Francois-Noel Babeuf
Lauren Bacall
Richard Bach
Francis Bacon
Leo Baeck
Walter Bagehot
F. Lee Bailey
Pearl Bailey
Francis A. Baker
Mikhail A. Bakunin
James Baldwin
Stanley Baldwin
Arthur James Balfour
Lucille Ball
Hosea Ballou
George Bancroft
Imanmu Amiri Baraka
Bertrand Barere
Frederick R. Barnard
Sir James M. Barrie
John Barrymore
Karl Barth
Bernard Baruch
Jacques Barzun
Al Batt
Orlando A. Battista
Charles Baudelaire
Glen Beaman
Henry Beard
Pierre de Beaumarchais
Simone de Beauvoir
Cesare Beccaria
Carl Becker
Thomas Beecham
Henry Ward Beecher
Max Beerbohm
Brendan Behan
Clive Bell
Edward Bellamy
St. Robert Bellarmine
Saul Bellow
Robert Benchley
Morris Bender
Stephen Vincent Benet
Arnold Bennett
James Gordon Bennett
Jack Benny
Jeremy Bentham
Bernard Berenson
Marilyn Berger
Henri Bergson
Isaiah Berlin
Georges Bernanos
Friedrich A. J. von Bernhardi
Wendell Berry
Aneurin Bevan
William Henry Beveran
Ernest Bevin
Bharitihari
Ambrose Bierce
William Norman Birkett
Otto von Bismark
Hugo L. Black
William Blackstone
William Blake
Logan Bleckley
Ron Blomberg
Roger Blough
Ludwig Boerne
Humphrey Bogart
Niels Bohr
Al Boliska
Simon Bolivar
Erma Bombeck
Napoleon Bonaparte
Daniel J. Boorstin
James H. Boren
Dominique Bouchard
Alec Bourne
Elizabeth Bowen
Lord Brabazon
Ray Bradbury
Charles Bradlaugh
Ben Bradlee
Omar Bradley
Anne Bradstreet
Louis D. Brandeis
Bertolt Brecht
Gerald Brenan
Robert Briffault
Ashleigh Brilliant
David Broder
Jacob Bronowski
Phillips Brooks
Henry Brougham
Heywood Broun
A. Whitney Brown
Charles Brockden Brown
Gene Brown
H. Jackson Brown
H. Rap Brown
Rita Mae Brown
Thomas Browne
Elizabeth Barret Browning
Lenny Bruce
Guido Bruno
La Bruyere
William Jennings Bryan
Anita Bryant
Bear Bryant
Marie Buatta
Martin Buber
Frank Buchman
Pearl S. Buck
Henry Thomas Buckle
Christopher Buckley
Buddha
William M. Bulger
Luther Burbank
Edmund Burke
Aaron Burr
John Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
Robert Burton
Hermann Busenbaum
George Bush
Samuel Butler
James F. Byrnes
� 2000 E-mail me
In a true society there should be neither rich nor poor.
The end justifies the means. To reach a certain goal, one must vanquish everything that stands in the way.
Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.
Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.
Learning is finding out what you already know. Doing is demonstrating that you know it. Teaching is reminding others that they know it just as well as you.
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.
It is true that a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's mind about to religion.
Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
A minority is always compelled to think. That is the blessing of being in the minority.
Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
It was government by discussion that broke the bond of ages and set free the originality of mankind.
Can any of you seriously say the Bill of Rights could get through Congress today? It wouldn't even get out of committee.
What the world really needs is more love and less paperwork.
Thousands have gone to heaven who never read one page of the bible.
Religion has always sanctified violence and transformed it into right. It has whisked away humanity, justice and fraternity into a fictitious heaven, so as to leave room on earth for the reign of iniquity and brutality.
The liberty of man consists in this, that he obeys the laws of nature, because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been imposed upon him externally by any foreign will whatsoever, human or divine, collective or individual.
Christianity is the complete negation of common sense and sound reason.
All law has for its object to confirm and exalt into a system the exploitation of the workers by a ruling class.
Any dictatorship can have only one aim: self-perpetuation.
Freedom is the absolute right of all adult men and women to seek permission for their actions only from their own conscience and reason, and to be determined in their actions only by their own will, and consequently to be responsible only to themselves, and then to the society to which they belong, but only insofar as they have made a free decision to belong to it.
