The Senate of the Late Personalities is made up of 81 historical personalities and is elected every two years from its one-third. In the first step, their selection is individual and in the second step, there is a unification from all members. The composition is then given by those who occur most often.
The Senate of Late Personalities is an instrument:
- how to find the composition of the ideal senate of humanity (usually by statesmen, businessmen, scientists, inventors, journalists, economists, lawyers, soldiers, dissidents, philosophers or artists);
- how to be able to simulate a discussion on a selected topic not only by contemporaries and then take into account the result;
- how to present a transparent reflection of the personalities and authorities that are taken into account by the citizen to define the anchorage in the political spectrum.
81-member Senate:
1) Oliver Wendell Holmes - "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."
2) Ayn Rand – "Every man has to judge himself and be judged only by his own actions and character.“
3) Thomas Jefferson - "All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
4) Lee Kuan Yew - "I have always thought that humanity was animal-like. The Confucian theory was man could be improved, but I'm not sure he can be. He can be trained; he can be disciplined."
5) Carl Sagan - “If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”
6) Ronald Wilson Reagan - "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction."
7) Karel Havlíček Borovský - "Something else is office and something completely different of bureaucracy, office must be in every well-run state, bureaucracy is everyone's misfortune."
8) Oliver Cromwell - "He who stops being better stops being good.”
9) Frédéric Bastiat - "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."
10) Džaláleddín Balchí Rúmí - "I belong to no religion. My religion is love. Every heart is my temple."
11) Vince Lombardi - "Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile."
12) Pim Fortuyn - "Muslims have a very bad attitude to homosexuality, they're very intolerant… And women. For them women are second class citizens. What we are witnessing now is a clash of civilisations, not just between states but within them.“
13) Karl Raimund Popper – „For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder. This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes.“
14) Confucius - "The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home."
15) Otto Wichterle - "The president of the Soviet Academy, Keldysh, said that this was the first place where, instead of the prescribed lies, they showed him the truth. He then asked me to send information and recommendations to Moscow, which I then did and summarized in an eight-page letter that root cause is in Soviet totalitarian and police regime."
16) Steve Jobs - "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
17) Ibn Khaldun - "Blindly following ancient customs and traditions doesn't mean that the dead are alive, but that the living are dead."
18) Bob Marley - "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds."
19) Nikola Tesla - "The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine."
20) Tomáš Baťa - "Mental hardwork is problem solving, decision making, creative ingenuity and conceptual realization, not intellectual contemplation in the Slavia Café."
21) František Palacký - “Patriotism is the most natural middle class everywhere, which leads man from animal selfishness to general love for people and to humanity in general."
22) Jean-Jacques Rousseau – “I prefer liberty with danger than peace with slavery.“
23) Oriana Fallaci - "My soldier weapon is the weapon of truth."
24) James Madison - "A man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them."
25) Mustafa Kemal Atatürk - "I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science."
26) Ho Chi Minh - "Nothing is more precious than independence and liberty."
27) Richard Buckminster Fuller - "God is a verb, not a noun."
28) Karel Kryl - "Politicians are not trusted, politicians are controlled. You can believe in God, in nature, in beauty, in thought. You can´t believe in politicians, and whoever believes in them is an idiot!"
29) Martin Luther King - "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend."
30) Otto von Bismarck – “The first generation earns the money, the second manages the wealth, the third studies history of art, and the fourth degenerates completely.“
31) Liu Xiaobo - "Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To strangle freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, stifle humanity, and suppress truth."
32) Sun Tzu - "The greatest victory is that which requires no battle."
33) Eleanor Roosevelt - "What you don't do can be a destructive force."
34) Louis Dembitz Brandeis - "The most important political office is that of the private citizen.“
35) Jan Hus - "Seek the truth, hear the truth, learn the truth, love the truth, speak the truth, hold on to the truth, defend the truth until death."
36) Theodore Roosevelt – “The pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrongdoer.“
37) Martha Gellhorn - "Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.“
38) Henry Ford – “There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.“
39) Jan Patočka – “Moral maturity, civil liberties and responsibility simply cannot grow organically from our worldly interests. These in themselves lead only to consumption, and ultimately to war. It is necessary to shake and to break the cycle of everyday life. Again, the goal is not struggle, but freedom and responsibility, moral maturity.“
40) Joseph Pulitzer – “Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together.“
41) Carl von Clausewitz - "War is merely the continuation of politics with other means."
42) Charles de Gaulle – “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.“
43) Enoch Powell - "The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.“
44) Leonardo da Vinci - “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.“
45) Konrad Adenauer - "In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity.“
46) Václav Havel - “I'm in power, so I'm permanently suspicious to myself.“
47) Edmund Burke - "Society is a partnership of the dead, the living and the unborn."
48) Solomon – “Your own soul is nourished when you are kind; it is destroyed when you are cruel.“
49) Alexis de Tocqueville - „The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.“
50) Isaac Newton - “We build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
51) Albert Einstein – “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."
52) Miyamoto Musashi – “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie.“
53) Margaret Mead - "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."
54) George Orwell – “If you hate violence and don't believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education.“
55) Lao Tzu – “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
56) Robert Baden-Powell – “A Scout is never taken by surprise; he knows exactly what to do when anything unexpected happens."
57) Thomas Jonathan Jackson - “The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth."
58) William F. Buckley – “I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth."
59) Hannah Arendt - “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous."
60) Niccolò Machiavelli - “Politics have no relation to morals."
61) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – “What is not started today is never finished tomorrow."
62) Winston Churchill - “There is nothing government can give you that it hasn't taken from you in the first place."
63) Alexander Hamilton - "There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.“
64) Jan Amos Komenský - “Do not believe everything that is presented to you to believe: Examine everything and check everything by yourself!“
65) Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk - “You, everyone, we each have to bear the opinion of the other. Democracy means debate.“
66) Miroslav Tyrš - "Brotherhood is not about not seeing mistakes, but blaming them in a fraternal way."
67) Sokrates - “I know that I know nothing.“
68) Marcus Tullius Cicero - "We are slaves of the law so that we may be able to be free."
69) Charles Spencer Chaplin - „We think too much and feel too little.“
70) John Adams - "There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt."
71) Karel Čapek - "The experience is a good school, but tuition is too expensive.“
72) Isabel Paterson - "The biggest pests are the people who use altruism as an alibi. What they passionately wish is to make themselves important."
73) Isaiah Berlin - "The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds."
74) Charles Darwin – “A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.“
75) Arthur Schopenhauer - "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."
76) John Locke - "There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men."
77) John Rawls - "A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you'd be willing to enter it in a random place. The fairest rules are those to which everyone would agree if they did not know how much power they would have."
78) Jan Werich – “Cowards are undoubtedly a dangerous element, but what about brave idiots.“
79) John Stuart Mill – “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.“
80) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry – “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.“
81) Julius Robert Oppenheimer - "Scientists and artists are the world's noticers. Their job is simply to notice what other people cannot.“
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