Birth: September 19, 1904 Death: February 4, 1978
Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable..
Speech is highly elliptical. It would scarcely be endurable otherwise. Ellipsis is indispensable to the writer or speaker who wants to be brief and p….
Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one's vo….
Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom..
Words are one of our chief means of adjusting to all the situations of life. The better control we have over words, the more successful our adjustmen….
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that m….
That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity..
We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us..
The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all..
Authors are magpies, echoing each other's words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters..
We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis..
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts..
Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom..
Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own i….
For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way that we are going..
There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead, and even less the ability to lead somewhere that will be to the ….
It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. ….
There is wisdom in the selection of wisdom..
An honorable man will not be bullied by a hypothesis..
Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues. . . . A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as ….
Freedom of speech and freedom of action are meaningless without freedom to think. And there is no freedom of thought without doubt..