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Cool Quotes

Ability


There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.
Robert Half

They are able because they think they are able.
Virgil

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.
Francis Bacon

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
Edward Gibbon

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability, and the fear of miscarriage, which hinders Our first attempts, is gradually dissipated as our skill advances towards certainty of success.
Samuel Johnson

Abnormal


Nothing out of the common order of nature can be long borne.
Samuel Johnson

Abortion


I will not give to a woman an instrument to procure abortion.
The Hippocratic Oath, c. 400 B. C.

Prevention of birth is a precipitation of murder. He also is a man who is about to be one.
Tertullian

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Abraham Lincoln


My fellow citizens, the President is dead, but the Government lives and God Omnipotent reigns.
James Abram Garfield, after President Lincoln's assassination.

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still.
Walt Whitman

Lincoln is one of those peculiar men who perform with admirable skill everything which they undertake.
Stephen A. Douglas

I will make a prophecy that may now sound peculiar. In fifty years, perhaps much sooner, Lincoln's name will be inscribed close to Washington's on this Republic's roll of honor.
Carl Schurz

Now he belongs to the ages.
Edwin M. Stanton, on being told of Lincoln's death

Absence


Speak no evil of an absent friend. (Non male loquare absenti amico.)
Plautus

Seldom seen, soon forgotten.
Richard Hilles

The pain without the peace of death.
Thomas Campbell

The absent are as good as dead.
Latin Proverb

The absent and the dead have no friends.
Spanish Proverb

Absence makes the heart go wander.
Author unidentified

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fire.
La Rochefoucauld

Absence is to love what wind is to fire;
It extinguishes the small, it kindles the great.

(L'absence est à l'amour ce qu'est au feu le vent;
Il éteint le petit, il allume le grand
.)

Comte de Bussy-Rabutin

Abstemiousness And Gluttony


To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.
Benjamin Franklin

Short supper; long life.
Serbian proverb

If you find honey, eat just enough —
too much of it, and you will vomit.
Proverbs 25:16

Abstinence


Abstinence is as easy to me, as temperance would be difficult.
Samuel Johnson

Abstraction


A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear, and is in the same state with him that teaches upon land the art of navigation, to whom the sea is always smooth, and the wind always prosperous.
Samuel Johnson

Abundance


Abundance kills more than hunger.
German proverb

Just as I see abundance as validation of my faith in God, the religion of Secular Fundamentalism sees shortage as validation of their faith.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Academic Freedom


A university studies politics, but it will not advocate fascism or communism. A university studies military tactics, but it will not promote war. A university studies peace, but it will not organize crusades of pacifism. It will study every question that affects human welfare, but it will not carry a banner in a crusade for anything except freedom of learning.
L. D. Coffman

Accident


Nothing under the sun is ever accidental.
G. E. Lessing

Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
Henry Brooks Adams

Accusation


If someone accuses you for something you haven't done he either has done it himself or he would do it if he were you.
Edi Rama (Attributed)

Achievement


No man has lived to much purpose unless he has built a house, begotten a son, or written a book.
Italian Proverb

Never mistake activity for achievement.
John Wooden

Accomplishing something provides the only real satisfaction in life.
Thomas Edison

Acquaintance


The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: "Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance," and I have found his words true.
Frank Swinnerton

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne?
Robert Burns

If a man is worth knowing at all, he is worth knowing well.
Alexander Smith

Acquaintance, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

A wise man knows everything; a shrewd one, everybody.
Author unidentified

Sir, I look upon every day to be lost, in which I do not make a new acquaintance.
Samuel Johnson

Acquiescence


The Japanese have a word for it. It's judo — the art of conquering by yielding. The Western equivalent of judo is, "Yes, dear."
J. P. McEvoy

Acting


On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting; ’Twas only that when he was off he was acting.
Oliver Goldsmith

Action


There are two kinds of people: those who don't do what they want to do, so they write down in a diary about what they haven't done, and those who haven't time to write about it because they're out doing it.
Richard Flournoy and Lewis R. Foster

I plow, but I do not write about plowing.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

It seems to me that man is made to act rather than to know: the principles of things escape our most persevering researches.
Frederick The Great

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.
Benjamin Disraeli

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of moral crisis, do nothing.
Dante Alighieri

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.
Edward Gibbon

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt

"He means well" is useless unless he does well.
Plautus

The inactivity of a conqueror betrays the loss of strength and blood.
Edward Gibbon

No matter how big and tough a problem may be, get rid of confusion by taking one little step toward solution. Do something.
George F. Nordenholt

Colonel Brighton: Look, sir, we can't just do nothing.
General Allenby: Why not? It's usually best.
David Lean

No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
Edmund Burke

This world, where much is to be done and little to be known.
Samuel Johnson

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go in.
Napoleon Bonaparte

If you're not making mistakes, then you're not doing anything. I'm positive that a doer makes mistakes.
John Wooden

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.
Calvin Coolidge

I never worry about action, but only about inaction.
Winston Churchill

[They] rate themselves by the goodness of their opinions, and forget how much more easily men may shew their virtue in their talk than in their actions.
Samuel Johnson

I prefer the talents of action — of war — of the senate — or even of science — to all the speculations of those mere dreamers of another existence.
Lord Byron

The end of man is an action and not a thought, though it were the noblest.
Thomas Carlyle

And whoever he be that has but little in his power, should be in haste to do that little, lest he be confounded with him that can do nothing.
Samuel Johnson

Man can only form a just estimate of his own actions, by making his power the test of his performance, by comparing what he does with what he can do.
Samuel Johnson

We must beat the iron while it is hot, but we may polish it at leisure.
John Dryden

Actor


Actors are a nuisance in the earth, the very offal of society.
Timothy Dwight

[Studio official's assessment of Fred Astaire:] Can't act. Slightly bald. Also dances.
Author unidentified

Actress


The life of youth and beauty is too short for the bringing an actress to perfection.
Colley Cibber

Adam


In the Garden of Eden sat Adam,
Massaging the bust of his madam,
He chuckled with mirth,
For he knew that on earth,
There were only two boobs and he had 'em.
Author unidentified

What could Adam have done to God that made Him put Eve in the garden?
Polish Proverb

The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation.
Mark Twain

Addiction


It's like I have a shotgun in my mouth, and I've got my finger on the trigger, and I like the taste of the gun metal.
Robert Downey Jr.

Adjective


As to the adjective, when in doubt strike it out.
Mark Twain

The adjective is the enemy of the noun.
Author unidentified

Admiration


Admiration is a very short-lived passion, that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.
Joseph Addison

Admiration, n. Our polite recognition of another's resemblance to ourselves.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Things not understood are admired.
Thomas Fuller

Admonition


Admonish your friends in private; praise them in public.
Publilius Syrus

Adult


I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted — stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container.
Bill Bryson

Adulteress


For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword.
Proverbs 5:3-4

All at once he followed her [the adulteress] like an ox going to the slaughter
Proverbs 7:22

Adultery


If a married woman shall be caught lying with another man, both shall be bound and thrown into the river.
The Code of the Hammurabi

But a man who commits adultery lacks judgment;
whoever does so destroys himself.
Proverbs 6:32

Between a man and his wife a husband's infidelity is nothing. The man imposes no bastards on his wife.
Samuel Johnson

A wanton and lascivious eye
Betrays the heart's adultery.
Robert Herrick

Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it.
Arthur Hugh Clough

That which constitutes adultery is not the hour that she accords to her lover: it is the night that she afterward passes in the arms of her husband.
George Sand

Advantage


It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.
Charlie Munger

Adventure


We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!
J. R. R. Tolkien

Adverb


The adverb is the enemy of the verb.
Author unidentified

Adversity


Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.

