"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff"
George W. Bush
"He has this thing about personal loyalty, it's: If you're not with us 100 percent, you're against us. And the more independent you are, the more you're against us."
Tom Pauken
The head of the Texas Republican Party when George W. Bush
was governor
"It is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of their leaders. That is easy. All you have to tell them is that they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
Hermann
Goering
a
high-ranking Nazi at the Nuremberg trials
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public... Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."
Theodore
Roosevelt
26th President, Kansas City Star, May 7, 1918
"Think for yourselves, and observe elementary moral principles, such as taking responsibility for your actions, or inaction."
Noam Chomsky
"The basic idea of dialogue is to be able to talk while suspending your opinions, holding them in front of you, while neither suppressing them nor insisting upon them. Not trying to convince, but simply to understand."
On
Creativity,
by
David Bohm
You know you've seized the day when "the solid outlines of individuality melt away and the feeling of finiteness no longer oppresses us."
Tao
of Physics
"[We all start out in life with] a sense of enormous expectation, the sense that one's life is important, that great achievements are within one's capacity, and that great things lie ahead. It is not in the nature of [a person]--nor of any living entity-- to start out by giving up, by spitting in one's own face and damning existence; that requires a process of corruption whose rapidity differs from [person] to [person]. Some give up at the first touch of pressure; some sell out; some run down by imperceptible degrees and lose their fire, never knowing when or how they lost it. ... Yet a few hold on and move on, knowing that that fire is not to be betrayed, learning how to give it shape, purpose and reality."
The
Fountainhead,
(From
the preface)
"Our telescopes reach out to a distance that is bigger than a superstring (the smallest substructure postulated to exist within atoms) by a sixty-figure number: there would be sixty frames (of which present measurements cover forty-three) in our 'zoom lens' depiction of the natural world. Of these, our ordinary experience spans nine at most - from the smallest things our eyes can see, about a millimeter in size, to the distance logged on an intercontinental flight. This highlights something important and remarkable, which is so obvious that we take it for granted: our universe covers a vast range of scales, and an immense variety of structures, stretching far larger, and far smaller, than the dimensions of everyday sensations."
Just
Six Numbers