You are What You Think

The human mind is trained by the knowledge imparted to it and the direction given to its ideas. Only what is great can make it great; the little can only make it little.

- Carl von Clausewitz

The Side Door

Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered. The front-door is in the street. Some keep it always open; some keep it latched; some, locked, some, bolted, - with a chain that will let you peep in, but not get in; and some nail it up, so that nothing can pass its threshold. This front door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room and this into the interior apartments. The side-door opens at once to the sacred chambers.

There is almost always at least one key to this side-door. This is carried for years hidden in a mother's bosom. Fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends, often, but by no means so universally have duplicates of it. The wedding-ring conveys a right to one; alas if none is given with it.

-Oliver Wendel Holmes

No Evil in the Inevitable

For the stone which has been thrown up it is no evil to come down, nor indeed any good to have been carried up.

- Marcus Aurelius

A Fool for Company

When he talked to me as a philosopher of his contempt of the world, I asked him, what he meant by getting so many new titles, which I call'd the hanging himself about with bells and tinsel. He had no other excuse for it, but this, that, since the world were such fools as to value those matters, a man must be a fool for company.

-Gilbert Burnet on the Marquess of Halifax

Secrecy and Conspiracy

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never be the system of regular government.

-Jeremy Bentham

Nature

If Nature be to be imitated, then there is a rule for imitating Nature rightly: otherwise there may be an end, and no means of conducting to it.

-John Dryden

Hell and Texas

If I owned Hell and Texas, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.

- General Phillip Henry Sheridan

Mendacity

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Death is one way out. Liquor is another.

-Tennessee Williams

Lawyers

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

-Jeremy Bentham

No Miracles

You have to remember that, in economic policies, there are no miracles.

-Ludwig von Mises

Fashion

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

-Oscar Wilde

Astrology

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often surfeits of our own behavior), we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we are villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treacherous by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and that we are evil in, and by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion by whore master man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star!

-Shakespeare, King Lear