Such is the nature of crowds: either they are humble and servile or arrogant and dominating. They are incapable of making moderate use of freedom, which is the middle course, or of keeping it.
--
Book XXIV, sec. 25Livy
These ideas are present in all sorts of unrelated cultures -- the Easter Islands, Celtic mythology, Plato's Symposium with its notion that we are all originally hermaphrodite. We became too arrogant and so the gods split us down the middle, forcing us to spend our lives chasing our other half. If we start being arrogant all over again, God will come down and split each half in half, and it will take four people to assemble a fifth, making our lives peculiarly, desperately difficult.
Peter Greenaway
Human nature is, by definition, a talkative one, imprudent, indiscreet, gossipy, incapable of closing its mouth and keeping it closed.
Jose Saramago
Don’t tell me you are a moderate. Moderate is an adjective. It is a qualifier. You may be a moderate conservative, a moderate democrat, or a moderate drinker but it doesn’t tell me what you believe in. It’s not a philosophy. Unless all you believe in is moderation for the sake of moderation. Grow up! You can’t be a good egg all of your life. Someday you have to either hatch or rot.
Mike Rosen
Barack Obama loves to get attached from the Left on being too moderate on the War on Terrorism. And there have been other things, too, where he's tried to make signals to the middle, saying, “I'm a free trader,” and saying he might cut corporate taxes, saying he might delay some of those tax increases on the wealthy. All of that is aimed on telling swing voters: You cannot put Obama in a far left box or paint him as a rigid ideologue. That shows the difficulty John McCain is going to have making that argument that Steve Schmidt offered — making it stick.
Barack Obama
Without risks or prizes for the darer, history would be insipid indeed; and there is a type of military character which every one feels that the race should never cease to breed, for everyone is sensitive to its superiority. The duty is incumbent on mankind, of keeping military character in stock — if keeping them, if not for use, then as ends in themselves and as pure pieces of perfection, — so that Roosevelt's weaklings and mollycoddles may not end by making everything else disappear from the face of nature.
William James
Livy
Lizhi, Fang
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z