quotes by people whose name begins with an s:
"Life is not a spectacle or feast; it is a predicament."
George Santayana, Articles and Essays
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana, The Life of Reason
"Don't be misled into believing that somehow the world owes you a living. The boy who believes that his parents or the government, or anyone else owes him his livelihood and that he can collect it without labour will wake up one day and find himself working for another boy who did not have that belief and, therefore, earned the right to have others work for him."
David Sarnoff
"A human being is a bundle of useless passions."
John-Paul Sartre Thanks Magda
"Hell is other people."
John-Paul Sartre, No Exit For Steph
"To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe."
Marylin vos Savant
"A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society founded on trash and waste, and such a society is a house built upon sand."
Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?
"Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have."
Hyman Judah Schachtel
"Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them."
Carl Schurz
"Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."
Albert Schweitzer
"Human beings lack the strength of the gorilla, the sharp teeth of the lion, the speed of the cheetah. Brain power is our speciality. The brain is a tool for reasoning, and a capacity to reason helps us to survive, to feed ourselves and to safeguard our children. With it we have developed machines that can lift more than many gorillas, knives that are sharper than any lion's teeth, and ways of travelling that make a cheetah's pace tediously slow. But the ability to reason is a peculiar ability. Unlike strong arms, sharp teeth or flashing legs, it can take us to conclusions we had no desire to reach. For reason is like an escalator, leading upwards and out of sight. Once we step on it we do not know where we will end up."
Peter Singer, How Are We to Live?
"Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the cheif task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosphy a worthwhile activity."
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation
"Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain."
John Selden, Table Talk
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more; it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing."
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it."
George Bernard Shaw
"Our laws make law impossible, our liberties destroy all freedom, our property is organised robbery, our morality is impudent hypocrisy, our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes, our power wielded by cowards and weaklings, and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons."
George Bernard Shaw
"A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses."
George Bernard Shaw
"You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your power - he's free again."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
"Interpretation is the revenge of of the intellect upon art."
Susan Sontag
"Not to be born is best. The second best is to have seen the light and then to back quickly whence we came."
Sophocles
"I think if I can make you secure, I've taken away your humanity. I think we're supposed to be insecure, that's what it means to be human."
Bishop John Selby Spong
"Life is a gamble at terrible odds - if it was a bet, you wouldn't take it."
Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
"We grudgingly accept the truths of science, which would have us believe that a torrent of sub-atomic particles streams though our solid earth, shadows of anti-matter dog our every step, and a curve-ball of space would carry us into the past. Yet we continue to live our lives in a Newtonian universe, with ripe apples falling by gravity onto the cozy lawns of reality."
Paul Strathern
"Death is fortunate for the child, bitter to the youth, too late for the old."
Publilius Syrus, Sententioe
"To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."
Sun Tzu