An unclassified compilation of quotations I’ve found wise, inspirational, funny, ironic or timely:

“To be hated by idiots is the price you pay for not being one.”

— Jean Cocteau

“I am not a dictator. I have only simplified democracy.”

— Adolf Hitler, 1936, three years after introducing censorship, ending civil liberties and negating the power of the legislature (Reichstag)

“Anything can happen if demagogues preach hate long enough.”

— Journalist I.F. Stone

“The new right is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists.”

— Anne Applebaum from “Twilight of Democracy”

“In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia.”

“For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain. Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change. Social systems can survive a good deal of folly when circumstances are historically favorable, or when bungling is cushioned by large resources or absorbed by sheer size as in the United States during expansion. Today, when there are no more cushions, folly is less affordable.”

— Historian Barbara Tuchman on declining standards for U.S. leadership in “The March of Folly,” published in 1984. (Darius was made king after his horse was first to neigh at the sunrise.)

“Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.”

— Anne Applebaum from “Twilight of Democracy”

“Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is noting intrinsically ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’ about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”

— Anne Applebaum from “Twilight of Democracy”

“It needs but a little to overthrow and destroy everything — just a slight aberration from reason. For the helmsman to wreck his vessel, he does not need the same resources as he needs to save it: if he turn it but a little too far from the wind, he is lost; yes, and if he does it not deliberately but from mere want of attention, he is lost all the same… Keep awake then and watch your impressions: it is no trifle you have in keeping.”

— Epictetus

“Trump is for a lot of white people what O.J.’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks ― you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.  — attributed to Barack Obama

“When societies grow so deeply divided that parties become welded to incompatible worldviews, and especially when their members are so socially segregated that they rarely interact, stable partisan rivalries eventually give way to perceptions of mutual threat. As mutual toleration disappears, politicians are tempted to abandon forbearance and try to win at all costs. This may encourage the rise of antisystem groups that reject democracy’s rules altogether. When that happens, democracy is in trouble.”

— Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, from “How Democracies Die”

“We’re controversial the same way any newspaper that doesn’t just write whatever it’s told is controversial.”

— Marion County (Kansas) Record newspaper editor Eric Meyer, responding to a question of whether his newspaper was controversial

“Virtue has never been as respectable as money.”

— Mark Twain

“To recognize error, to cut losses, to alter course, is the most repugnant option in government.”

— Barbara Tuchman, from “The March of Folly”

“Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue.”

— Francois de La Rochefoucauld

“Saving the world doesn’t pay much but it’s steady work.”

— Folksinger Pete Seeger

“Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

— Ambrose Bierce

“Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.”

— Oscar Ameringer

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

— Biologist E.O. Wilson

“All of Russia was learning to read, and reading — politics, economics, history — because the people wanted to know… In every city, in most towns, along the front, each political faction had its newspaper — sometimes several. Hundreds of thousands of pamphlets were distributed by by thousands of organizations, and poured into the armies, the villages, the factories, the streets. The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, went out every day tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water, insatiable. And it was not fables, falsified history, diluted religion and the cheap fiction that corrupts — but social and economic theories, philosophy, the works of Tolstoy, Gogol and Gorky….”

— Journalist John Reed, on the intellectual foment before the Bolshevik revolution.

“Character is fate, the Greeks believed. A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which the seed of self-destruction lay embedded, waiting for its hour. The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Hegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny of the compulsory Kulture, of Nietzsche who told them Supermen were above ordinary controls, of Treitschke who set the increase of power as the highest moral duty of the state, or the whole German people who called their temporal ruler the “All Highest.” What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae, but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on ‘the desperate delusion of the will that deems itself absolute.'”

— Barbara Tuchman, on the delusion that led to the start of World War I, from “The Guns of August”

“No doubt the heroic remedy for this tragic misunderstanding is that both armies should shoot their officers and go home to gather in their harvests in the villages and make a revolution in their towns; and though this is not at present a practical solution, it must be frankly mentioned, because it or something like it is always a possibility in a defeated transcript army if its commanders push it beyond human endurance when its eyes are opening to the fact that in murdering its neighbors it is biting off its nose to vex its face, besides riveting the intolerable yoke or militarism more tightly than ever around its neck… But there is no chance — or, as our Junkers would put it, no danger — of our soldiers yielding to such an ecstasy of common sense.”

