“What defines a people is not race, not tradition, not geography, but the free choice of a group of human beings to live together as fellow citizens.”
– Thomas G. West
On What Defines a People
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Tag Archives: Quotes
On Beauty in Retrospect
“The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they’re seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?”
– André Gide
On Pure Entertainment
“People who see life as anything more than pure entertainment are missing the point.”
– George Carlin
On Chess and Objectivity
“Chess, first of all, teaches you to be objective.”
– Alexander Alekhine
On Weird People
“The weirdest thing about weird people is how normal they are.”
– Louis Theroux
On Language, Politics and Reality
“Language has always been important in politics, but language is incredibly important to the present political struggle. Because if you can establish an atmosphere in which information doesn’t mean anything, then there is no objective reality.
– Stephen Colbert
On Churches and Lighthouses
“Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin wrote this in a letter to his wife on 17 July 1757, after narrowly avoiding a shipwreck. These lines are often misquoted as “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” Instead, Franklin—who identified himself as a Deist, not as a Christian, let alone a Roman Catholic—rather wittily remarks he is sceptical about the practical value of a chapel at the seaside to prevent shipwreck, as if to say “if I were to do anything to help prevent ships running aground, I would build a tower containing a guiding light and not some place of worship.”
On Infinity
“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Knowledge Guild 