A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
-William James

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
-John Stuart Mill

I have given my life to opening this path, but when I look back there's no one following me.
-Morihei Ueshiba "O-Sensei", founder of the martial art of aikido

I was in a taxi with O-Sensei, and I said to him, "I really want to do your aikido." He said, "That's very strange. Everyone else wants to do their aikido."
-Robert Nadeau

Even the most powerful metaphor is capable of yielding only partial truth. No metaphor tells the whole story from all sides, and hence no vision of the present, let alone the future, can ever be complete or final.
The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.
-Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave

The sickness and madness of those days--I'm glad to be free of them. It's a time for martyrs now. And if I'm to be one, it will be in the cause of brotherhood. That's the only thing that can save this country. I've learned it the hard way, but I've learned it.
-Malcolm X, two days before his assassination in a hail of gunfire at the Audubon Ballroom, Harlem, February 21, 1965.

A reasonable estimate of economic organisation must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralysed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic.
-R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, taken from E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful.

Specialisation paralyses, ultra-specialisation kills. Palaeontology is littered with such catastrophes.
-P. Teilhard de Chardin, Le PhÈnomËne Humain, trans. Bernard Wall

Freedom's just another word for
Nothin' left to lose
-K. Kristofferson and F. Foster, Me and Bobby McGee

If you have attained mastery of swordlessness, you will never be without a sword.
-Yagyu Munenori, 17th century Japanese sword master, trans. Thomas Cleary

Above all, what I learned from my Sensei was how to wait. I believe I learned the "meaning" of waiting on one foot. If I understand anything in this life, it is how to wait. It is not an answer. But for me it is everything.
-Sadaharu Oh, legendary Japanese home run hitter, from his autobiography Sadaharu Oh: A Zen Way of Baseball

I took him [Dainin Katagiri Roshi] to a junior high school once -- he'd been invited to introduce that pubescent audience to Buddhism and Zen. I couldn't believe what he said. "Do you think God is far away? Do you think Zen is far away? Do you think it is hard to understand? It's just toilet paper! That's all it is. You may not think so. But that's what it is! You may think Zen is something wonderful and in some heaven. It is just toilet paper!"
In the car on the way back he turned to me and said, "I don't think they understood."
-David Chadwick, THANK YOU AND OK! A Zen failure in Japan

Any representation of God produces accordingly.
-Joseph Chilton Pearce, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg

Don't believe everything you think!
-Seen on a bumper sticker

Long experience has taught me not always to believe in the limitations indicated by purely theoretical considerations. These, as we well know, are based on insufficient knowledge of all the relevant factors.
-Guglielmo Marconi

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.
-Bertrand Russell

Logic must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can.
-Bertrand Russell

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
-Niels Bohr

On two occasions I have been asked (by members of Parliament), "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?"  I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine, precursor to the modern computer

The computer is a greater threat to the [nuclear] family than all the abortion laws and gay rights movements and pornography in the world.
-Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.
-Bernard Avishai

They use Microsoft Word. I use vi.
-Irene Pasternak, a consultant at Microsoft, when asked by her boss why it seemed she did eight times more work than his other employees

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
-Edsger W. Dijkstra

Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers.
-Leonard Brandwein