John Quincy Adams

“Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it”. –John Quincy Adams

Frederick Rolfe

“Brisk and prompt to war, soft and not in the least able to resist calamity, fickle in catching at schemes, and always striving after novelties — French characteristics remained unaltered twenty centuries after Julius Caesar made a note of them for all time”. –Frederick Rolfe

Otto Hahn

“First we attacked the Russian soldiers with our poisonous gases, and then when we saw the poor fellows lying there, dying slowly, we tried to make breathing easier for them by using our own life-saving devices on them”. –Otto Hahn

Louis Armstrong

“Making money ain’t nothing exciting to me. You might be able to buy a little better booze than the wino on the corner. But you get sick just like the next cat, and when you die you’re just as graveyard dead as he is”. –Louis Armstrong

Henry Liddon

“The life of man is made up of action and endurance; and life is fruitful in the ratio in which it is laid out in noble action or in patient perseverance”. –Henry Liddon

Jonas Salk

“Neither wisdom nor good will is now dominant. Hope lies in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality”. –Jonas Salk

Bill Mauldin

“Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo”. –Bill Mauldin

J.G. Ballard

“Human beings today… are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment enterprises. They’ve made themselves user friendly, but they define the tastes to which we conform. They’re rather subtle, subservient tyrants, but no less sinister for that”. –J.G. Ballard

Walter Lippmann

“A State is absolute in the sense which I have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to establish and dis-establish property, to define crime, to punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family, to regulate habits, and to censor opinions. The modern State claims all of these powers, and, in the matter of theory, there is no real difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and democrats”. –Walter Lippmann

Bradley Nowell

“I think that self-reliance is what makes you happy; not having to worry about anything or not depending on anybody besides yourself”. –Bradley Nowell

John Marshall

“The people made the Constitution, and the people can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will, and lives only by their will”. –John Marshall

Rembrandt

“Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what now you do not know”. –Rembrandt

Jean Giraudoux

“Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom”. –Jean Giraudoux

Rosa Parks

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear”. –Rosa Parks

Lewis Mumford

“Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers”. –Lewis Mumford

Yukio Mishima

“My knowledge that I am masquerading as a normal person has even corroded whatever of normality I originally possessed, ending by making me tell myself over and over again that it too was nothing but a pretense of normality”. –Yukio Mishima

John Stuart Mill

“A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself”. –John Stuart Mill

Dag Hammarskjöld

“Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment”. –Dag Hammarskjöld

Kurt Vonnegut

“Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima”. –Kurt Vonnegut

Fiorello La Guardia

“It makes no difference if I burn my bridges behind me — I never retreat”. –Fiorello LaGuardia

Claude Debussy

“Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art”. –Claude Debussy

Wilhelm von Humboldt

“The government is best which makes itself unnecessary”. –Wilhelm von Humboldt

T.E. Lawrence

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses  of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did”. –T.E. Lawrence

Democritus

“By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich”. –Democritus

Nathalie Sarraute

“It’s the duty of all novelists, all painters, all musicians, all people who try to make art move: to look for something they feel authentically, without paying attention to styles”. –Nathalie Sarraute

Alexis Carrel

“Everyone makes a greater effort to hurt other people than to help himself”. –Alexis Carrel

Pierre Beaumarchais

“Drinking when not thirsty and making love all the time, madam, is all that distinguishes us from other animals”. –Pierre Beaumarchais

Booker T. Washington

“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public”. –Booker T. Washington

H.G. Wells

“A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own”. –H.G. Wells

Ulysses S. Grant

“If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail”. –Ulysses S. Grant

Humphrey Bogart

“Things are never so bad they can’t be made worse”. –Humphrey Bogart

William Tecumseh Sherman

“Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster”. –William Tecumseh Sherman