(Popular variation: Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.)

Robert G. Ingersoll

In time of prosperity friends will be plenty;
In time of adversity not one in twenty.
James Howell

In prosperity, caution; in adversity, patience.
Dutch Proverb

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Mark Twain

While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior.
Henry C. Link

Adversity is the state in which man mostly easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free of admirers then.
John Wooden

You can't adjust the winds, but you can adjust your sails.
Author unidentified

Prosperity getteth friends, but adversity trieth them.
Nicholas Ling

In the adversity of our best friends we often find something that is not wholly displeasing to us.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Adversity makes a man wise, not rich.
John Ray

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle

Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.
Publilius

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath laboured more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
Francis Bacon

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
Francis Bacon

Advertisement


Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.
Stephen Leacock

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark: you know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
Edgar Watson Howe

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Thomas Jefferson

I always hated those testimonials on TV … [where the actress says,] "If I can do it, you can do it." How the hell does she know what I can and cannot do?
Stephen Furst

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
Norman Douglas

Advice


When we ask advice, we are usually looking for an accomplice.
Marquis de Lagrange

Whatever your advice, make it brief.
Horace

Advice is least heeded when most needed.
English Proverb

You may give him good advice, but who can give him wit to take it?
Thomas Fuller

The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde

Beware the advice of a poor man.
Spanish Proverb

Never advise anyone to go to war or to marry.
Spanish Proverb

Years ago, my mother used to say to me, "In this world, Elwood, you must be be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.
Elwood P. Dowde (James Stewart), "Harvey"

Ask advice only of your equals.
Danish Proverb

Many receive advice, few profit by it.
Publilius Syrus

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

[But] if the royal ear [of Theodoric] was open to the voice of truth, a saint and a philosopher are not always to be found at the ear of kings.
Edward Gibbon

If you've ever taken advice from a cartoonist, there's a good chance it didn't end well.
Scott Adams

It is better to advise than upbraid, for the one corrects the erring; the other only convicts them.
Epicetus

How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice, when they will not so much as take warning?
Jonathan Swift

Advice is seldom welcome; and those who want it the most always like it the least.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

We ask advice but mean approbation.
C. C. Colton

We may give advice but we cannot give conduct.
Benjamin Franklin

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthen'd, sage advices,
The husband frae the wife despises!

(Ah, gentle ladies, it makes me cry,
To think how many counsels sweet,
How much long and wise advice
The husband from the wife despises!)

Robert Burns

I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.
Samuel Johnson

Vanity is so frequently the apparent motive of advice, that we, for the most part, summon our powers to oppose it without any very accurate inquiry whether it is right. It is sufficient that another is growing great in his own eyes at our expense, and assumes authority over us without our permission; for many would contentedly suffer the consequences of their own mistakes, rather than the insolence of him who triumphs as their deliverer.
Samuel Johnson

In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge.
Lord Chesterfield

Fortunately I have never learned to take the good advice I give myself nor the counsel of my fears.
Ernest Hemingway

Affectation


The qualities we have do not make us so ridiculous as those we affect to have.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

And I cannot always withhold some expression of anger, like Sir Hugh in the comedy, when I happen to find that a woman has a beard.
Samuel Johnson

[For] it is not folly but pride, not errour but deceit, which the world means to persecute, when it raises the full cry of nature to hunt down affectation.
Samuel Johnson

The hatred which dissimulation always draws upon itself, is so great, that if I did not know how much cunning differs from wisdom, I should wonder that any men have so little knowledge of their own interest, as to aspire to wear a mask for life.
Samuel Johnson

Hypocrisy is the necessary burthen of villany, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop. Contempt is the proper punishment of affectation, and detestation the just consequence of hypocrisy.
Samuel Johnson

For, if the pinnacles of fame be at best slippery, how unsteady must his footing be who stands upon pinnacles without foundation!
Samuel Johnson

Affectation may possibly succeed for a time, and a man may, by great attention, persuade others, that he really has the qualities which he presumes to boast; but the hour will come when he should exert them, and then whatever he enjoyed in praise, he must suffer in reproach.
Samuel Johnson

Affection


Affection is a coal that must be cooled;
Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire.
William Shakespeare

I could have been happy with a servant girl had she only in sincerity of heart responded to my affection.
S. T. Coleridge

You can have true affection for only a few things in your life, and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection.
Ernest Hemingway

Affliction


Affliction may one day smile again; and till then, sit thee down, sorrow!
Shakespeare

Affluence


[The] bulk of mankind must owe their affluence to small and gradual profits, below which their expense must be resolutely reduced.
Samuel Johnson

After Life


Since the common events of the present life happen alike to the good and bad, it follows from the justice of the Supreme Being, that there must be another state of existence, in which a just retribution shall be made, and every man shall be happy and miserable according to his works.
Samuel Johnson

Age


One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell that would tell anything.
Oscar Wilde

I'm very pleased with each advancing year. It stems back to when I was forty. I was a bit upset about reaching that milestone, but an older friend consoled me. 'Don't complain about growing old — many, many people do not have that privilege.'
Earl Warren

Old age is not so bad when you consider the alternatives.
Maurice Chevalier

As for me, except for an occasional heart attack, I feel as young as I ever did.
Robert Benchley

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
Woody Allen

Nothing so dates a man as decrying the younger generation.
Adlai Stevenson

There are three categories of age: youth, middle age, and "Gee, you're looking well."
Dean Rusk

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.
Benjamin Disraeli

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Aggression


Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed.
Phaedrus

Agnostic


In every unbeliever's heart there is an uneasy feeling that, after all, he may awake after death and find himself immortal. This is his punishment for his unbelief. This is the agnostic's Hell.
H. L. Mencken

Agnosticism


I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.
Clarence Darrow

Agreeable


My idea of an agreeable person is a person who agrees with me.
Benjamin Disraeli

Alcohol


All I can say is that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.
Winston Churchill

To alcohol! The cause of — and solution to — all of life's problems.
The Simpsons

Alcohol is the prince of liquids, and carries the palate to its highest pitch of exaltation.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Alexander Hamilton


Hamilton was honest as a man, but, as a politician, believed in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.
Thomas Jefferson

Alice Roosevelt Longworth


I can do one of two things. I can be president of the United States or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.
Theodore Roosevelt

Alliance


Close alliances with despots are never safe for free states.
Demosthenes

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations — entangling alliances with none.
Thomas Jefferson

The nature of the English government forbids, of itself, reliance on her engagements; and it is well known she has been the least faithful to her alliances of any nation of Europe.
Thomas Jefferson

