He that voluntarily continues ignorant is guilty of all the crimes which ignorance produces.
—Samuel Johnson
The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into every individual.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
—George Orwell
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Character is higher than intellect. A great soul will be strong to live as well as strong to think.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
—Samuel Johnson
Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.
—Walt Disney
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.
—Alfred Whitney Griswold
Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
—Howard H. Aiken
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
—Virginia Woolf
If one took no chances, one would not fly at all. Safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. That judgment, in turn, must rest upon one’s outlook on life. Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed.
—Charles Lindbergh
Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.
—Charles Lindbergh
I see myself as a huge fiery comet, a shooting star. Everyone stops, points up and gasps "Oh look at that!" Then—whoosh, and I'm gone… and they'll never see anything like it ever again… and they won't be able to forget me—ever.
—Jim Morrison
If my poetry aims to achieve anything, it's to deliver people from the limited ways in which they see and feel.
—Jim Morrison
How small the vastest of human catastrophes may seem at a distance of a few million miles.
—H. G. Wells