Rhetoric is the art of conquering the soul through speech.

Platon

After all, we all contain two people. We are, to begin with, what nature has made of us. But then, we are what we have done with the nature in us.

Gabriel Liiceanu

In history, as in any other field, you need to have something to offer to your epoch, and speak the same language as your interlocutors. If not, you are out, no matter how patriotic your intentions may be.

Lucian Boia

Being in power is like being a lady: if you need to say you are, you are not.

Lady Margaret Thatcher

The bad leader people despise. The good leader people admire. But the real leader is the one of whom people say, when the work is done, "we did it ourselves".

Lao Tzu

You can not teach anybody anything. You can only help people discover themselves.

Galileo Galilei

I love to learn but I hate being taught.

Winston Churchill

You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

Niels Bohr to Albert Einstein, in a public debate.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Albert Einstein

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John Gardner

You heard sheep, you drive cattle but you lead people. So lead me, follow me, or get the hell out of my way!

Gen. George Patton

I know that you think you understand  you picture what I just said. But I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not the same with what I wanted to say.

Patrick Murray

If you keep waiting for the right time, others who don’t will walk pass you.

Woody Allen

The easiest relationship, if you ask me, is that with a 10,000 people audience. The most difficult is that with a single person.

Joan Baez

The responsibilities to the future surpass the ones to the past.

Eugen Lovinescu

Some people study all their life, and at their death they have learned everything except to think.

François Domergue

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

One of my major regrets from the time when I was an actor is that I couldn’t take a seat in the audience and look at myself.

John Barrymore

The modern man’s tragedy is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his life, but that this bothers him less and less.

Václav Havel

The worst of all tragedies is not to die young, but to live until I am 75 and yet not ever truly to have lived.

Martin Luther King

Don't ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Harold Whitman

Sex-apeal is 50% what you've got and 50% what people think you've got.

Sophia Loren

Chance only favors the minds that are prepared.

Louis Pasteur

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

Derek Bok

Without obligations and widely shared and deeply rooted moral values, neither justice, nor democratic government or market economy will be able to function properly.

Václav Havel

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best.

W. Edwards Deming

The beauty of things is in the soul of the beholder.

David Hume

Perceptions are real. If you're playing to win, they have to be favorable. Your ability to persuade people to listen to you, understand what you are saying, and support you, will determine whether you win or lose.

Lord Bell

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Leadership is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower 

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

The heart has reasons unknown to reason.

Blaise Pascal

There are only two options regarding commitment. You're either in, or you're out. There is not such a thing as life in between.

Pat Riley