"The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man."
G.K. Chesterton (I could include many, many quotes from Chesterton, but I'll point you here instead)

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
Mark Twain

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.”
Lord Acton

“Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.”
Edsger W. Dijkstra

"A writer who says there are no truths, or that all truth is merely 'relative', is asking you not to believe him. So don't."
Roger Scruton

"Bad terminology is the enemy of good thinking."
Warren Buffett (2001 Chairmans Letter)

“Rather go to bed supperless than rise in debt.”
Ben Franklin

"Only a very shallow person does not judge by appearances."
Oscar Wilde

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."
George Orson Welles

"All of us are ignorant, if not misinformed, on vast numbers of things. What makes experts different is that they dare not admit it. That is also what makes experts dangerous."
Thomas Sowell

"If you leave a bunch of eleven year olds to their own devices, they'll usually create a Lord of the Flies world. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid."
Paul Graham (Author of "On Lisp")

"The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting, 'Heil, Spode!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?'"
P.G. Wodehouse

"I like a man who grins when he fights."
Winston Churchill

"It is by now only too obvious how dearly mankind has paid for the fact that we have all throughout the ages preferred to censure, denounce and hate others, instead of censuring, denouncing and hating ourselves. But obvious though it may be, we are even now, with the 20th century on its way out, reluctant to recognize that the universal dividing line between good and evil runs not between countries, not between nations, not between parties, not between classes, not even between good and bad men: the dividing line cuts across nations and parties, shifting constantly, yielding now to the pressure of light, now to the pressure of darkness. It divides the heart of every man, and there too it is not a ditch dug once and for all, but fluctuates with the passage of time and according to a man's behavior."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn (Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations)

"Dixon, though on the whole glad at this escape, felt at the same time that the conversation would have been appropriately rounded off by Welch's death."
Kingsly Amis (Lucky Jim)

"Freud and Marx ... undermined the whole basis of Western European civilization as no avowedly insurrectionary movement ever has or could, by promoting the notion of determinism, in the one case in morals, in the other in history, thereby relieving individual men and women of all responsibility for their personal and collective behaviour.
Malcolm Muggeridge

"Oh, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own interests; and that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interests, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one man can, consciously, act against his own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, he would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child!"
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes From the Underground)

"XML is not the answer. It is not even the question. To paraphrase Jamie Zawinski on regular expressions, "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use XML.” Now they have two problems.""
http://dirtsimple.org/

"Greek Tragedy is the tragedy of necessity; i.e., the feeling aroused in the spectator is 'What a pity it had to be this way.' Christian tragedy is the tragedy of possibility, 'What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'"
W.H. Auden

"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."
T.S. Eliot

"Today's art has given us nothing that bears the slightest resemblance to our own lives, touches our fears and cares, evokes our dreams, or gives hope in time of darkness. Today's art is no longer a part of life, no longer in the domain of the common man, no longer an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization, no longer the majestic presence in everyday life that it was in the past. It is not that the public has failed art; it is art which has failed the public."
Frederick Hart