A Quote by Randal Marlin

To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, an alert citizenry today should take the trouble to learn how easy it can be for a powerful minority to manipulate information to win the support-or the indifference-of the majority towards an action.

Randal Marlin

Quote Topics

Action Alert Avoid Citizenry Easy How Indifference Information Learn Majority Manipulate Minority Mistakes Past Powerful Repeating Should Support Take Today Towards Trouble Win

Quote Author

Randal Marlin
Born: 1938

If an action must be taken that will benefit the majority at the cost of the minority, is it morally indefensible? If an action taken for the benefit of a majority occurs at the expense of a minority, is it moral action?

Garth Nix

Instead of turning away from our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, let us instead learn from our history and avoid repeating the mistakes of our past.

Loretta Lynch

Let’s face it, we’re all imperfect and we’re going to fall short on occasion. But we must learn from failure and that will enable us to avoid repeating our mistakes. Through adversity, we learn, grow stronger, and become better people.

John Wooden

To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.

Charles Horton Cooley

Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority.

William Howard Taft

If we were given one word of information in our entire history, how we'd treasure it! how we'd pore over ever syllable, divining it's meaning, arguing its importance; how we'd examine it and wring every lesson we could from it. Yet today we have trillions of words, tidal waves of information and the smallest detail of every action our government and businesses take is easily available to us at the touch of a button. And yet...we ignore it, and learn nothing from it. One day we'll die of voluntary ignorance

Karen Traviss

It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Carolyn [Maloney] is the kind of legislator who, whether she's in the majority or the minority, whether her party is in the majority or the minority, she doesn't take "No" for an answer, and she frequently calls women leaders and say, "I think we should do this. This is really necessary for women." And so she hangs in there and gets bills passed when people think it's not possible.

Eleanor Smeal

[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.

L. Neil Smith

Everyone wants to learn the same thing from painful situations: how to avoid repeating them.

Gary Zukav

Then, if action is possible or necessary, you take action or rather right action happens through you. Right action is action that is appropriate to the whole. When the action is accomplished, the alert, spacious stillness remains.

Eckhart Tolle

Yesterday is history, but if you don't learn from your past mistakes you will continue to make the same mistakes. Tomorrow isn't a mystery. Go after your goals with every breathe you take, and the future is far from being a mystery. Today isn't a gift. You have to earn it every day.

Steve Kaufman

... I don't think anybody should avoid mistakes. If it is within their nature to make certain mistakes, I think they should make them, make the mistakes and find out what the cost of the mistake is, rather than to constantly keep avoiding it, and never really knowing exactly what the experience of it is, what the cost of it is, you know, and all the other facets of the mistake. I don't think that mistakes are that bad. I think that they should try and not do destructive things, but I don't think that a mistake is that serious a thing that one should be told what to do to avoid it.

Anne Bancroft

You can't learn how to be elegant; you can only learn how to avoid mistakes. The rest is instinct. Elegance is about the way you cross your legs, not the label or the newest clothes from the latest collection.

Carine Roitfeld

History informs us of past mistakes from which we can learn without repeating them. It also inspires us and gives confidence and hope bred of victories already won.