User:Superbfc/Quotes
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Quotes that I like:
When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.
– William Shakespeare, King Lear (Lear, Scene vi)
Architecture is frozen music.
– Johann Wolfgang Goethe [1], Letter to Eckmann (March 23, 1829)
Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. [2]
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. [2]
– Samuel Johnson, William Boswell's Life of Johnson
Children are the only bold philosophers. And bold philosophers are invariably children. One should always be like a child
– Evgeny Zamyatin, We (I-330)
Selfishness has established its system ... in our society, and we experience ... all the calamities of community without the accompaniment of a communal spirit.
– Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (5th Letter)
So far from setting us free, culture only develops a new want with every power that it bestows on us... The maxim of passive obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life.
– ibid.
With the monotonous noise of the wheel he drives everlastingly in his ears, he [man] never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of inspiring humanity upon his nature, he becomes merely the imprint of his occupation, of his science.
– ibid., (6th Letter)
As soon as man is only a content of time, he is no longer, and consequently he has no content either.
– ibid., (13th Letter)
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.
– ibid.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Also attributed to Friedrich Schiller
- ^ a b Do not construe these two quotes as being contradictory, nor as a thinly-veiled criticism of JFK. The explanatory note at Wikiquote gives that extreme patriotism was viewed unfavourably by Dr. Johnson. I also do not take JFK's quote to be a call for blind absolute patriotism, the kind that saw George W. Bush re-elected