— Writer George Bernard Shaw, on the First World War

“If you’re a ‘solid’ fellow and an ‘up-and-coming’ fellow you find yourself at dinner parties agreeing with people who go on about a lot of half-baked nonsense and you shake your head very wisely and people see you shaking your head very wisely and they figure you’re a very wise guy… Pretty soon, you know, you’re just caught up in the goddamnest mess of crap.”

— Journalist I.F. Stone

“Small-town hatreds…verging on civil war, have happened everywhere in this country: over a man shooting a neighbor’s dog; over one kid’s slapping another; over a dead relative’s will; over which farmer was first in line at the grain elevator; over hiring a new preacher. It’s small and disgusting, but it’s America. And I reckon we might as well get used to the idea that people are going to be mean and ornery at certain times of the moon.”

— Journalist Ernie Pyle, on a battle over a town name in Alabama, 1935

“The whole aim of  practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

— Journalist H.L. Mencken

“Build communism by yourselves. You do not even know how to smile like human beings here.”

— JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, in a note to his Russian neighbor, after becoming disillusioned about living in the U.S.S.R., May 1962

“I really hoped the impact would be more far-reaching than it has. Not that we haven’t had a great appreciation for the lunar landing around the world, especially in other countries… But I had hoped that it might take our minds away from some of the more mundane and temporal problems that we as a society face, which are very similar to the problems that society of every age has faced, and look a little farther into the future with an air toward solving problems before they became problems.”

— Astronaut Neil Armstrong ruminating on the societal impact of the lunar landing, one year after walking on the moon, July 19, 1970.

“He was moved by sheer primitive, willful egotism, unrestrained by form or convention. That’s why he hated all legal, diplomatic and religious institutions — all the social values that represented restrictions to his impulsive ego-expression.”

— Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”

— Journalist, writer and novelist George Orwell

“I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are ‘proving’ that socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the ‘mystique’ of socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people, socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.”

— George Orwell

“I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

— George Orwell

“Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions.”

— Jerry Falwell Sr., founder of the Moral Majority

“Nothing in history has done more to turn people away from Christianity than organized religion.”

— Jerry Falwell Jr., son of Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell Sr.

“I wanted to make Germany great! If it could be done peacefully, all well and good; if not, that was fine too!”

— Reichsmarschall and Luftwaffe-Chief Hermann Goering

“That is the real mistake we made: giving so much power to the police chief… The people went in for idolizing Hitler and feeling blind loyalty to him personally. That was not the original idea.”

— Alfred Rosenberg, chief Nazi philosopher, Reichsminister for the Eastern Occupied Territories

— “Christ cannot possibly have been a Jew. I don’t have to prove that scientifically. It is a fact.”

— Nazi propagandist Joseph Paul Goebbels

“There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.”

— Will Rogers

“That seems to me the great American danger we’re all in, that we’ll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.”

– “The Graduate” director Mike Nichols

“It requires ages to destroy a popular opinion.”

— Voltaire

“A hard rain was falling and temperature was 34 degrees. Haines, in November, was not much. A few low buildings, heavy slush on the streets, a few drunken Indians in the rain. There did not seem to be any lights. A closed-up IGA store with the front window broken where someone, apparently, had thrown a rock.”

— Journalist Joe McGinnis, on arriving in Haines in 1975, from his nonfiction best-seller about Alaska, “Going to Extremes”

“I found myself wondering about the people who lived in little clusters of houses down at the water level in places where the sheer drop did not reach all the way down to the water. You could make out faint and precarious winding trails that climbed up and up to the top, but it was obvious they would seldom be used. These lives had to be attuned to water traffic. They did look snug and out of the wind, but there would be a perpetual gloom there except during those very few hours when the sun might shine directly down into the fjord.

“No electricity, no commercial entertainment, with the possible exception of the radio used with a generator. Books and silence. Fish and bread and bed. Are they secure in their awareness of who they are? What are their social and emotional values? How do they endure the iron long winter? Are they mad, by our standards? We saw their little gardens, their goats, their children. One could readily accept a winter there. Or a year. One year might have a flavor of novelty. But a lifetime down at the bottom of a deep incredible gash in the earth, next to frigid water. It stuns the mind to contemplate a willing acceptance.”

