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The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.

— Samuel Smiles Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

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Knowledge

More quotes by Samuel Smiles

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Thrift (1875)

"Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience.

Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic (1987)

Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.

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You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Samuel Smiles (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.