Any alliance whose purpose is not the intention to wage war is senseless and useless
Adolph Hitler

Alliteration


Alliteration tickles the ear, and is a very popular form of language among savages.
Benjamin Disraeli

Alms


I must be dunned for alms, and do not scramble over hedges and ditches in searching for opportunities of flinging away my money on good works.
Horace Walpole

I do not give alms: I am not poor enough for that.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Alone


It is better to be alone than in ill company.
George Pettie

A man is never alone, not only because he is with himself and his own thoughts, but because he is with the Devil, who ever consorts with our solitude.
Thomas Browne

I was never less alone than while by myself.
Edward Gibbon

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.
P. G. Hamerton

A man alone is either a god or a devil. (Homo solus aut deus, aut daemon.)
Latin Proverb

Alone the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
Emily Carr

Altruism


It is the freeman who must win freedom for the slave; it is the wise man who must think for the fool; it is the happy who must serve the unhappy.
Jean Paul Richter

Nobody does good to men with impunity.
Auguste Rodin

Ambassador


A sovereign should always regard an ambassador as a spy.
The Hitopadesa

Ambassadors are the eyes and ears of the state.
Francesco Guicciardini

[An ambassador is] a politician who is given a job abroad in order to get him out of the country.
Author unidentified

Ambition


Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind,
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
John Webster

It seems that ambition makes most people wish to be loved rather than to love others.
Aristotle

Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.
Aesop

I would to God there were more ambition in the country … ambition of that laudable kind, to excel.
John Adams

Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult.
Samuel Johnson

Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.
Quintilian

The same ambition can destroy or save,
And makes a patriot as it makes a knave.
Alexander Pope

Where ambition ends happiness begins.
Hungarian proverb

Ambition is the rankest poison to the church, when it possesses preachers. It is a consuming fire.
Martin Luther

His demands were, indeed, very often such as virtue could not easily consent to gratify; but virtue is not to be consulted when men are to raise their fortunes by the favour of the great.
Samuel Johnson

Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition:
By that sin fell the angels.
Shakespeare

Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious.
John Locke

I have never yet exerted ambition in rising in the state. But sure I am, no man has made his way better to the best company.
James Boswell

To be admired must be the constant aim of ambition.
Samuel Johnson

America


In England I would rather be a man, a horse, a dog, or a woman, in that order. In America I think the order would be reversed.
Bruce Gould

I regard England as my wife and America as my mistress.
Cedric Hardwicke

The European traveler in America — at least if I may judge by myself — is struck by two peculiarities: first, the extreme similarity of outlook in all parts of the United States (except the Old South), and secondly, the passionate desire of each locality to prove that it is peculiar and different from every other. The second of these is, of course, caused by the first.
Bertrand Russell

Because I really want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.
Unidentified Indian immigrant when asked why he wants to come to America

The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced.
Frank Zappa

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.
Oscar Wilde

America is not what's wrong with the world.
Donald Rumsfeld

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
Alexis de Tocqueville (Attributed)

I'll start to worry about America's standing in the world when people from all corners of the earth cease to want to come here.
Attributed to Paul Johnson

America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.
Bernard Lewis

The Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Winston Churchill (Attributed)

We have learned one lesson in the last half-century: the well-being of the world depends, above all, on the sensible pursuit of common aims by the United States and the free European peoples. That the Japanese are rapidly transforming this relationship into a triangular one goes without saying. But the U.S.-European axis remains the fulcrum of stability, and the Europeans know it: it is the one fixed point in their geopolitics. For this reason they are remarkably dependent on the workings of the American system, and the character of the man it places in the White House.
Paul Johnson

I wonder if the word "American" will one day have the same connotation as the word "byzantine."
Author unidentified

America is now a land that rewards failure — at the personal, corporate, and state level.
Mark Steyn

The later chapters of "The Decline and Fall of the United States" will make interesting reading.
Charles C. W. Cooke

I want no criticism of America at my table. The Americans criticize themselves more than enough.
Winston Churchill

Europe is the product of history. America is the product of philosophy.
Margaret Thatcher (paraphrased)

Anyone, in any walk of life, who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition.
George S. Patton, Jr.

America will never be an ordinary country; it's always going to be extraordinary.
Paul Johnson

Anyone who travels to every part of the United States, as I do, becomes aware that the notion of America oppressing humanity is absurd. To a great extent, America is humanity.
Paul Johnson

In the 1770s, surveying the immensity and diversity of London, Dr. Samuel Johnson laid down: "Sir, a man who is tired of London is tired of life." The saying could be rephrased today. A man who hates America hates humanity.
Paul Johnson

In America the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed of.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
Samuel Johnson

Young man, there is America — which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
Edmund Burke

Not a place upon earth might be so happy as America. Her situation is remote from all the wrangling world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them.
Thomas Paine

Nothing contributes more to peace of soul than having no opinion at all.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I do not think the Red Indians had any right to say, "The American Continent belongs to us and we are not going to have any of these European settlers coming in here." They had not the right, nor had they the power.
Winston Churchill

[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
John Quincy Adams

Shall I tell you what this collision [of free and slave labor] means? … It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become entirely a slave-holding nation or entirely a free-labor nation.
William Henry Seward

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement. The idea of novelty is there indissolubly connected with the idea of amelioration.
Alexis de Tocqueville

America And Russia


The American’s principal means of action is liberty; the Russian’s, servitude. Their points of departure are different, their ways diverse. Yet each seems called by a secret design of Providence some day to sway the destinies of half the globe.
Alexis de Tocqueville

American


No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
H. L. Mencken

The American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goosesteppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.
H. L. Mencken

The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English.
H. L. Mencken

Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't.
Jonah Goldberg

We [Americans] are fat, overgrown lab rats, and we get too many reward pellets for too little effort.
Graeme Wood

There are no people in the world who are so slow to develop hostile feelings against a foreign country as the Americans and there are no people who once estranged, are more difficult to win back.
Winston Churchill

I am not a Virginian but an American.
Patrick Henry

They [Americans] are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.
Samuel Johnson

I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
Samuel Johnson

See what it is to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or scholars. They have in the course of 20 years acquired a distinct national character for low, lying knavery.
Robert Southey

I have traveled more than four thousand miles about this country; and I never met one single insolent or rude … American.
Thomas Holme

[An American is] an Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism.
Bayard Taylor

The American is nomadic in religion, in ideas, in morals.
James Russell Lowell

God looks after drunks, children, and Americans.
Author unidentified

A European says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with me? An American says: I can't understand this, what's wrong with him [the author]?
Terry Pratchett

The American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.
H. L. Mencken

Oppressive laws do not destroy minorities; they simply make bootleggers.
H. L. Mencken

What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country … Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur

American Fanaticism


Sometimes it [the witch-hunt] is launched from one end of the ideological spectrum, sometimes from the other, but its characteristics remain the same: fanaticism, self-righteousness, abuse of the legal forms, contempt for justice.
Paul Johnson

