Table of Contents

Bob's Favorite Quotes

Since being locked up I have had a lot of time to read, and a pretty decent prison library to pick from. I've come across some really good thoughts and would like to pass them along:


The famous American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that in his long experience he had not found that juries were particularly concerned with finding the truth; that they were much more concerned with upholding community standards.


The world is curious theatre, and there are occasions when the worst pieces succeed best. -- Alexis de Tocqueville


Tantum religion potuit suadere malorum . (To such heights of evil are men driven by religion.) -- Lucreti us , De Rerum Natura (Of Na tural Things)


Nothing optional from homosexuality to adultery is ever made punishable un-
less those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate . -- Christopher Hitchens


In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see . When daylight comes, however, it i s foolish to use blind old men as guides . -- Heinrich Heine


El sueno de la razon produce monstruos. ( The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.) --Title of an etching by Francisco Goya


Mankind may be divided into three classes -- those who think for themselves , those who think as others think, and those who do not think at all. -- Hesiod


Man is a mythmaking animal who prefers to embrace the myths that keep him comfortable rather than inquire into the facts that enjoin him to think. -- Ashley Montague, 1965


Eliminate the impossible and whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - - Sherlock Holmes (based on Dr. Joseph Bell of Edinburgh)


Travel broadens the mind, and it is broad minds we need in the world that is so very much broader than the posters of travel agents suggest. Ian Fleming, 1963


I do not want a government that takes care of me . I want a government that keeps other men's hands off of me so that I may take care of myself. -- President Woodrow Wilson


I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. -- Thomas Jefferson


To do him justice, it would be necessary to remark the disadvantages his doctrines had to encounter, not having been committed to writing by himself, but by the most unlettered of men, by memory, long after they had heard them from him, when much was forgotten, much misunderstood, and presented in every paradoxical shape. - Thomas Jefferson on the teachings of Jesus


We flatter ourselves that we can make machines that think like human beings, but omit to observe that we can also make human beings who think like machines. The result is not intelligence , but its caricature. It is the travesty of thought, the perversion of man's crowning quality. When thought is mechanized it becomes stereotyped, conformist, imitative and uncreative. It becomes anti-thought, a barrier to the reception and an impediment to the development of new ideas. We are human because we think. Mankind will always stand in need of the unconfused and unobstructed capacity to think on the part of as many as possible, not alone for the benefits of mankind, but also for the benefit of the individual who remains a person. - Ashley Montague , 1965


Curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of association, and of assembly, surveillance over letters, telegrams, and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscation of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible beyond the limits hitherto established by law. -- Emergency Decree for Homeland Security, Signed into law by Adolf Hitler in March of 1933


Political party: A large body of people, some few of whom think, and all the rest talk. The former take the lead and discipline the latter, prescribing what they must hoot at, whom they must support, but, above all, whom they must hate; for no one can be a right good partisan who is not a thorough - going hater. - Washington Irving


Je n' ai pas besoin de cette hypothese. (I was not in need of that hypothesis.) -- Pierre - Simon de Laplace in answer to Napoleon's question as to why God did not appear in the great mathematician's equations.


The fearful can be the most dangerous when they gain power. They become demoniac when they see the unpredictable workings of all that life around them. Seeing the strengths as well as the weaknesses, they fasten only on the weaknesses. - - Frank Herbert


Justice does not happen by chance; indeed some thing that subjective may never have happened at all. -- Frank Herbert


We seldom get rid of evil merely by understanding its causes. -C.G. Jung

At any moment in history it is the function of associations of devoted individuals to undertake tasks which clear - sighted people perceive to be necessary, but which nobody else is willing to perform. -- Aldous Huxley


One measure of humanity lies in the lengths taken to right the wrongs perpetrated against others. Recognition of wrongdoing is the first crucial step. -- Raja Thomas


Without the conscious acknowledgment and acceptance of our kinship with those around us there can be no synthesis of personality. -- C.G.Jung


If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infiinite. Foe man has closed himself up, til he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. -- William Blake


The repressed share the psychoses and neuroses of the caged. As the caged run when released, the repressed explode when confronted with their condition. -- Raja Thomas


It comes to pass that the same evils and inconveniences take place in all ages of history. -- Niccolo Macchiavelli


A complete description of a machine must refer to who made it, must give some account of how it was put together, and must explain how it started to work, and what source of energy keeps it moving. -- A. R. Ubbelohde 1954


Machines are taking the upper hand in a way that makes me anxious and apprehensive. Like a thunderstorm, this manifestation of being is getting nearer and nearer to ourselves. Its approach is circuitous, but the trend is set and the storm will break over us. We think about machines, we talk about them, but neither thinking nor talking can help us. Two ways are open, each of them rather grim. Either we must seize progress deliberately, and speed up the harm being done, or we must break away and seek a happier fate beyone the seas, taking the bestand and most worthy with us. Both courses have doubtful prospects, and who will help us weigh the factors in making a decision. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1794


We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its preceding state, and the cause of what is to follow. An intelligence which at a given instant knew all the forces which animate nature, and the respective situations of the beings in it could, if it were great enough to complete the analysis, comprise in the same equation the movements of the greatest bodies in the universe, as well as those of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be unknown to such an intelligence, and the future as well as the past would be present before its eyes. With the perfection it has given to astronomy, the human spirit presents a pale prelumination of such an intelligence. -- Laplace, 1795


The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. -- T. H. Huxley


I have long concluded that established religions of any kind are in general the supreme example of forms created to meet no longer existing conditions. If I were asked what the present and future world could best jettison for its own good, I should have no hesitation: all established religion. -- John Fowles


White men are crazy. The Indians lived on this country for hundreds and hundreds of years without the need for prisons or jails. -- Crazy Horse