda

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity.
We cast away priceless time in dreams, born of imagination, fed upon illusion, and put to death by reality.
Fanny Brice Judy Garland

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?
Jacek Tylicki

Art happens all the time, everywhere. All we have to do is to keep our minds open.
The problem is that everybody in America votes for the party which favors the class they want to be in, rather than the class they are in.
Jim Oblak Randy Helzerman

Creativity is the subtle theft of another's ideas.

Maude Adams

Genius is the talent for seeing things straight. It is seeing things in a straight line without any bend or break or aberration of sight, seeing them as they are, without any warping of vision.
John T. Noonan, Jr.

The users of any system --scientific, theological, legal --encounter points where their premises and Their practices are inconsistent. These gaps in the system must be bridged or the system changed. To bridge the gaps, those who accept the system employ fictions... Fictions are a necessity of law.
Eugene J. Martin

If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs.
The left (liberals) are snide and sarcastic; the right (conservatives) are dangerous and violent.
Niemeyer, Gerhart Dan Savage

The communist mind is tempted by visions of fancy, bribed by a pseudoscientism, they come to Believe the reality of dreams, submerge themselves in a world of their own intellectual making, and Pretend to be masters of creation. As long as such people are effectively organized for political Action, the world can have no peace.
Jeffrey Kaplow

Now it is a fact that humor and revolutionary fervor are never congenial bedfellows. The lack of a Sense of humor is doubtless one of the most salient characteristics of the revolutionary. Wit and Humor appeared as counterrevolutionary vices.....It reveals a state of mind that the Revolutionaries...would not have denied, for they took life very seriously and attached a quasi-

Religious significance to words.

Wilson Mizner

Faith is a wonderful thing, but doubt gets you an education.

Nouy, Pierre Lecompte Du

The human brain craves understanding. It cannot understand without simplifying, that is, without Reducing things to a common element. However, all simplifications are arbitrary and lead us to drift Insensibly away from reality.
Ian Hornak

While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are today suspect I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.
The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
W.H. Murray

Daniel Katz

The functional approach is the attempt to understand the reasons people hold the attitudes they do. The reasons, however, are at the level of psychological motivations and not the accidents of external Events and circumstances. Unless we know the psychological need which is met by the holding of An attitude we are in a poor position to predict when and how it will change.
Blum, Leon

A free man is he who does not fear to go to the end of his thought.
Dick Gregory

In America, with all its evils and faults, you can still reach through the forest and see the sun. But we do not know yet whether the sun is rising or setting for our country.
John Constable

The whole beauty and grandeur of Art consists ... in being able to get above all singular forms, particularities of every kind [by making out] an abstract idea ... more perfect than any one original.
Luis Barragn

Art is made by the alone for the alone.

Margaret Knight

Christians claim that organized Christianity has been a great force for good, but this view can be maintained on one assumption only: that everything good in the Christian era is a result of Christianity and everything bad happened in spite of it.
Matilda Joslyn Gage

The careful student of history will discover that Christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it.
William Jay Gaynor

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.
Joseph Minton

Art should be more then just brush stokes on canvas showing a precise and literal duplication of an event. Art is for more then that. True art captures emotions, feelings and the energy of the object or event that is being depicted. It goes far deeper then the cold, flat surface of duplication.
Robert Thibodeau Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed. Erma Bombeck

I remember thinking how often we look, but never see...we listen, but never hear...we exist, but never feel. We take our relationships for granted. A house is only a place. It has no life of its own. It needs human voices, activity and laughter to come alive.

Robert Herrick

Art quickens nature; care will make a face; Neglected beauty perishes apace.
Every individual decision is nothing but coincidence, every artistic decision is coincidence.
Carsten Nicolai

Love without truth lies; truth without love kills.

