[PiratePoet]

• "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public" (PT Barnum)
• "Ekam sat vipra bahuda vadanti/ The one truth is called by different names by various learned men" (Rig Veda)
• "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him." (Paul Tillich)
• "The Brain is wider than the Sky / For put them side by side / The one the other will contain" (Emily Dickinson)
• "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." (Frank Zappa)
• "Congressmen are like diapers. You need to change them often, and for the same reason." (Pete McCloskey)
• "I think I know what it is but don't ask me to play it" (John Coltrane to Zita Carno on seeing one of his improvisations transcribed to music notation)
• "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" (Josef Stalin)
• "The foolish ask questions the wise cannot answer" (Oscar Wilde)
• "No one really knows enough to be a pessimist" (Norman Cousins)
• "Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught" (oscar Wilde)"
• "I would characterize current U.S. nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary, and dreadfully dangerous" (former USA defense secretary Robert McNamara)
• "Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present" (a manifesto signed in France by some of the greatest writers of our times: Levy, Rushdie, Chafiq, Nasreen, Fourest, Namazie, etc)
• "[The Koran is one of] the most stubborn enemies of civilisation, liberty, and the truth which the world has yet known." (William Muir, British specialist of Islam of the 19th century)
• "We only had our brains to use as weapons against the Christians" (A Jewish friend, when i asked him why so many Jews became scientists and artists and writers. Contrast it with a very similar statement made by an Al Jazeera commentator regarding suicide bombers: "The Arabs only have their bodies to use as weapons against Israel and the USA")
• "Sometimes the metaphors write themselves" (Eugene Robinson, 2006)
• "All murderers are punished unless they kill in great numbers" (Voltaire)
• "Je ne suis pas d'accord avec ce que vous dites, mais je d‚fendrai jusqu'… la mort le droit que vous avez de le dire/ I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (Voltaire)
• "It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go." (Dolores Ibarruri "La Pasionaria", Spanish communist)
• "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
• "La lor cieca vita e` tanto bassa, che invidiosi son d'ogni altra sorte. Fama di loro esser non lassa; misericordia e giustizia li sdegna. Non ti curar di lor, ma guarda e passa./ Their pointless life is so low that all other lots they envy. Fame of them the world hath none; Mercy and Justice scorn them both. Ignore them, look ahead and pass them by". (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto III)
• "Envy is blind, and she has no other quality than that of detracting from virtue" (Titus Livius)
• "There are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know that we don't know" (Donald Rumsfeld)
• "A scientist is someone who learns more and more about less and less, and ultimately knows everything about nothing. A Philosopher is someone who learns less and less about more and more, and ultimately knows nothing about everything" (Anonymous joke)
• "The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine" (Charles Townes)
• "Time is the substance of which we are made" (Borges)
• "First they came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me." (Reverend Martin Niemoller, 1945)
• "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think" (Adolf Hitler)
• "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" (Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf")
• Karl Radek: "Vladimir Ilyich, where are we going to get enough rope to hang the whole bourgeoisie?" "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: "They will sell it to us themselves"
• "With our growing income inequalities and child poverty; our underperforming schools and disgracefully inadequate health services... our suspect voting machines and our gerrymanded congressional districts; our bellicose religiosity and our cult of guns and executions; our cavalier unconcern for institutions, treaties and laws... we should not be surprised that America has ceased to be an example to the world." (Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute, 2004)
• "It is reasonable to expect that, with the favourable effects of time, and of European arts and sciences, [America] will become the most formidable power in the world." (the Venetian ambassador to Paris, 1783)
• "Truth and untruth often co-exist; good and evil often are found together" (Gandhi)
• "A great country worthy of the name does not have any friends." (Charles De Gaulle)
• "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East, and we achieved neither" (Condoleeza Rice)
• We are not shooting enough professors (Lenin's telegram)
• "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist." (George Orwell, 1942)
• An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. (Mahatma Gandhi)
• A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject. Winston Churchill
• History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. Winston Churchill
• "The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking" (Martin Heidegger, 1951)
• "Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians." Charles De Gaulle
• You must be the change you wish to see in the world (Mahatma Gandhi)
• This whole world Is one big prison yard. Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards. (Bob Dylan)
• "The past is not dead - it isn't even past" (Christa Wolf, 1976)
• I think it would be a good idea. (Mahatma Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western civilization)
• God is dead - Nietzsche. Nietzsche is dead - God. (Graffiti on Nietzsche's tomb)
• Philosophy has only interpreted the world. The real challenge is to change it. (Epigraphe on Karl Marx tomb)
• "It will take a thousand years for the frontier to reach the Pacific" ( Thomas Jefferson)
• Like all religions, Reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created (John Ralston Saul, 1992)
• "The Army causes Taxes; Taxes cause Discontents; and Discontents make an Army necessary"Lord Bath, 1749)
• To do is to be - Descartes; To be is to do - Voltaire; Do be do be do - Frank Sinatra (Men'w Restrooms, Greasewood Flats, Scottsdale)
• I play the notes, in order, as they are written. It is God who makes the music. (Johan Sebastian Bach)
• "The first thing that we do let's kill all the lawyers" (Henry VI, II.4, Shakespeare)
• "Under no circumstances should a true Christian draw the sword" (Tertullian, 2nd century AD)
• The basis of government is jugglery. If it lasts and works, it becomes policy. (Caliph Al Mansur of Baghdad)
• The worst things are those that are novelties. Every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hell. (Prophet Mohammed, The Neglected Duty)
• "shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi shi" = "the master is fond of licking lion spittle" (Chinese tonguetwister)
• "I am who I am" (God to Moses)
• Jesus: "I came into the world to bear witness to the truth". Pilate: "What is truth?" (John 18:3438)
• What is the sound of one hand clapping? (Hakuin)
• Four blind men gave four altogether contradictory descriptions of an elephant because one had been able to touch only its tail, the other its legs, the third its belly and the fourth its ears only. (Ancient Arab proverb)
• "Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy." (Jorge-Luis Borges)
• "Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets" (Napoleon Bonaparte)