Soothsayer, say unto me the Sooth... add your favorite quote(s)

[wsk]

I have several here that I've been collecting:

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

Clifford's Dictum: "It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence."

Government should be small, unobtrusive, and ridiculous. At present, it's only one of these.
-- Edward Abbey

It is doubted whether a man ever brings his faculties to bear with their full force on a subject until he writes upon it.
-- Cicero

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

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.
-- Robert Lewls Stevenson

Twenty centuries of 'progress' have brought the average citizen a vote, a national anthem, a Ford, a bank account, and a high opinion of himself, but not the capacity to live in high density without befouling and denuding his environment, nor a conviction that such capacity, rather than such density, is the true test of whether he is civilized.
-- Aldo Leopold

When looking for the root cause of a problem, never overlook sheer stupidity, or the limitless capacity of the human race to produce new and improved idiots.

[Caradoc]

I have several here that I've been collecting:

Another Mencken quote I like:

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

-H.L. Mencken