If God existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
A platitude is simply a truth repeated until people get tired of hearing it.
I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.
I never forgive but I always forget.
It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.
The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
A religion that requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation.
The fued between the capitalists and the laborer, the House of Have and the House of Want, is as old as social union, and can never be entirely quieted.
The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.
A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money.
A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.
God has been replaced, as he has all over the West, with respectability and air conditioning.
The tree of liberty only grows when watered by the blood of tyrants.
One picture is worth ten thousand words.
I'm not young enough to know everything.
His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall.
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is to what he vowed to make it.
When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
Every time a child says "I don't believe in fairies" there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
Charm is a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.
My only regret in the theater is that I could never sit out front and watch me.
Die? I should say not, old fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
Men have never been good, they are not good, and they never will be good.
To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.
A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.
You can talk about capitalism and communism and all that sort of thing, but the important thing is the struggle everybody is engaged in to get better living conditions, and they are not interested too much in forms of government.
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed up in the speechless real.
Money changes people just as often as it changes hands.
Praise can be your most valuable asset as long as you don't aim it at yourself.
The best inheritance a parent can give to his children is a few minutes of his time each day.
An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.
Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine. God is the only being who does not have to exist in order to reign.
Stubborness does have its helpful features. You always know what you're going to be thinking tomorrow.
Lead, follow, or get out of the way.
It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable.
It is easier to think of the world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradiction of the world.
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.
The significance of man is that he is that part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of Man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.
There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
Good music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and quits the memory with difficulty.
The worst thing in the world, next to anarchy, is government.
When a nation's young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
The real democratic American ideal is, not that every man shall be on a level with every other man, but that every man shall have liberty to be what god made him, without hindrance.
It is for men to choose whether they will govern themselves or be governed.
I have known no man of genius who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual, for what the gods had given him.
You will find that the woman who is really kind to dogs is always one who has failed to inspire sympathy in men.
Beauty and the lust for learning have yet to be allied.
You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.
When I came back to Dublin, I was courtmartialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
As political equality is the remedy for political tyranny, so is economic equality the only way of putting an end to the economic tyranny exercised by the few over the many through the superiority of wealth.
Freedom of belief is pernicious, it is nothing but the right to be wrong.
I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgement and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you."
It was one of those plays in which the actors unfortunately enunciated very clearly.
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at the moment.
It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by then I was too famous.
Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
My only solution for the problem of habitual accidents and, so far, nobody has asked me for my solution, is to stay in bed all day. Even then, there is always the chance that you will fall out.
I had just dozed off into a stupor when I heard what I thought was myself talking to myself. I didn't pay much attention to it, as I knew practically everything I would have to say to myself, and wasn't particularly interested.
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
A sceptic is a person who, when he sees the handwriting on the wall, claims it is a forgery.
We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. Indeed, I think it must be more agreeable, must have a more real savour, than optimism--from the way in which pessimists abandon themselves to it.
Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.
I have made mistakes, but I never made the mistake of claiming that I never made one.
I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
All punishment is mischief; all punishment is in itself evil.
Every law is an infraction of liberty.
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Except as its clown and jester, society does not encourage individuality, and the State abhors it.
Power is what it's perceived to be.
The universe is a machine for creating gods.
Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
In the ideal society, composed of wholly responsible human beings, laws, because I should scarcely be conscious of them, would gradually wither away. Only one social movement was bold enough to render this assumption quite explicit and accepts its consequences--that of the Anarchists.
The first sign of corruption is that the end justifies the means.
War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with.
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.
Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.
There has never been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented. The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.
Nothing enchants the soul so much as young women. They alone are the cause of evil, and there is no other.
Education is that which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.
I do not object to people looking at their watches when I am speaking. But I strongly object when they start shaking them to make sure they are still working.
Nothing should be left to an invaded people except their eyes for weeping.
The Framers knew that free speech is the friend of change and revolution. But they also knew that it is always the deadliest enemy of tyranny.
Our constitution was not written in the sands to be washed away by each wave of new judges blown in by each successive political wind.
The layman's constitutional view is that what he likes is constitutional and that which he doesn't like is unconstitutional.
