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Jacob Abbott

• A child can ask a thousand questions that the wisest man cannot answer.

Lyman Abbott

• No man ever inherited sin. There is no original sin.

Lord Acton

• Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
• The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.

Douglas Adams

• Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

F. P. Adams

• What this country needs in a good five cent nickel. (Also attributed to Ed Wynn)
• If a man keeps his trap shut, the world will beat a path to his door.

Henry Adams

• Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
• The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.
• Philosophy: unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

James Truslow Adams

• The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do and dare but freedom from care and worry.

John Quincy Adams

• ... nature's God commands the slave to rise, and on th' oppressor's head to break his chain.

• Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: first, a right to life; secondly, a right to liberty; thirdly to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can.
• If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsel of arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
• If I am to have a master, let me have a severe one that I may always have the mortifying sense of it. I shall then always be disposed to take the first fair opportunity of ridding myself of slavery.
• Mankind are more governed by their feelings than by reason.

African proverb

• The full-bellied child says to the hungry child, "Keep good cheer."

Herbert Agar

• Snobs talk as if they had begotten their own ancestors.

A. B. Alcott

• Politeness is an easy virtue, and has great purchasing power.

Richard Aldington

• Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on his own dunghill.

W. R. Alger

• Men often make up in wrath what they lack in reason.

Ethan Allen

• (To his physician, who said "General, I fear the angels are waiting for you.") "Waiting, are they? Waiting, are they? Well, goddam 'em, let 'em wait!"
• In those parts of the world where learning and science has prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.

Fred Allen

• A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Woody Allen

• More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
• No only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
• It seemed the world was divided into good people and bad people. The good ones slept better ... while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.
• I took a course in speed reading and was able to read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It's about Russia.
• Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.
• You can live to be 100 if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be 100.
• I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not dying.

William Allman

• So when you are being nice to your child, they say, all you are really doing is selfishly trying to propagate your own genes. A lot of sociobiological work carries this cynical interpretation of human behavior--a view of the world for which sociobiologists have been rightly criticized. The problem is that sociobiologists confuse the mechanisms of the mind with the process that built the mind, and in fact these are two separate things. Evolutionary biology is not a theory of human nature. Rather, it is a theory for how human nature came to be--and a useful tool for discovering what human nature actually is. A mother really does love her child--it's not that somewhere deep inside her mind there is a selfish motive to spread her genes.
• People are neither innately selfish nor innately altruistic, precisely because following such a simpleminded strategy is a prescription for disaster.
• Much of the world of literature, drama, and humor relies on the supreme ability of humans not only to create theories about each character's mind but also to imagine simultaneously how each of these imaginary minds might view the minds of other characters. The tragic nature of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for instance, comes from a series of misconceptions among the characters that only the audience is aware of. Romeo's suicide is the result of his thinking that Juliet has died, and the audience is aware that if Romeo knew what they knew, the suicide would not have happened. To an audience of monkeys, however, Romeo's actions would make no sense, because they wouldn't be able to distinguish between their own beliefs and his.
• Just as the sexes are different below the neck, they have different mental "organs" above the neck as well.
• In erotica geared toward men, women are typically depicted as lusty, aggressive, and enjoying sex for sex's sake, without emotional attachments or courtship. In erotica geared toward women--that is romance novels--sex is part of a greater theme of love, where a man is consumed emotionally by passion for the heroine and no one else. For the heroine, sex is not an act of submission but an act of control, as she masters her man's emotional fate. In other words, erotic materials for both men and women typically present the opposite sex as a caricature of the consumer's own sexuality.

Susan B. Anthony

• I cannot imagine a God of the universe made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling Him "great."
• Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.

Aristotle

• Let men be on their guard against those who flatter and mislead the multitude: their actions prove what sort of men they are. Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principle instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary as their leader.
• Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men do not have the same writing, so all men do not have the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are images.
• A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider godfearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

St. Augustine

• All sin is a kind of lying.

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