C.E. Moore

William J. Goode

People who intensely believe in any extreme political ideology, whether left or right, are also likely to Believe that some small groups conspire to achieve their evil ends by manipulating the social Structure.
Lewis Namier

What matters most about political ideas is the underlying emotions, the music, to which ideas are mere libretto, often of an inferior quality.
Adams, Charles Francis

In this country men seem to live for action as long as they can and sink into apathy when they retire.
Robert S. McElvaine

Most liberals never lost sight of the potential for evil in big government. They have consistently opposed government power in matters of personal and political belief. Liberals are not unconcerned with economic liberty, but they have come to believe that the common good requires that social justice be given a higher priority than absolute economic freedom. Conservatives are-and always have been-on the other side of both questions. They are much more prone than liberals to limiting personal and political liberties, but they place the freedom of an individual to do as he pleases in the economic realm at the top of their concerns. Social justice has held a lower priority for conservatives, from the days of Alexander Hamilton when they favored strong government as a means of protecting their economic privileges to the days of Ronald Reagan when they see government as an instrument of social justice and therefore a threat to their economic position.
Nystrom, Christine L.

Fanaticism is the triumph of reflex over reflection. It differs from the more primitive reflexes in that it Is conditioned contingent on symbols rather than sensory stimuli but it is reflex nonetheless As a variety of reflex, fanaticism is deeply rooted in human behavior; reflection, on the other hand, is As yet only tenuously established
Christopher Sunami

I reject philosophy as an academic discipline. I embrace philosophy as a way of life. A philosophy unlived is no true philosophy at all. The purpose of philosophy is to help people understand and ultimately influence the world they live in. A philosopher is an intellectual activist. A philosopher is an engineer of the mind. Philosophy is not mind games. Philosophy is not navel-gazing. Philosophy is not unintelligible answers to unanswerable questions.

Philosophy, properly understood, is one of the most powerful forces affecting human existence. Every meaningful action and every willed choice is built upon, responds to, reacts against or presupposes a philosophy. In this time of crisis, I call on philosophers around the world to rise to their destiny and duty as the shapers of the basic nature of human thought!
Rank, Otto

Art unquestionably has an end, probably even serves a variety of ends - but the ends are not concrete and practical, they are abstract and spiritual. Otto Rank
It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.
Martha Gelhorn

Alexander Maclaren Conflict, not progress, is the word that defines man's path from darkness into light. No holiness is won by any other means than this, that wickedness should be slain day by day, and hour by hour. Dong Kingman

Most artists are surrealists. ... always dreaming something and then they paint it.
Any ideal system is its own worst enemy, and as soon as you start to implement these visions of grandeur, they just fall apart and turn into a complete tyranny.
Robert Mills Ben Nicholson

Knowledge stands on one leg, and requires balance and attention. Truth stands on its own two strong legs, and requires no proof.
Josiah W. Gitt

Humanity's most valuable assets have been the non-conformists. Were it not for the non-conformists, he who refuses to be satisfied to go along with the continuance of things as they are, and insists upon attempting to find new ways of bettering things, the world would have know little progress, indeed.

Leonard Jeffries

Power is the ability to define reality and have other people respond to your definition!
Martin Niemller

In Germany, they first came for the Communists -- and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews -- and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists -- and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics -and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me -- and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Maria Mitchell

We have a hunger of the mind, which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.

Peter Gay

# To have a liberal temperament is a kind of psychological boon, To be able to understand that someone you disagree with is not just a terrible creature but somebody with whom you disagree.
Ethel Lina White

Lost causes are the only causes worth fighting for.

Ted Goertzel

Passionate belief is a sign of ideological thinking when the passion is attached to the ideology itself Instead of to the underlying moral or value issues. 429. Perhaps the most general and important indicator of ideological thinking is a tendency to rigidly Defend a consistent position regardless of any evidence that may be offered.... Facts are chosen Selectively to illustrate and defend ideological beliefs. Truth is congenial to man. Moral truth is then most consummate when, like beauty, it commends itself without argument. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right.
Yevgenia Ginsburg Francis W. Newman

All ideologies are relative; the only absolute is the torment men inflict on each other.
I think that we're -- we're talking about usually two ideologies, capitalism and socialism. One's a 16th century idea. One's a 19th century idea. We're in the 21st century. Can't we come up with our own system that meets the needs of this new era and has democracy at its core?
Michael Moore