American Government


What was once a constitutional federal republic is now converted, in reality, into one as absolute as that of the autocrat of Russia, and as despotic in its tendency as any absolute government that ever existed.
John C. Calhoun

American Language


It is remarkable how very debased the language has become in a short period in America.
Frederick Marryat

When I speak my native tongue in its utmost purity in England, and Englishman can't understand me at all.
Mark Twain

Americas


The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveler from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.
Horace Walpole

Ammianus Marcellinus


Ammianus is so eloquent, that he writes nonsense.
Edward Gibbon

Amusement


I am a great friend to public amusements; for they keep people from vice.
Samuel Johnson

Anarchist


The following classes of aliens shall be excluded from admission into the United States: … anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the government of the United States, or of all government, or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials.
Act of Congress, Feb. 20, 1907

We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules.
Alan Bennett

Ancestor


Life is surely given us for higher purposes than to gather what our ancestors have wisely thrown away, and to learn what is of no value, but because it has been forgotten.
Samuel Johnson

Ancestry


I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be.
Abraham Lincoln

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.
Van Wyck Brooks

It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors.
Plutarch

He who boasts of his descent praises another.
Seneca

A mule always boasts that its ancestors were horses.
German Proverb

Speak of the moderns without contempt and of the ancients without idolatry; judge them all by their merits and not by their age.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Edmund Burke

The Queen is not amused.
Queen Victoria

Andrew Jackson


If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood [from the battle of New Orleans] would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency.
Mark Twain

I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place.
Thomas Jefferson

Where is there a chief magistrate of whom so much evil has been predicted, and from whom so much good has come?
Thomas H. Benton, of Andrew Jackson

Angel


Who does the best his circumstances allows
Does well, acts nobly; angels could do no more.
Edward Young

Anger


The best cure for anger is delay.
Seneca

How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Marcus Aurelius

Whate'er's begun in anger ends in shame.
Benjamin Franklin

When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred.
Thomas Jefferson

Anger is a vulgar passion directed to vulgar ends, and it always sinks to the level of its object.
Ernst Von Feuchtersleben

The size of a man can be measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry.
J. Kenfield Morley

He who is slow to anger is longer getting over it.
Hungarian Proverb

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
Henry Ward Beecher

An angry man [differs] from a madman only in the shorter time which his passion [endures].
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

"In your anger do not sin": Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.
Ephesians 4:26,27

Anger so clouds the mind, that it cannot perceive the truth.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

We are all crazy when we are angry.
Philemon

Women are like wasps in their anger.
Nicholas Breton

The angry man never wanted woe.
Thomas Draxe

Anger begins with folly, and ends with repentance.
H. G. Bohn

The best answer to anger is silence.
German Proverb

He who restrains his anger overcomes his greatest enemy.
Hungarian Proverb

Those sudden bursts of rage generally break out upon small occasions; for life, unhappy as it is, cannot supply great evils as frequently as the man of fire thinks it fit to be enraged
Samuel Johnson

Whoever converses with him (the man prone to anger), lives with the suspicion and solicitude of a man that plays with a tame tiger, always under a necessity of watching the moment in which the capricious savage shall begin to growl.
Samuel Johnson

This is the round of a passionate man's life; he contracts debts when he is furious, which his virtue, if he has virtue, obliges him to discharge at the return of reason. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation.
Samuel Johnson

I am angry nearly every day of my life … but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so.
Louisa May Alcott

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
Francis Bacon

Anger is never without an Argument, but seldom with a good one. (Alternative version: Anger is never without a reason, but seldom with a good one.)
George Savile

I was angry with my friend;
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
William Blake

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
George Eliot

Anglo-Saxon


The great qualities of the Anglo-Saxon race are industry, intelligence, and self-confidence.
Anthony Trollope

The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.
H. W. Beecher

Animal


I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.
Winston Churchill

A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.
Josh Billings

The pig, if I am not mistaken,
Supplies us sausage, ham, and bacon.
Let others say his heart is big —
I call it stupid of the pig.
Ogden Nash

If you have no trouble, buy a goat.
Persian Proverb

Our toil is lessened, and our wealth is increased, by our dominion over the useful animals.
Edward Gibbon

There be beasts that, at a year old, observe more, and pursue that which is for their good more prudently, than a child can do at ten.
Thomas Hobbes

The lower animals have not the high advantages which we have, but they have some which we lack. They know nothing of our hopes, but they also know nothing of our fears; they are subject to death as we are, but they are not aware of it; most of them are better able to take care of themselves than we are, and they make a less evil use of their passions.
C. L. de Montesquieu

Animals are such agreeable friends — they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot

We have no reason to believe that other creatures have higher faculties, or more extensive capacities, than the preservation of themselves, or their species, requires; they seem always to be fully employed, or to be completely at ease without employment, to feel few intellectual miseries or pleasures, and to have no exuberance of understanding to lay out upon curiosity or caprice, but to have their minds exactly adapted to their bodies, with few other ideas than such as corporal pain or pleasure impresses upon them.
Samuel Johnson

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.
Immanuel Kant

Answer


No answer is also an answer.
German Proverb

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
Proverbs 15:1

Ant


Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.
Proverbs 6:6-8

As a thinker and a planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized.
Mark Twain

Antipathy


Violent antipathies are always suspicious, and betray a secret affinity.
William Hazlitt

Antiquity


Let others praise ancient times; I am glad that I was born in these.
Ovid

Damn the age; I will write for antiquity.
Attributed to Charles Lamb

Antisocial


The antisocial or asocial man is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle

Anxiety


To live in anguish is death itself; anxiety defeats and destroys man.
The Madness of Tristan

You know what is before you. The whips and scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties, and weight of Empire.
Abigail Adams

Aphorism


It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men in whole books — what other men do not say in whole books.
F. W. Nietzsche

But, perhaps, the excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some obvious and useful truth in few words.
Samuel Johnson

Apology


Never make a defence or apology before you be accused.
Charles I

Apostasy


If I am asked, Shall I utter the formula of Islam or submit to death? I answer, Utter the formula and live.
Maimonides

Appearance


All is not gold that shines like gold. (Non teneas aurum totum quod splendet ut aurum.)
Other translations:
  1. Everything that glitters is not gold.
  2. Do not hold as gold all that shines as gold.
Alanus De Insulis

Three-tenths of a good appearance are due to nature; seven-tenths to dress.
Chinese Proverb

A good exterior is a silent recommendation.
Publilius Syrus

Appearances are very deceitful.
Tobias Smollett

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton

Do not praise individuals for their good looks, or loathe anyone because of appearance alone.
Ecclesiasticus 11:2

Beware, as long as you live, of judging people by appearances.
Jean de La Fontaine

Keep up appearances; there lies the test;
The world will give thee credit for the rest.
Outward be fair, however foul within;
Sin if thou wilt, but then in secret sin.
Charles Churchill

Appeasement


I … smell the stench of appeasement in the air.
Margaret Thatcher

I think that if I give him [Stalin] everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time.
Neville Chamberlain

We seem to be very near the bleak choice between war and shame. My feeling is that we shall choose shame and then have war thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at present.
Winston Churchill

