Teacher

🇺🇸Mark Twain

Literature

1835–1910

"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."

🇺🇸Thomas Jefferson

Politics

"The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them."

🇦🇹Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophy

analytic philosophy

1845–1925

"What has to be accepted, the given, is — so one could say — forms of life."

Socrates

Literature

-469–-398

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

Confucius

Philosophy

Confucianism

-550–-478

"Follow the seasons of Ha,Ride in the state carriage of Yau,Wear the ceremonial cap of Chan,Let the music be the Shiu with its pantomimes."

🇺🇸Walt Whitman

Literature

Transcendentalism

1819–1892

"I say the whole earth and all the stars in the sky are for religion’s sake."

🇺🇸James Joyce

Literature

1870–1931

"His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before."

Swami Vivekananda

Religion

1863–1902

"First get rid of the delusion “I am the body,” then only will we want real knowledge."

🇺🇸Booker T. Washington

Literature

1856–1915

"There is no power on earth, that can neutralize the influence of a high, pure, simple and useful life."

🇮🇪Samuel Beckett

Literature

Nouveau Roman

1906–1989

"The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in."

Karl Popper

Philosophy

liberalism

1902–1994

"Sir Karl Popper: "Science: Conjectures and Refutations"

🇺🇸John Dewey

Philosophy

1859–1952

"Even the eye that is artificially trained to see color as color, apart from things that colors qualify, cannot shut out the resonances and transfers of value."

Nikolai Gogol

Literature

1809–1852

"The reason why Proshka wore such large boots can be explained at once: Plyushkin kept only one pair of boots for all of his servants, however numerous they were, and they always stood in the hall."

🇺🇸Woodrow Wilson

Politics

1916–1965

"The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and serve together!"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Literature

1918–2008

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."

🇺🇸Stephen King

Literature

b. 1986

"Born in Lust, Turn to Dust. Born in Sin, Come on In"

🇺🇸Robert Kiyosaki

Business

b. 1947

"I told him that his profit is made when you buy, not when you sell."

🇬🇧Anthony Burgess

Music

1917–1993

"Somerset Maugham refers more than once to the pleasure of the Malayan morning - papaya and eggs and bacon and strong British tea taken while the air is cool and the sun awaits its sudden thrust into the green land...."

Charlotte Brontë

Literature

1816–1855

"Better to be without logic than without feeling."

🇺🇸Willem de Kooning

Art

abstract expressionism

1904–1997

"complete text of De Kooning's lecture 'What Abstract Art Means to Me' February 5, 1951 - on the 'What is Abstract Art?' symposium, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 5, 1951"

🇺🇸Maxine Waters

Politics

b. 1938

"Maxine Waters talks about ACORN on Real Time with Bill Maher"

🇺🇸Allen West (politician)

Military

b. 1961

"If it's about the lives of my men and their safety, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can."

Benito Mussolini

Politics

fascism

1883–1945

"For my part I prefer fifty thousand rifles to five million votes."

🇬🇧David Hockney

Art

pop art

1937–2026

"'Why David Hockney Should Not Be Taken Seriously'."

"As humans, we reflexively reject arguments that contradict what we would like to be true."

Joseph Priestley

Science

1733–1804

"From the fame opinion of a soul distinct from the body came the practice of praying, first for the dead, and then to them with a long train of other absurd opinions, and superstitious practices."

🇺🇸Christa McAuliffe

Education

1948–1986

"What are we doing here? We're reaching for the stars."

🇺🇸JoAnna Garcia

Entertainment

b. 1979

"I think that being a parent is the greatest soul-baring—the greatest learning experience we could have ever. We learn more — we give birth to our greatest teachers."

Rais Yatim

Politics

b. 1942

"Do not evaluate a leader based on his or her academic qualifications because politics cannot be fully taught or learnt in school."

🇺🇸Joseph Campbell

Literature

1904–1987

"We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about."

🇺🇸Dale Carnegie

Literature

1888–1955

"Abilities wither under criticism, they blossom under encouragement."

🇬🇧J. R. R. Tolkien

Literature

Inklings

1892–1973

"Fantasy is a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so the most potent."

🇮🇪Michael Longley

Literature

1939–2025

"Poetry's only crucial attribute is rhythm. This is its heartbeat.This makes it memorable. If the rhythm falters , then the poem dies of heart failure."

🇨🇳Benny Tai

Education

b. 1964

"People in Hong Kong still believe in democracy – the big question after the Umbrella Movement is how we can achieve it."

🇺🇸Ben Stein

Politics

b. 1944

"The indispensable first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: decide what you want."

🇨🇦Carolyn Parrish

Literature

b. 1946

"Damn Americans... I hate those bastards."

🇦🇺Jenny Lewis

Literature

b. 1960

"It's all of the good that won't come out of us and how eventually our hands will just turn to dust, if we keep shaking them standing here on this frozen lake."

"...some things are better left in the past. And true things are destined to repeat themselves."