— Novelist John D. MacDonald on visiting a Norwegian fjord, 1977

“There was one comforting aftermath. I was able to persuade Brigadier General James A. O’Connor of the Corps of Engineers and head of the Northwest Service Command with headquarters in Whitehorse to construct a branch road to extend the road running north from Haines to the Canadian boundary until it joined the Alaska Highway about 95 miles west of Whitehorse at a point designated as Haines Junction. This hundred-mile addition had not been included in the ‘C’ plan. My plans were aided by the pile-up of freight on the docks at Skagway which overtaxed the facilities of the White Pass railroad. The ‘Haines Cut-Off,’ as the extension came to be known, furnished a new land route from Alaska’s panhandle to the interior of Alaska and the great outside.”

— Ernest Gruening, Alaska’s Territorial Governor, on the creation of the Haines Highway in 1943, from Gruening’s autobiography, “Many Battles”

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath and my last drop of blood.”

— Folk singer Woody Guthrie on commercial music

“There comes a time when one must decide about one’s dream — to risk everything to achieve it, or to sit the rest of one’s life in the backyard.”

— Cleveland newspaper copy editor Robert Manry, who in middle age sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean in a 13-foot boat he bought for $250.

“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” 

— Sir Raymond Priestly, Antarctic explorer and geologist, on famed expedition leader and survivor Sir Ernest Shackleton

“They want us to believe there’s no chance of success. But whether or not there’s hope for change is not the question. If you want to be a free person, you don’t stand up for human rights because it will work, but because it is right. We must continue living as decent people.”

— Soviet dissident Andrei Sarkovsky

“Between man and man, resort to murder is not allowed. Not so among nation states, where murder is the final sanction, and preparation for it the main business of the state. To kill or be killed is the higher law of nations, and this makes them monster nations.”

— columnist I.F. Stone

“As long as the atomic bomb has made war too dangerous for nations to resort to, (nations) will settle their differences peacefully in the future, anyhow.”

— Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi foreign minister, at Nuremberg

“Working in a dictatorship can have its advantages, if the regime is behind you… We used to have thousands of Russian prisoners-of-war working for us.”

— famed Nazi rocket scientist and Apollo Space Program leader Wernher von Braun

“People don’t want the truth. They want a carefully crafted lie they can believe in.”

— Joe Parnell

“When your politics becomes your religion, every disagreement becomes a holy war.”

“Don’t marry your ideas. Divorce is too painful. Date them. You’ll get along better.”

“You can’t always stop the march of human madness. Sometimes the best you can do is leave a record that someone tried.”

“Power makes nearly every person who touches it a king over another another and thus abusive of another and thus unworthy of power.”

“Power is a sword not many people can resist swinging.”

“Our problem with history is mistaking it for the story of who we were rather than what it is, the story of who we are.”

“Some people were created in the image of God; the rest of us are just highly evolved apes doing the best that we can.”

“A man has never traveled who hasn’t opened a letter fragranced by the perfume of a distant lover.”

“A villain’s best disguise is a badge or a crucifix.”

“War is a crime committed against the poor by the rich.”

— original

“Every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.”

— Henry David Thoreau 

“The whole misfortune came from racial politics.”

— Nazi Youth Leader Baldur von Schirach, on reading the indictment against him at Nuremberg.

“Most people don’t care if you’re telling them the truth or if you’re telling them a lie, as long as they’re entertained by it.”

— Tom Waits

“Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.”

— British author and satirist Terry Pratchett

“When you’re good at something, you’ll tell everyone. When you’re great at something, they’ll tell you.”

— running back Walter Payton

“The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful, and then only for a short while.”

— Albert Einstein

“The expansion of needs is the antithesis of wisdom and truth.”

— Economist E.F. Schumacher

“Sow a Jesuit, and you reap a rebel.”

— Jerome Bonaparte

“All of the animals excepting man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”

— Samuel Butler

“I am not of the opinion of those gentlemen who are against disturbing the public repose; I like a clamor wherever there is an abuse. The fire bell at midnight disturbs our sleep, but it keeps you from being burnt in your bed.”

— Edmund Burke

“You’re not the boss of me and neither am I.”

— drunkard’s boast