-Peter Abelard
Great men are almost always bad men, even when they excercise influence and not authority; still more when they superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption of authority.
-Lord Acton
In every age its (liberty's) progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power and the poor man's craving for food.
-Lord Acton
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
-Francis Bacon
Great hypocrites are the true atheists.
-Francis Bacon
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
-Walter Bagehot
There are in fact four very significant stumbling-blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.
-Roger Bacon
The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
-Henry Beecher Ward
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, not liberty to purchase power.
-Benjamin Frankilin
The simplest and most necessary truths are always the last believed.
-John Ruskin
They (corporations) cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
-Sir Edward Coke
He (God) is invisible, although seen; incomprehensible, though revealed by grace; unfathomable, although fathomed by the human senses.
-Tertullian
To confess that God exists, and at the same time to deny that he has foreknowledge of future things, is the most manifest folly.
-Saint Augustine
Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor their ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ.
-Fyodor Dostoyevski
May it (the Declaration of Independence) be to the world what I believe will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all), the signal of arousing man to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition has persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessing of security and self-government.
-Thomas Jefferson
During the whole period of written history, it is not the workers but the robbers who have been in control of the world.
-Scott Nearing
There has never been a genius without some touch of madness.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca
He who lives by usury in this world shall not live in the world to come.
-Midrash