It is my belief that there are "absolutes" in our Bill of Rights, and that they were put there on purpose by men who knew what words meant and meant their prohibitions to be "absolutes."
It is better that ten guilty escape than that one innocent suffer.
The public good is in nothing more essentially interested, than in the protection of every individual's private rights.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
It is always probable that something improbable will happen.
Competing in sports has taught me that if I'm not willing to give 120%, somebody else will.
Steel prices cause inflation like wet sidewalks cause rain.
To want to be free is to be free.
There is nothing to fear but fear.
The Holy Roman Empire--neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
The only thing you owe the public is a good performance.
There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?
If Nature is against us, we will fight Nature.
Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.
If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.
A man may have no religion, and yet be moral.
Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
If I were to give liberty of the press, my power could not last three days.
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance--it is the illusion of knowledge.
Guidelines for bureaucrats: (1) When in charge, ponder. (2) When in trouble, delegate. (3) When in doubt, mumble.
The difference between a genius and a lunatic is that the genius has proof.
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Experience isn't interesting till it begins to repeat itself--in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence really blots people out. We really have no absent friends.
If you cannot say what you are going to say in 20 minutes, you ought to go away and write a book about it.
If you don't like what you're doing, then don't do it.
I don't try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.
Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than a denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
As a child, one looks for compliments. As an adult, one looks for evidence of effectiveness.
The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts.
We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.
If you will help run our government in the American way, then there will never be danger of our government running America in the wrong way.
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant.
Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify oppression of free speech and assembly.
We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.
Food comes first, then morals.
Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money.
No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the fact of man's evolution.
The oppressed are always morally in the right.
To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right.
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power.
Anybody that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
Every animal leaves traces of what he was; man alone leaves traces of what he created.
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation.
That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on your way to a pertinent answer.
Man masters nature not by force but by understanding.
In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical. His religion has so long been identified with conservatism that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him.
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
The tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins.
Free speech is about as good a cause as the world has ever known. But, like the poor, it is shoved aside in favour of things which seem at some given moment more vital. Everybody favours free speech when no axes are being ground.
I'm not a vegetarian because I love animals. I'm a vegetarian because I hate plants.
That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
Of all the forms of injustice, that is the most egregious which makes the circumstances of sex a reason for excluding one half of mankind from all those paths which lead to usefulness and honor.
One good thing about being young is that you are not experienced enough to know that you cannot possibly do the things you are doing.
Sucess is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get.
Be smarter than other people, just don't tell them so.
I consider myself neither legally nor morally bound to obey the laws made by a body in which I have no representation.
Lead me not into temptation, I can find the way myself.
Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself.
My sun sets to raise again.
The liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them.
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.
It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgement to be silent.
You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
There is no more reason to believe that man descended from an inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage.
Man is not a mammal.
If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education.
All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution.
My plan cannot fail if the people are with us and we ought not to succeed unless we do have the people with us.
If homosexuality were the normal way, God would have made Adam and Bruce.
Winning isn't everything, but it sure beats anything that comes in second.
Dust is a protective coating for fine furniture.
I don't like religion much, and I am glad that in the Bible the word is not to be found.
I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defence against the anti-Christ of Communism.
There is enough in the world for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed.
It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation.
Every new truth which has ever been propounded has, for a time caused mischief; it has produced discomfort, and often unhappiness.
People believe unbelievable things because it's self-flattering to think that you are intellectually daring enough to accept what others find preposterous. It's why people believe in UFO's, assassination conspiracies, certain religions, and the possibility that the Boston Red Sox will someday win the World Series.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
There is never a better measure of what a person is than what he does when he's absolutely free to choose.
The God within us is the only available God we know and the clear light of science teaches us that we must be our own saviours.
Good order is the foundation of all things.
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; it cannot prevail long.
A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted.
Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow.
Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.
I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess.
One religion is as good as another.
The greatest enemy to man is man.
When the end is lawful, the means are also lawful.
I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli.
I will never apologize for the United States of America - I don't care what the facts are.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
He that complies against his will is of his opinion still.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
An honest God's the noblest work of man.
Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
All progress is based on a universal and innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
An apology for the Devil: It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.
To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
The nearest approach to immortality on earth is a government bureau.
