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Beatrice Webb Quotes
British - Sociologist January 2, 1858 - April 30, 1943

It would be curious to discover who it is to whom one writes in a diary. Possibly to some mysterious personification of one's own identity.
Beatrice Webb

Religion is love; in no case is it logic.
Beatrice Webb

Renunciation - that is the great fact we all, individuals and classes, have to learn. In trying to avoid it we bring misery to ourselves and others.
Beatrice Webb

If a weakly mortal is to do anything in the world besides eat the bread thereof, there must be a determined subordination of the whole nature to the one aim no trifling with time, which is passing, with strength which is only too limited.
Beatrice Webb


William Lyon Phelps Quotes
American - Educator January 2, 1865 - August 21, 1943


If at first you don't succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.
William Lyon Phelps

Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation - what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.
William Lyon Phelps

One of the secrets of life is to keep our intellectual curiosity acute.
William Lyon Phelps

A well-ordered life is like climbing a tower; the view halfway up is better than the view from the base, and it steadily becomes finer as the horizon expands.
William Lyon Phelps

God speaks to me not through the thunder and the earthquake, nor through the ocean and the stars, but through the Son of Man, and speaks in a language adapted to my imperfect sight and hearing.
William Lyon Phelps

If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.
William Lyon Phelps

A student never forgets an encouraging private word, when it is given with sincere respect and admiration.
William Lyon Phelps

Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense.
William Lyon Phelps

If I were running the world I would have it rain only between 2 and 5 a.m. Anyone who was out then ought to get wet.
William Lyon Phelps

I divide all readers into two classes: those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
William Lyon Phelps

There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit they enjoy life.
William Lyon Phelps

The belief that youth is the happiest time of life is founded on a fallacy. The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, and we grow happier as we grow older.
William Lyon Phelps

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.
William Lyon Phelps

In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.
William Lyon Phelps

If happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care, then the happiest individual would not be either a man or a woman; it would be, I think, an American cow.
William Lyon Phelps

The happiest people in this world are those who have the most interesting thoughts.
William Lyon Phelps

This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
William Lyon Phelps

Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.
William Lyon Phelps

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.
William Lyon Phelps

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.
William Lyon Phelps

A cat pours his body on the floor like water. It is restful just to see him.
William Lyon Phelps

You can be deprived of your money, your job and your home by someone else, but remember that no one can ever take away your honor.
William Lyon Phelps


Gilbert Murray Quotes
British - Diplomat January 2, 1866 - May 20, 1957

The life and liberty and property and happiness of the common man throughout the world are at the absolute mercy of a few persons whom he has never seen, involved in complicated quarrels that he has never heard of.
Gilbert Murray

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
Gilbert Murray

The higher Greek poetry did not make up fictitious plots; its business was to express the heroic saga, the myths.
Gilbert Murray

Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul.
Gilbert Murray

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.
Gilbert Murray

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.
Gilbert Murray

Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.
Gilbert Murray

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.
Gilbert Murray

The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.
Gilbert Murray

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.
Gilbert Murray


Isaac Asimov Quotes
American - Scientist January 2, 1920 - April 6, 1992


People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Isaac Asimov

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
Isaac Asimov

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Isaac Asimov

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
Isaac Asimov

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Isaac Asimov

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Isaac Asimov

The true delight is in the finding out rather than in the knowing.
Isaac Asimov

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
Isaac Asimov

Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Isaac Asimov

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
Isaac Asimov

And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.
Isaac Asimov

I don't expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.
Isaac Asimov

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them.
Isaac Asimov

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
Isaac Asimov

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
Isaac Asimov

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
Isaac Asimov

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
Isaac Asimov

Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
Isaac Asimov

A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
Isaac Asimov

It takes more than capital to swing business. You've got to have the A. I. D. degree to get by - Advertising, Initiative, and Dynamics.
Isaac Asimov

To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
Isaac Asimov

He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.
Isaac Asimov

Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to an all time low over the world.
Isaac Asimov

Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Isaac Asimov

I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
Isaac Asimov

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.
Isaac Asimov

Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.
Isaac Asimov

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.
Isaac Asimov

Creationists make it sound as though a 'theory' is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
Isaac Asimov

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.
Isaac Asimov

From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
Isaac Asimov

When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.
Isaac Asimov

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
Isaac Asimov

I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.
Isaac Asimov

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.
Isaac Asimov

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.
Isaac Asimov

I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.
Isaac Asimov

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
Isaac Asimov