Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
— Mark Twain
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
— Benjamin Franklin
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
— Greek Proverb
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
— H. L. Mencken
I do not curse the day when I engaged in public affairs [...]. I cannot repent of any thing I ever did conscientiously and from a sense of duty. I never engaged in public affairs from my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice, or ambition, or even the desire of fame. If any of these had been my motive, my conduct would have been very different. In every considerable transaction of my public life, I have invariably acted according to my best judgment, and I can look up to God for the sincerity of my intentions.
— John Adams
Politicians are like diapers; they need to be changed often and for the same reason.
— Mark Twain
No army can stop an idea whose time has come.
— Victor Hugo
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
— Mark Twain
They must find it difficult, those who have taken authority as truth, rather than truth as authority.
— Gerald Massey
The amount of tyranny you put up with is the amount you’ll live under.
— Thomas Jefferson
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
— Theodore Roosevelt
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
— Mahatma Gandhi
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
— Alexander Tyler
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago
