Quotations

Hence it happened that all the armed prophets conquered, all the unarmed perished.
-- Machiavelli, 'Il Principe.'

Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. Without the possibility of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing.
-- Archibald Macleish

He is always the severest censor of the merit of others who has the least worth of his own.
-- Elias Lyman Maggon

The polite thing to do has always been to address people as they wish to be addressed, to treat them in a way they think dignified. But it is equally important to accept and tolerate different standards of courtesy, not expecting everyone else to adapt to one's own preferences. Only then can we hope to restore the insult to its proper social function of expressing true distaste.
-- Judith Martin, Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

Armament is an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor. Man, not material, forms the decisive factor.
-- Mao Tse Tung, 1938.

War cannot be divorced from politics for a single moment.
-- Mao Tse Tung, 1938.

Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone.
-- Ferdinand Edralin Marcos

Democracy isn't just the best form of government; It's the only one remotely worth a damn. Only democracy guarantees that people get what they deserve.
-- Zena Marley

Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
-- Groucho Marx

Outside of a dog a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx

Any man who says he can see through a woman is missing a lot.
-- Groucho Marx

Do you suppose I could buy back my introduction to you?
-- Groucho Marx

I didn't like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions -- the curtain was up.
-- Groucho Marx

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on I go into the library and read a good book.
-- Groucho Marx

Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.
-- Karl Marx

Current annual cost for an inmate in maximum security is approximately equal to an undergraduate student tuition at Harvard, and the chances for a subsequent successful (and legal) career are not as good.
-- Denis McKeon

The USA is so enormous, and so numerous are its schools, colleges and religious seminaries, many devoted to special religious beliefs ranging from the unorthodox to the dotty, that we can hardly wonder at its yielding a more bounteous harvest of gobbledygook than the rest of the world put together.
-- Sir Peter Medawar

Man is always looking for someone to boast to; woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
-- H. L. Mencken

Puritanism -- The haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.
-- H. L. Mencken

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
-- H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
-- H. L. Mencken

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody is looking.
-- H. L. Mencken

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.
-- H. L. Mencken

After all, all he did was string together a lot of old, well-known quotations.
-- H. L. Mencken, on Shakespeare

An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.
-- James Michener

It may well be that in some difficult hour
Pinned down by pain, and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power
I might be driven to sell your love for peace
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
-- Edna St. Vincent Milay

In all the great sieges, the defenders eat rats, and if I have to eat rats, they are going to be well spiced!
-- Lee Miller (after buying a basket of spices from a London shopkeeper just before the Blitz, 1940)

Awake, arise, or be forever fall'n!
-- Lucifer, Milton's "Paradise Lost"

Knowledge is not Power: Power is but one attribute of Knowledge.
-- D. Mitchell

There is a First Amendment right to speak in a encrypted way... The right to speak P.G.P. is like the right to speak Navajo. The Government has no particular right to prevent you from speaking in a technical manner even if it is inconvenient for them to understand.
-- Eben Moglen, Columbia U. professor of law and legal history, in a New York Times article by John Markoff, Sep. 21, 1993

Men are always ready to respect someone who bores them. And if most married women, even the pretty ones, look so dull, it's because they're getting too much respect.
-- Marilyn Monroe

People are always looking at me as if I were a kind of mirror instead of a person. They don't see me, they see their own hidden thoughts and then they whitewash themselves by claiming that I embody those secret thoughts.
-- Marilyn Monroe

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
-- Charles Edward Montague

I have only the idea I have made of myself to sustain me on oceans of nothingness.
-- Henry de Montherlant

Learning, study, reading, and the preservation of books are all integral to spiritual practice. We get into trouble when we give up any of these...
-- Thomas Moore, Meditations.

The masses are asses.
-- Muniz

Perceive those things which cannot be seen.
-- Miyamoto Musashi

There is a violence that liberates, and a violence that enslaves; there is a violence that is moral and a violence that is immoral.
-- Benito Mussolini

I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining.
-- Vittorio Mussolini

Click on the mailbox to let me know what you think about what I've written -- I'm always interested in communicating! ;-)