The utmost he [Neville Chamberlain] has been able to gain for Czechoslovakia and in the matters which were in dispute has been that the German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, has been content to have them served to him course by course.
Winston Churchill

Appetite


All man's efforts are for his mouth, yet his appetite is never satisfied.
Ecclesiastes 6:7

Subdue your appetites, and you've conquered human nature.
Charles Dickens

Appetite comes with eating … but the thirst goes away with drinking.
François Rabelais

Let appetite obey reason.
Cicero

Leave with an appetite.
William Bullein

If thou rise with an appetite thou art sure never to sit down without one.
William Penn

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.
Joseph Addison

Applause


When most the world applauds you, most beware:
'Tis often less a blessing than a snare.
Edward Young

Do not trust to the cheering, for those very persons would shout as much if you and I were going to be hanged.
Oliver Cromwell

When you applaud me at the start [of my speech], that's faith; midway through, that's hope. But, ah, my dear friends, if you applaud me at the end, that will be charity!
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Arab


Better the oppression of Turks than the justice of Arabs.
Arab Proverb

The life of a wandering Arab [in the time of Gibbon] is a life of danger and distress; and though sometimes, by rapine or exchange, he may appropriate the fruits of industry, a private citizen in Europe is in the possession of more solid and pleasing luxury than the proudest emir, who marches in the field at the head of ten thousand horse.
Edward Gibbon

[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.
Edward Gibbon

[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
Edward Gibbon

But [the Arabs'] friendship was venal, their faith inconstant, their enmity capricious: it was an easier task to excite than to disarm these roving barbarians; and, in the familiar intercourse of war, they learned to see, and to despise, the splendid weakness both of Rome and of Persia.
Edward Gibbon

The character of Hatem is the perfect model of Arabian virtue: he was brave and liberal, an eloquent poet, and a successful robber.
Edward Gibbon

Arabs would have sat in the dark forever had not the Zionist engineers harnessed the Jordan river for electrification. Now they swarm into Palestine in seeking the light.
Winston Churchill

Arabic


He was swearing audibly, and when he found that the infirmities of the English tongue hemmed in his rage, he sought consolation in Arabic, which is expressly designed for the use of the afflicted.
Rudyard Kipling

Archbishop


Scanavius relates that he knew an archbishop who was so old that he could remember a time when he did not deserve hanging.
Ambrose Bierce

Architect


Architect, n. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The fate of the architect is the strangest of all. How often he expends his whole soul, his whole heart and passion, to produce buildings into which he himself may never enter.
J. W. Goethe

Architecture


I have found a paper of mine in which I call architecture frozen music [erstarrte Musik]. Really there is something in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the effect of music.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Arctic


This gloomy region [the Arctic], where the year is divided into one day and one night, lies entirely outside the stream of history.
W. Winwood Reade

Arguing


Be calm in arguing: for fierceness makes
Error a fault, and truth discourtesy.
George Herbert

Argument


When we wish to reprove with profit, and show another that he is mistaken, we must observe on what side he looks at the thing, for it is usually true on that side, and to admit to him that truth, but to discover to him the side whereon it is false. He is pleased with this, for he perceives that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to look on all sides.
Blaise Pascal

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
Caron de Beaumarchais

To attempt to argue any great question upon facts only is absurd; you cannot state any fact before a mixed audience which an opponent as clever as yourself cannot with ease twist towards another bearing, or at least meet by a contrary fact, as it is called.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is no greater mistake that the hasty conclusion that opinions are worthless because they are badly argued.
T. H. Huxley

You cannot argue with someone who denies the first principles. (Contra negantem principia non est disputandum.)
Auctoritates Aristotelis

Aristocracy


I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
Thomas Jefferson

Armenian


If you can make a good bargain with an Armenian you can make a good bargain with the Devil.
Persian Proverb

Arms


The principal foundations of all states are good laws and good arms; and there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle

I do not wish to see guns in the hands of all the world, for there are other ferae naturae besides hares and partridges.
Horace Walpole

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment II

Arms are the props of peace. (Arma pacis fulcra.)
Latin Proverb

Army


An army of stags led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a stag.
Attributed to Chabrias

That's what an army is — a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.
Mark Twain

A large army is always disorderly.
Euripides

Walled towns, stored arsenals and armories, goodly races of horse, chariots of war, elephants, ordinance, artillery, and the like; all this is but a sheep in lion's skin except the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike.
Francis Bacon

The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took care to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier, and oblige him to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was reared. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.
Thomas Jefferson

The army has always been the basis of power, and it is so today. Power is always in the hands of those who command it.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

It may be said, therefore, that the military opinion of the world is opposed to those people who cry 'Democratize the army!' and it must be remembered that an army is not a field upon which persons with Utopian ideas may exercise their political theories, but a weapon for the defence of the State.
Winston Churchill

Arrogance


[Their] minds were not yet humbled to their condition.
Edward Gibbon

It has been long observed, that drollery and ridicule is the most easy kind of wit: let it be added that contempt and arrogance is the easiest philosophy.
Samuel Johnson

Arrow


I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art


Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.
Somerset Maugham

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.
Hippocrates

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.
Dante Alighieri

You must treat a work of art like a great man: stand before it and wait patiently till it deigns to speak.
Arthur Schopenhauer

No one can explain how the notes of a Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce their essential effects. If you do not feel it, no one can by reasoning make you feel it.
John Ruskin

I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like.
American Proverb

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.
Edith Wharton

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
G. K. Chesterton

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.
Orson Welles

I don't know what art is, but I do know what it isn't. And it isn't someone walking around with a salmon over his shoulder, or embroidering the name of everyone they have slept with on the inside of a tent.
Brian Sewell

The photographer is like the cod which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
George Bernard Shaw

I always ask the sitter if they want truth or flattery. They always ask for truth, and I always give them flattery.
Ruskin Spear

Yes — one does like to make one's mummy just as nice as possible!
James McNeill Whistler

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.
Oscar Wilde

If a scientist were to cut his ear off, no one would take it as evidence of a heightened sensibility.
Peter Medawar

The joy of conceptual art is that the description is everything. Oh yes, there is real artistry at work here. It just isn't on the walls but in the catalogue descriptions.
Benet Brandreth

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
Ludwig van Beethoven

The period in which any given people reach their highest power in art is precisely that in which they appear to sign the warrant of their own ruin.
John Ruskin

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art.
Mark Twain

It is the treating of the commonplace with the feeling of the sublime that gives to art its true power.
Jean-Francois Millet

The struggle against a purpose in art is always a struggle against the moral tendency in art — against its subordination to morality. L'art pour l'art means, Let morality go to the Devil.
F. W. Nietzsche

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser

There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and … there is more beauty in the works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.
Joseph Addison

All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust outlasts the throne, —
The Coin, Tiberius.
Henry Austin Dobson

Artery


A man is as old as his arteries.
Thomas Sydenham

Artist


The gods that first taught artists their craft laid a great curse on mankind.
Antiphanes

Artists are on the average less happy than men of science.
Bertrand Russell

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost — by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.
E. W. Emerson

