"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants" (Sir Isaac Newton)
"you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you." (Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France)
"to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress." (The aim of The Economist)
"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve" (Sir Karl Popper)
"only those who have never known disorder fail to grasp that it is the necessary precondition for liberty." (Niall Ferguson in Colossus)
"When every benefit received is a right, there is no place for good manners, let alone for gratitude." (Theodore Dalrymple in What is Poverty?)
"If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. // We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." (Sir Karl Popper on the paradox of freedom in The Open Society and Its Enemies)
"This is the lesson: Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." (Sir Winston Churchill, October 29th 1941, Harrow School , London)