"Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer."

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Science See all quotes by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg →

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More by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Where the frontier of science once was is now the centre.”

“Do not commence your exercises in philosophy in those regions where an error can deliver you over to the executioner.”

“There were honest people long before there were Christians and there are, God be praised, still honest people where there are no Christians. It could therefore easily be possible that people are Christians because true Christianity corresponds to what they would have been even if Christianity did not exist.”

“There are very many people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”

“There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.”

“What concerns me alone I only think, what concerns my friends I tell them, what can be of interest to only a limited public I write, and what the world ought to know is printed...”

Resonant Thoughts

"There is no punishment that would be hard enough to be applied to these Nazi beasts. Of course, in the case of this coming retribution, the innocent will have to suffer along with them. Ninety-nine pe…"

— Friedrich Kellner

1885–1970

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"It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a stead…"

— William L. Shirer

Journalism1904–1993

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"Well, that's a judgment that you are making. I promise you that if you look at it from outside, and perhaps you're taking rather a parochial view at the moment, I don't think that other people in the …"

— James Callaghan

Politics1956–2005

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"We can see quite plainly that our present civilisation is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilisations were built on the exploitation of slaves, and we believe the spiritual destin…"

— Donald Watson

Social Activism1910–2005

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