The great artist is the simplifier.
H. F. Amiel

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
George Bernard Shaw

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man — that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense — has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
H. L. Mencken

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.
Cyril Connolly

That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward.
Ernest Hemingway

Asceticism


There is no virtue in penance and fasting which waste the body; they are only fanatical and monkish.
Immanuel Kant

A dominant religion is never ascetic.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James

Ash


I am ashes where once I was fire.
Lord Byron

Asia


Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.
Rudyard Kipling

Asking


He that asketh faintly beggeth a denial.
Thomas Fuller

The man who is afraid of asking is ashamed of learning.
Danish Proverb

Aspiration


Men would be angels, angels would be gods.
Alexander Pope

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's Heaven for?
Robert Browning

The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life:
Try to be Shakespeare, leave the rest to fate.
Robert Browning

Hitch your wagon to a star.
R. W. Emerson

If you aspire to the highest place it is no disgrace to stop at the second, or even the third.
Cicero

Assassination


Assassination is the last resource of cowards.
Edward Gibbon

Assembly


The more numerous an assembly may be, of whatever characters composed, the greater is known to be the ascendancy of passion over reason.
Alexander Hamilton

Assimilation


When you are at Rome live in the Roman style; when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere.
Saint Ambrose

Association


I am always longing to be with men more excellent than myself.
Charles Lamb

When a dove begins to associate with crows its feathers remain white but its heart grows black.
German Proverb

Astrology


[Astrology] is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and teachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence.
William Shakespeare

I don't believe in astrology; I'm a Sagittarius and we're sceptical.
Arthur C. Clarke

Astronomy


[The] sublime science of astronomy … elevates the mind of man to disdain his diminutive planet and momentary existence.
Edward Gibbon

Atheism


A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth a man's mind about to religion.
Francis Bacon

The three great apostles of practical atheism, that make converts without persecuting, and retain them without preaching, are wealth, health, and power.
C. C. Colton

Practical atheism, seeing no guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight, endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will be good for mankind and what bad.
Herbert Spencer

By cutting the umbilical cord with God, our source of ethical vitality would be gone. Morally, we would be come nothing better than a species of fantastically clever monkeys. Our ultimate fate would be too horrible to contemplate. For the truth is that we humans are all Jekyll and Hyde creatures, and the monster within each of us is always striving to take over.
Paul Johnson

They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
Francis Bacon

Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts.
Edmund Burke

Atheist


The kingdom that is infested by atheists is beset by famine and disease and soon perishes.
The Code of Manu

To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
Woody Allen

Some are atheists by neglect; others are so by affectation; they that think there is no God at some times do not think so at all times.
Benjamin Whichcote

Boldness formerly was not the character of Atheists as such. … But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.
Edmund Burke

An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.
John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir)

There are no atheists in the foxholes.
William Thomas Cummings

All thinking men are atheists.
Ernest Hemingway

Attack


Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes.
William Prescott

Attitude


A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
Herm Albright

Audacity


Success is the child of audacity.
Benjamin Disraeli

Audience


The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
Alben W. Barkley

The play was a great success, but the audience was a total failure.
Oscar Wilde

Austerity


Austerity is the proper antidote to indulgence.
Samuel Johnson

Austria


Poor Austria! Two things made her a nation: she was German and she was Catholic, and now she has neither.
Benjamin Disraeli

Austrian


So long as the Austrian has his beer and sausages he will not revolt.
Ludwig van Beethoven

No Italian can hate an Austrian more than I do; unless it is the English, the Austrians seem to me the most obnoxious race under the sky.
Lord Byron

Author


The best part of every author is in general to be found in his book, I assure you.
Samuel Johnson

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.
Samuel Johnson

An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.
Leigh Hunt

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.
Charles de Montesquieu

Authors with a mortgage never get writer's block.
Mavis Cheek

An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism, and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace.
Samuel Johnson

To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.
Samuel Johnson

There are men that will make you books, and turn 'em loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
Cervantes

Choose an author as you choose a friend.
Wentworth Dillon

The most "popular," the most "successful" writers among us (for a brief period, at least) are, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, persons of mere address, perseverance, effrontery — in a word, busy-bodies, toadies, quacks.
Edgar Allan Poe

The author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.
Benjamin Disraeli

A writing man is something of a black sheep, like the village fiddler. Occasionally a fiddler becomes a violinist, and is a credit to his family, but as a rule he would have done better had his tendency been toward industry and saving.
E. W. Howe

I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
Samuel Johnson

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
Samuel Johnson

The wickedness of a loose or profane author is more atrocious than that of the giddy libertine, or drunken ravisher, not only because it extends its effects wider, as a pestilence that taints the air is more destructive than poison infused in a draught, but because it is committed with cool deliberation.
Samuel Johnson

Authority


Nothing has been found so mighty
That it has not found a master.
Elias Lonnrot, The Kalevala

Autobiography


Autobiography is now as common as adultery and hardly less reprehensible.
Lord Altrincham (John Grigg)

An autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.
Quentin Crisp

To write one's memoirs is to speak ill of everybody except oneself.
Henri Philippe Pétain

The next thing like living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in writing.
Benjamin Franklin

To set about writing my own life would be no less than horrible to me; and shall of a certainty never be done. The common impious vulgar of this earth, what has it to do with my life or me?
Thomas Carlyle

Automobile


Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
Russell Baker

Carriage without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Anonymous, 1862

Avarice


Avarice and luxury have been the ruin of every great state.
Livy

Avarice has so seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they to possess their wealth.
Pliny the Younger

Avarice is the root of evil. (Radix malorum est cupiditas.)
1 Timothy 6:10 (translation of the Vulgate)

Aviation


What can you conceive more silly and extravagant than to suppose a man racking his brains, and studying night and day how to fly?
William Law

The birds can fly,
An' why can't I?
J. T. Trowbridge

Award


I don't deserve this award, but I have arthritis and I don't deserve that either.
Jack Benny

Awkwardness


Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.
Ninon de Enclos

BBC


I am against the monopoly enjoyed by the BBC. For eleven years they kept me off the air. They prevented me from expressing views which have proved to be right. Their behaviour has been tyrannical. They are honeycombed with Socialists — probably with Communists.
Winston Churchill

Baby


A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
Mark Twain

A man deposits seed in a womb and goes away, and then another cause takes it, and labors on it, and makes a baby. What a consummation from such a beginning!
Marcus Aurelius

Who would not tremble and rather choose to die than to be a baby again, if he were given such a choice?
St. Augustine

An infant … is all gut and squall.
Charles Brown

A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.
Mark Twain

Bachelor


A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who has cheated some woman out of a divorce.
Don Quinn

Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't, they'd be married too.
H. L. Mencken

Cock's bones! now again I stand
The jolliest bachelor i' th' land.
Attributed to Henry VIII of England: On the beheading of Anne Boleyn, 1536

A single man has not nearly the value he would have in [a] state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.
Benjamin Franklin

An old bachelor is a poor critter.
C. F. Browne

A bachelor is one who enjoys the chase but does not eat the game.
Author unidentified

