Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler
1838-1918. American historian and novelist.
1. "Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems."
source: (about philosophy)
Categories: Science and Technology -:- Question and Problem
2. "Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world."
Categories: Human -:- Science and Technology
3. "Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence."
Categories: God and Religion -:- Oration and Silence
4. "Practical politics consists in ignoring facts."
Categories: Politics and Diplomacy
5. "Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic."
source: "The Education of Henry Adams"
Categories: Authority, Government -:- Power and Weakness
6. "Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds."
source: "Education of Henry Adams"
Categories: Politics and Diplomacy
7. "One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it."
source: "The Education of Henry Adams"
Categories: Truth and Falsity
8. "One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible."
Categories: Friendship and Hostility
9. "Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
source: "The Education of Henry Adams"
Categories: Knowledge, Ignorance -:- Education
10. "My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to."
Categories: Science and Technology
11. "I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist."
Categories: Art and Culture -:- Optimism and Hope
12. "Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man."
source: "The Education of Henry Adams"
Categories: Human -:- Nature and Animals
13. "Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit."
source: "The Education of Henry Adams"
Categories: Various
14. "A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops."
Categories: Education
2007, collected and compiled by Kazimierz Matan
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