This is a collection of some of my favourite quotes in no particular order. In case they were not actually said by these people, or said a bit differently (which is impossible to know for sure), they are still very much true.
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."
Albert Einstein
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."
Leonardo da Vinci
"Art is never finished, only abandoned."
Leonardo da Vinci
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"It's easy to win forgiveness for being wrong; being right is what gets you into real trouble."
Bjarne Stroustrup
"The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything."
Theodore Roosevelt
"In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing."
Theodore Roosevelt
"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
Theodore Roosevelt
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt
"Always make the audience suffer as much as possible."
Alfred Hitchcock
"I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career."
Charlie Chaplin
"Well, I'll be tougher than the toughies, and sharper than the sharpies… and I'll make my money square!"
Scrooge McDuck
"Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%."
Thomas Jefferson
"On two occasions I have been asked: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
Charles Babbage
"All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach."
Adolf Hitler
"If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed."
Adolf Hitler
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
A. J. Liebling
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"I'm as proud of what we don't do as I am of what we do."
Steve Jobs
"It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
Steve Jobs
"In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
Steve Jobs
"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
Steve Jobs
"No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
H.L. Mencken
"Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly."
H.L. Mencken
"If you think nobody cares, try missing a few payments."
anonymous
"To move forward, you have to look back."
anonymous
"Claiming to only be doing one's job is a convenient but poor excuse to act immorally."
anonymous
"Believers in karma have their eyes wide shut; outside of fiction, neither the good nor the bad tend to get what they deserve."
anonymous
"A clear policy is helpful. An indisputable one is madness."
anonymous
"A more accurate definition of insanity: trying something only once, then dropping it all because it didn't work the first time."
anonymous