Praise all wives, but remain a bachelor.
Italian Proverb

So long as a man is without a wife he is only half a man.
Sanskrit Proverb

Happy am I who have no wife.
Menander

When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.
Shakespeare

A good bachelor drinks his dessert (and sometimes the rest of his meals). A sweet tooth is a danger signal that you're getting too much exercise and not enough cocktails.
P. J. O'Rourke

Backfire


For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petard.
William Shakespeare

Bad


No man becomes bad all at once.
Juvenal

Nothing so bad but it might be worse.
English Proverb

A man once bad is assumed to be always bad. (Semel malus, semper presumitur esse malus.)
Legal Maxim

Bait


Fish, or cut bait.
American Proverb

Balance


One who is serious all day will never have a good time, while one who is frivolous all day will never establish a household.
Ptahhotpe

Bald


There is nothing more contemptible than a bald man who pretends to have hair.
Martial

Honest men grow gray; others grow bald.
Hungarian Proverb

Balkans


[The Balkans] produce more history than they can consume.
Winston Churchill

If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.
Otto von Bismarck

Ballot


Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets.
Abraham Lincoln

Banana


Where the banana grows man is sensual and cruel.
R. W. Emerson

Bank


If you owe a bank enough money you own it.
Author unidentified

Banker


A banker is a man who lends you an umbrella when the weather is fair, and takes it away from you when it rains.
Author unidentified

Bankruptcy


If the nation is living within its income its credit is good. If in some crisis it lives beyond its income for a year or two it can usually borrow temporarily on reasonable terms. But if, like the spendthrift, it throws discretion to the winds, is willing to make no sacrifice at all in spending, extends its taxing up to the limit of the people's power to pay, and continues to pile up deficits, it is on the road to to bankruptcy.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Baptism


I think the baptismal service almost perfect. I never could attend a christening without tears bursting fourth at the sight of the helpless innocent in a pious clergyman's arms.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Barbarian


[The Gauls] derided the hairy and gigantic savages of the North; their rustic manners, dissonant joy, voracious appetite, and their horrid appearance, equally disgusting to the sight and to the smell.
Edward Gibbon

Bargain


It's a bad bargain where nobody gains.
English proverb

No bargain without wine.
Latin saying

Bargain like a gypsy, but pay like a gentleman.
Hungarian proverb

Baseball


Think! How the hell are you gonna think and hit at the same time?
Yogi Berra

Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal.
George F. Will

Bashfulness


To get thine ends, lay bashfulness aside;
Who fears to ask doth teach to be deny'd.
Robert Herrick

Though modesty be a virtue, yet bashfulness is a vice.
Thomas Fuller

The bashful always lose.
French Proverb

Bashfulness, however it may incommode for a moment, scarcely ever produces evils of long continuance; it may flush the cheek, flutter in the heart, deject the eyes, and enchain the tongue, but its mischiefs soon pass off without remembrance.
Samuel Johnson

Basque


When the Devil himself tried to study Basque, he learned only three words in seven years.
Basque proverb

Bastard


Those born of sinful intercourse are not counted as children.
Legal Maxim

Battle


Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
The Duke of Wellington: Despatch from the field of Waterloo, June, 1815

If your bayonet breaks, strike with the stock; if the stock gives way, hit with your fists; if your fists are hurt, bite with your teeth.
M. I. Dragomiroff: Notes for Soldiers, c. 1890

In battle those who are most afraid are always in most danger.
Cataline

The battle is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.
Patrick Henry

Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; men now even die, and kill one another, in an artificial manner.
Thomas Carlyle

Quid enim? Concurritur-horae
Momento cita mors venit, aut victoria laeta.

The battle joins, and, in a moment's flight,
Death, or a joyful conquest, ends the fight.

Horace

Battlefield


Well, well, General, bury these poor men, and let us say no more about it.
R. E. Lee: To General A. P. Hill after the battle of Bristoe Station, Oct. 14, 1863

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.
Abraham Lincoln

On fame's eternal camping-ground
Their silent tents are spread,
And glory guards with solemn round
The bivouac of the dead.
Theodore O'Hara

Beard


Beware of women with beards and men without them.
Basque proverb

Beating


A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree,
The more they're beaten the better they be.
John Ray

Beauty


Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.
John Ruskin

Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have any curiosity?

Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.

Penelope Gilliatt

Beauty and wisdom are seldom found together.
Petronius Arbiter

A holy woman may be beautiful by the gift of nature, but she must not give occasion to lust. If beauty be hers, so far from setting it off she ought rather to obscure it.
Tertullian

Had she deigned to remove her veil, God Himself would have fallen in love with her.
Torquato Tasso

A poor beauty finds more lovers than husbands.
George Herbert

Beauty and sadness always go together.
George MacDonald

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.
R. W. Emerson

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.
Oscar Wilde

It is the beautiful bird which gets caged.
Chinese Proverb

Beauty is a good letter of introduction.
German Proverb

Beauty and chastity are always quarreling.
Spanish Proverb

[Beauty is] an outward gift which is seldom despised, except by those to whom it has been refused.
Edward Gibbon

Beauty, Mr Rambler, has often overpowered the resolutions of the firm, and the reasonings of the wise, roused the old to sensibility, and subdued the rigorous to softness.
Samuel Johnson

She who is beautiful is more formidable than fire and iron.
Anacreon

Gaze not upon a maiden, lest her beauty be a stumbling-block to thee.
Ecclesiasticus IX, 5

How rare a thing it is to match virginity with beauty.
John Lyly

Beauty in a good woman is like fire at a distance or a sharp sword: the one does not burn, or the other wound, those who come not too close.
Cervantes

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover,
Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.
Joseph Addison

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit-stall.
Jean Paul Richter

The fatal gift of beauty.
Lord Byron

To marry a woman for her beauty is like buying a house for its paint.
Author unidentified

These three soon pass away: the echo, the rainbow, and the beauty of a woman.
German proverb

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.
Petrarch

You will find that there are other charms than those of beauty, and other joys than the praise of fools.
Samuel Johnson

If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best thing God invents.
Robert Browning

Bed


Loath to bed, and loath to rise.
John Clarke

No bed is big enough to hold three.
German Proverb

When one begins to turn in bed it is time to turn out.
Ascribed to the Duke of Wellington

The waterbed trend was similar to the fulfillment movement, in the sense that you paid for something that was supposed to bring you happiness, but you wound up with something less fulfilling, in this case motion sickness and water damage.
Dave Barry

Bedroom


A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart — or found happiness.
Honoré de Balzac

Bee


The bee is more honored than other animals, not because she labors, but because she labors for others.
St. John Chrysostom

The bee that hath honey in her mouth hath a sting in her tail.
John Lyly

So the industrious bees do hourly strive
To bring their loads of honey to the hive;
Their sordid owners always reap the gains,
And poorly recompense their toils and pains.
Mary Collier

Beef


Beefsteaks and porter are gude belly mortar.
Scottish Proverb

Beer


He that drinks strong beer,
And goes to bed mellow,
Lives as he ought to live,
And dies a hearty fellow.
Author unidentified

I wish to see this beverage [beer] become common instead of the whisky which kills one-third of our citizens, and ruins their families.
Thomas Jefferson

