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Thought

Kong Fu Zi

To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous.

From The Analects of Master Kong (Kong Fu Zi, or “Confucius”), Chapter II.

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Thought

T.S. Eliot

They constantly try to escape 
From the darkness outside and within 
By dreaming of systems so perfect
  that no one will need to be good. 

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 – 1965), Choruses from “The Rock” (1934).

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Thought

Thomas Jefferson

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.

Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774).

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Thought

Rose Wilder Lane

When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.

Rose Wilder Lane, The Discovery of Freedom: Man’s Struggle Against Authority (1943), p. 32.
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Thought

Aldous Huxley

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

Aldous Huxley, “Distractions I” (essay) in Vedanta for the Western World (1945), Christopher Isherwood, editor.
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Thought

Kong Fu Zi

“If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.”

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.

The popular paraphrase of the maxim, above, from The Analects of Master Kong (Kong Fu Zi, or “Confucius”), Chapter XIII, with one grammatical emendation. (The common saying has, inexplicably, the final word in singular form.)