Quotations: Truisms
Truisms. These quotations contain information that is absolutely, and often unabashedly true. ;)
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"Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm."
-Donella Meadows
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"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"To speak of right and wrong per se makes no sense at all. No act of violence, rape, exploitation, destruction, is intrinsically unjust, since life itself is violent, rapacious, exploitative, and destructive, and cannot be conceived otherwise."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"In civilized life, where the happiness, and indeed almost the existence, of man depends so much upon the opinion of his fellow men, he is constantly acting a studied part."
-Washington Irving
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"All supposedly 'selfless' acts are entirely selfish. When a man gives to charity, rest assured he values the happiness it brings him more than the money itself. If he did not, he would not give away his money!"
-James Halloran
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"The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat."
-Lily Tomlin
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"No one is completely unhappy at the failure of his best friend."
-Groucho Marx
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"Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative."
-Henry Kissinger
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"If you don't control your mind, someone else will."
-John Allston
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"No man was ever so much deceived by another as by himself."
-Greville
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"What breaks in a moment may take years to mend."
-Swedish proverb
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"The real measure of your wealth is how much you'd be worth if you lost all your money."
-???
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"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."
-P. J. O'Rourke
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"When you betray somebody else, you also betray yourself."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
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"Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened."
-Gerald W. Johnston
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"We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us."
-La Rochefoucauld
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"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
-Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
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"We're supposed to be perfect our first day on the job and then show constant improvement."
-Ed Vargo
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"One man's theology is another man's belly laugh."
-Robert Heinlein
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"At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded."
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
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"Man would sooner have the Void for his purpose than be void of Purpose."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
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"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes."
-Oscar Wilde
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"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"It seems safe to say that significant discovery, really creative thinking, does not occur with regard to problems about which the thinker is lukewarm."
-Mary Henle
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"He that leaveth nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things."
-George Savile
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"It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them."
-Mark Twain
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"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."
-Anais Nin
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"The one who loves the least, controls the relationship."
-Robert Anthony
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"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."
-Oscar Wilde
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"Truth would quickly cease to become stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."
-Henry Louis Mencken
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"If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."
-Anatole France
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"Never wrestle a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."
-???
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"If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names."
-Elbert Hubbard
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"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch."
-???
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"It is impossible to love and to be wise."
-Francis Bacon
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"Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don't recognize them."
-Anne Landers
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"The most common of all antagonisms arises from a man's taking a seat beside you on the train, a seat to which he is completely entitled."
-Robert Benchley
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"Only the winners decide what were war crimes."
-Gary Wills
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"'He means well' is useless unless he does well."
-Plautus
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"Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind."
-John F. Kennedy
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"Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it."
-???
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"Life has no rehearsals, only performances."
-???
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"It is easier to be critical than correct."
-Benjamin Disraeli
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"For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe... Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end."
-H. L. Mencken
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"Everybody's a self-made man; but only the successful ones are ever willing to admit it."
-???
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"To demand 'sense' is the hallmark of nonsense. Nature does not make sense. Nothing makes sense."
-Ayn Rand
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"No matter where or what, there are makers, takers, and fakers."
-Robert Heinlein
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"The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself."
-Thomas Carlyle
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"Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack for being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as often as the right ones. We get along in life this way."
-Lewis Thomas
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"Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination."
-Christopher Isherwood
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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana
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"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen."
-Albert Einstein
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"People only see what they are prepared to see."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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"The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend."
-Robertson Davies
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"What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary."
-Richard Harkness
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"Some people have a large circle of friends while others have only friends that they like."
-???
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"Foolproof systems don't take into account the ingenuity of fools."
-Gene Brown
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"The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds that make it up."
-Harold R. McAlindon
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"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
-Mark Twain
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"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
-Mark Twain
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"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."
-Mark Twain
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"He that falls in love with himself will have no rivals."
-Benjamin Franklin
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"Life is only one damn thing after another."
-Elbert Hubbard
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"Experience is somthing you don't get until just after you need it."
-???
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"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people we personally dislike."
-Oscar Wilde
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"The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist."
-George Bernard Shaw
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"Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time."
-Henry Louis Mencken
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"We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe."
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
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"An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows."
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
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"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
-Georg Wilhelm F. Hegel
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"If the enemy is in range, so are you."
-???
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"A sweater is a garment worn by a child when his mother feels chilly."
-???
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"A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary."
-Thomas Carruthers
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"There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere."
-William James
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"By legend and perhaps by nature philosophers are more accustomed to the armchair than the workbench."
-Ian Hacking
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"It is only too easy to catch people's attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before."
-Claude Monet
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"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."
-Marcus Aurelius
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"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity a greater."
-William Hazlitt
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"Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go."
-William Feather
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"Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into, but hard to get out of."
-???
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"Experience is one thing you can't get for nothing."
-Oscar Wilde
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"A rumor is one thing that gets thicker instead of thinner as it is spread."
-Richard Armour
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"Opportunity may knock only once, but temptation leans on the doorbell."
-???
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"No matter how much spin, effort, lunch or dinner you give the media, they will not fail to notice whether you have won or lost."
-Robin Renwick
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"Procrastination is the thief of time."
-Edward Young
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"Our deeds follow us, and what we have been makes us what we are."
-John Dykes
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"Necessity never made a good bargain."
-Benjamin Franklin
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"To obtain a man's opinion of you, make him mad."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."
-George Eliot
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"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."
-Bertrand Russell
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"We invent what we love, and what we fear."
-John Irving
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"Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves."
-Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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"The coward regards himself as cautious, the miser as thrifty."
-Publilius Syrus
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"It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so."
-Josh Billings
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"While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position."
-???
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"All things being equal, fat people use more soap."
-???
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"The big theives hang the little ones."
-Czech Proverb, regarding capital punishment
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"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
-John F. Kennedy
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"Who begins too much accomplishes little."
-German proverb
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"You may delay, but time will not."
-Benjamin Franklin
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"What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art."
-Augustus Saint-Gaudens
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