Favorite Quotations

You will never be successful attempting to please everyone. (Victor T. Stephens)

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

It is better to be divided by truth than united by error.

It is better to speak the truth that hurts and then heals, than a lie that comforts and then kills.

It is better to stand alone for the truth, than stand in a crowd in a lie.

Where was God on September 11, 2001? Exactly where you left Him on the 10th.

Like a gold ring in a pig's snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion (Proverbs 11:22).

The true and only God is not the God of all faiths and religions. The true and only God is the God of those who have accepted His Son, Jesus Christ. (Victor T. Stephens)

There are many things in my life for which I am ashamed, but Jesus Christ is not one of them.

It is often said that blood is thicker than water; but I say that honor and respect is thicker than blood.
(Victor T. Stephens)

If the path of your life has no obstacles to overcome, it is probably leading to nowhere.

Was it a mistake and were you sorry before or after you were caught?

True teachers of God's Word do not ensnare His people with unknown revelations or esoteric insights of scripture, and then label "immature' those who would question such teachings.

There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them. (Louis Armstrong)

Once truth is replaced by tradition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it. (Victor T. Stephens)

A righteous man is cautious in friendship, but the way of the wicked leads them astray (Proverbs 12:26).

He who walks with the wise grows wise, but a companion of fools suffers harm (Proverbs 13:20).

When the devil cannot stay us from a good work, then he laboureth by all means to make us proud of it. (Henry Smith)

How many of us, who are engaged in the Lord's holy service, are secretly cherishing some proud purpose of excelling other men, of making a name, of securing money and applause. (F.B. Meyer)

God puts away many in anger for their supposed goodness, but not any at all for their confessed badness. (John Trapp)

The anointed don't like to talk about painful trade-offs. They like to talk about happy "solutions" that get rid of the whole problem- at least in their imagination. (Thomas Sowell)

I have more trouble with D.L. Moody than with any man I ever met. (D.L. Moody)

Emotionalism and zeal in the absence of discernment and truth leads to self-imposed blindness.
(Victor T. Stephens)

Jesus prescribes a doctrinal test for false prophets because a behavioral test is unreliable.
(John W. Robbins)

For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are. (Niccolo Machiavelli)

There is in true beauty something which vulgar souls cannot admire. (William Congreve)

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. (Leo Tolstoy)

If you don't risk anything, you risk even more. (Erica Jong)

Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than going to a garage makes you a car. (Laurence J. Peter)

You can get a lot more done with a kind word and a gun, than with a kind word alone. (Al Capone)

Common sense is not so common. (Voltaire)

While modern technology has given people powerful new communication tools, it apparently can do nothing to alter the fact that many people have nothing useful to say. (Leo Gomes)

It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people. (Giordano Bruno)

Now godliness with contentment is great gain. (1Timothy 6:6)

Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error. (Benjamin Rush)

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated. (George Bernard Shaw)

It is difficult to conceive a more dangerous way of making vital decisions than by entrusting those decisions in the hands of those who, by decision, are morally corrupt or marginally intelligent.
(Victor T. Stephens)

Demagogue: one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
(H.L. Mencken)

My enemy is not the man who wrongs me, but the man who means to wrong me. (Democritus)

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good men to do nothing. (Edmund Burke)

To discuss evil in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction it. (Ayn Rand)

Beware the fury of a patient man. (John Dryden)

He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. (Herman Melville)

There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young. (Thomas Sowell)

He who does not bellow out the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers. (Charles Peguy)

The most fundamental fact about the ideas of the political left is that they do not work. Therefore we should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive. (Thomas Sowell)

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. (Thomas Jefferson)

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. (Leo Tolstoy)

It is necessary to try to surpass oneself always; this occupation ought to last as long as life.
(Christina, Queen of Sweden)

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else. (Nathaniel Branden)

The class of those who have the ability to think their own thoughts is separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the class of those who cannot. (Ludwig von Mises)

The strongest man upon Earth is he who stands most alone. (Henrik Ibsen)

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. (Kathleen Norris)

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity. (James Fenimore Cooper)

Freedom cannot be experienced when one becomes enslaved by the opinion of others.
(Victor T. Stephens)

Integrity has no need of rules. (Albert Camus)

Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves. (Nathaniel Branden)

No intelligent man has any respect for an unjust law. (Robert Heinlein)

There are many who know many things, yet are lacking in wisdom. (Democritus)

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young. (Henry Ford)

Liberal: a power worshiper without power. (George Orwell)

It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you cannot liberate a slave. (Louis J. Halle)

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.
(Francois de La Rochefoucald)

The right to be let alone is the underlying principle of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. (Erwin N. Griswold)

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.

This minding of other people's business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor's shoulder or fly at his throat.

Historically...those who told the truth about a particular regime have been exiled, jailed, or killed by those in power whose fury has been aroused. To be sure, the obvious explanation is that they were dangerous to their respective establishments, and that killing them seemed the best way to protect the status quo. This is true enough, but it does not explain the fact that the truth-sayers are so deeply hated even when they do not constitute a real threat to the established order. The reason lies, I believe, in that by speaking the truth they mobilize the [psychological] resistance of those who repress it. To the latter, the truth is dangerous not only because it can threaten their power but because it shakes their whole conscious system of orientation, deprives them of their rationalizations, and might even force them to act differently. Only those who have experienced the process of becoming aware of important impulses that were repressed know the earthquakelike sense of bewilderment and confusion that occurs as a result. Not all people are willing to risk this adventure, lest of all those people who profit, at least for the moment, from being blind.
(Erich Fromm)

If you can't answer a man's argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names. (Elbert Hubbard)

Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth. (Thomas Jefferson)

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. (Frederick Douglass)

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power- power to oppress others.

I can promise to be sincere, but not to be impartial. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

Do not bite the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it. (Thomas Jefferson)

An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens. (Thomas Jefferson)

I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others. (Thomas Jefferson)

Power-lust is a weed that grows only in the vacant lot of an empty mind. (Ayn Rand)

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. (Aldous Huxley)

Blaming "society" makes it awfully easy for a person of weak character to shrug off his own responsibility for his actions. (Stanley Schmidt)

The right of a nation to determine its own form of government does not include the right to establish a slave society (that is, to legalize the enslavement of some men by others). There is no such thing as "the right to enslave." A nation can do it, just as a man can become a criminal- but neither can do it by right. (Ayn Rand)

What divides men is less a difference in ideas than a likeness in pretensions. (Pierre Jean de Beranger)

Thugism is the cowardly man's impression of strength and manhood -- luxurating as a legend in his own mind; a deluded soul that is incognizant of the distinction between rudeness and self-respect.
(Victor T. Stephens)

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else. (Nathaniel Branden)

He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

The primary sign of a well-ordered mind is a man's ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company. (Seneca)

Thinking men cannot be ruled. (Ayn Rand)

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. (Oscar Wilde)

People who have time on their hands will inevitably waste the time of people who have work to do. (Thomas Sowell)

All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established. (Aristotle)

Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something. (Anton Pavlovich Chekhov)

Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties. (Aesop)

An athiest is a man with no invisible means of support. (John Buchan)

To say nothing of its holiness or authority, the Bible contains more specimens of genius and taste than any other volume in existence. - (Walter S. Landor)

Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall. (Tobias Smollett)

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. (George Washington)

My hope for my children must be that they respond to the still, small voice of God in their own hearts. (Andrew Young)

Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead. (Carl von Clausewitz)

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. (Aesop)
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