Controversial Sayings

214 sayings found from the Modern era from 214 authors

The government of a country by a mere numerical majority, is a thing which cannot be permanent.

— John Stuart Mill 1861
Political

The great advantage of the present-day bourgeoisie is to possess no moral, no ideal, no religion, no God, no sacred values.

— Simone de Beauvoir 1949
Religious

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.

— Hannah Arendt 1963
War & Violence

A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting of nothing but jokes.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein c. 1930s-1940s
General

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

— Bertrand Russell Undated
General

A man's life is nothing but a slow trek to death.

— Albert Camus 1971
General

The deaf should not intermarry.

— Alexander Graham Bell 1883
General

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson 1841
General

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

— Henry David Thoreau 1854
General

The proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!

— Friedrich Engels 1848
General

The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory.

— Alexis de Tocqueville 1835
General

The most depraved type of human being is the man who is happy to serve. A man who is happy to serve is a slave.

— Ayn Rand 1959
Social & Racial

Civilization began the first time an angry man cast a stone instead of a word.

— Sigmund Freud N/A (common theme)
General

The path to the nucleus is easy to find, but the nucleus itself is hard to reach.

— Werner Heisenberg 1938
General

For the colonized subject, objectivity is always a weapon directed against him.

— Frantz Fanon 1952
War & Violence

It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them.

— Alexander Fleming 1945
War & Violence

The fight against tuberculosis is hopeless unless we attack the germ directly.

— Robert Koch 1901
General

Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person who is crushed who feels it.

— Simone Weil 1940
General

I grieve to say that I know of no country where the practice of dentistry is so atrocious as in England.

— Charles Dickens 1846
General

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

— Mark Twain 1888
General
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