Here
With my beer
I sit,
While golden moments flit:
Alas!
They pass
Unheeded by:
And as they fly,
I,
Being dry,
Sit, idly sipping here
My beer.
George Arnold

There is no bad beer: some kinds are better than others.
German Proverb

Come and let me cheer your spirits,
Make you sing the songs of wisdom,
That with honor ye may praise me,
Sing the songs of beer immortal!
Elias Lonnrot, The Kalevala

Thus was brewed the beer of Northland,
At the hands of Osmo's daughter;
This the origin of brewing
Beer from Kalew-hops and barley;
Great indeed the reputation
Of the ancient beer of Kalew,
Said to make the feeble hardy,
Famed to dry the tears of women,
Make the aged young and supple,
Make the brave men ever braver,
Fill the heart with joy and gladness,
Fill the mind with wisdom-sayings,
Fill the tongue with ancient legends,
Only makes the fool more foolish.
Elias Lonnrot, The Kalevala

Beer that is not drunk has missed its vocation.
Meyer Breslau

Beer and bread make the cheeks red.
German proverb

Bread is the staff of life, but beer is life itself.
Oxfordshire proverb

I'm only here for the beer.
Advertising slogan

It's Miller time.
Miller beer

Beethoven


Beethoven can write music, thank God — but he can do nothing else on earth.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Keep your eyes on him [Beethoven]; he'll make the world talk of him some day.
W. A. Mozart

Beethoven is not beautiful. He is dramatic, powerful, a maker of storms, a subduer of tempests; but his speech is the speech of a self-centered egotist. He is the father of all the modern melomaniacs, who, looking into their own souls, write what they see therein — misery, corruption, slighting selfishness, and ugliness.
James Huneker

Beggar


Beggars should be abolished. It annoys one to give to them, and it annoys one not to give to them.
F. W. Nietzsche

It is a beggar's pride that he is not a thief.
Japanese Proverb

The beggar fears no reverse of fortune.
Bhartrihari

He [the beggar] is not expected to become bail or surety for any one. No man troubleth him with questioning his religion or politics. He is the only free man in the universe.
Charles Lamb

Begging


What we are told about the great sums got by begging is not true: the trade is overstocked.
Samuel Johnson

Beginning


The beginning is half of the whole.
Plato

Every beginning is hard.
German Proverb

Well begun is half done.
Horace

"Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.

"Begin at the beginning," the King said, gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

Lewis Carroll

Belief


I believe it because it is absurd.
Tertullian (Attributed)

We believe nothing so firmly as what we least know.
Michel de Montaigne

He does not believe [who] does not live according to his belief.
Thomas Fuller

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
Dinah Mulock Craik

Never tell all that you know, or do all that you can, or believe all that you hear.
Portuguese Proverb

Belief forms behavior.
David Klinghoffer

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.
Bertrand Russell

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
Bertrand Russell

Alice: This is impossible.
The Mad Hatter: Only if you believe it is.
Alice in Wonderland (2010 film)

We believe whatever we want to believe.
Demosthenes

Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.
Jean de la Fontaine

We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.
Thomas Carlyle

What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.
T. H. Huxley

Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Men are nearly always willing to believe what they wish.
Julius Caesar

Believer


The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.
Hungarian proverb

Belisarius


The spectator and historian of [Belisarius's] exploits has observed, that amidst the perils of war, he was daring without rashness, prudent without fear, slow or rapid according to the exigencies of the moment; that in the deepest distress he was animated by real or apparent hope, but that he was modest and humble in the most prosperous fortune.
Edward Gibbon

Bell


All the church-bells made a solemn din —
A fire-alarm to those who lived in sin.
Ambrose Bierce

Belly


A full belly neither fights nor flies well.
George Herbert

Beneficiary


We naturally endear to ourselves those to whom we impart any kind of pleasure, because we imagine their affection and esteem secured to us by the benefits which they receive.
Samuel Johnson

Benefit


Cui bono? (to whose benefit?)
Author unidentified, though most associated with Lucius Cassius

New benefits cannot obliterate old injuries.
Niccolò Machiavelli

There is a hook in every benefit, that sticks in his jaws that takes that benefit, and draws him whither the benefactor will.
John Donne

Benevolence


To act from pure benevolence is not possible for finite beings. Human benevolence is mingled with vanity, interest, or some other motive.
Samuel Johnson

The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm.
Walter Bagehot

Berry


Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.
William Butler, of the strawberry

Best


The best smell is bread, the best savor salt, the best love that of children.
George Herbert

The best is the enemy of the good.
Voltaire

It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required.
Winston Churchill

Betrayal


You also, Brutus? (Et tu, Brute!, though what Caesar said, if anything, and in what language, is uncertain)
Julius Caesar (Attributed)

Betting


The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong — but that's the way to bet.
Author unidentified

Most men (till by losing rendered sager)
Will back their own opinions by a wager.
Byron

Put up or shut up.
American saying

Bible


I have made it a practice for several years to read the Bible through in the course of every year. I usually devote to this reading the first hour after I rise every morning.
John Quincy Adams

Bibliomania


Bibliomania, or the collecting of an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds.
Isaac D'Israel

Bigotry


You cannot separate race, religion and culture. It will not work to say it is wrong and unlawful to insult a man's race but quite all right to spit on his god and insult the religious beliefs which form the biggest single element in his culture. In most societies the three are inextricably intermingled.
Paul Johnson

Bill Of Rights


The only guarantee of the Bill of Rights which continues to have any force and effect is the one prohibiting quartering troops on citizens in time of peace. All the rest have been disposed of by judicial interpretation and legislative whittling.
H. L. Mencken

It was observed half a century ago that what is a stone wall to a layman, to a corporate lawyer is a triumphant arch. Much the same might be said of civil rights and freedoms. To the layman the Bill of Rights seems to be a stone wall against the misuse of power. But in the hands of a congressional committee, or often enough of a judge, it turns out to be so full of exceptions and qualifications that it might be a whole series of arches.
Henry Steele Commager

Billiards


To play billiards well is a sign of a misspent youth.
Author unidentified

Biographer


Our Grubstreet biographers … watch for the death of a great man, like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him.
Joseph Addison

Biography


Biography is one of the new terrors of death.
John Arbuthnot

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
Mark Twain

There has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.
Samuel Johnson

Biography is the only true history.
Thomas Carlyle

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
Oscar Wilde

If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it as it was.
Samuel Johnson

If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.
Samuel Johnson

Nobody likes being written about in their lifetime, it's as though the FBI and the CIA were suddenly to splash your files in the paper.
Saul Bellow

A well-written Life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.
Thomas Carlyle

Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.
Benjamin Disraeli

Bird


Birds of prey do not sing.
German proverb

Birth


Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Man alone, at the moment of his birth, is cast naked upon the naked earth.
Pliny the Elder

When we are born we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
Shakespeare

The first breath is the beginning of death.
Thomas Fuller

My mother groan’d! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
William Blake

Birth And Death


For no king has had a different beginning of existence; there is for all one entrance into life, and one way out.
Wisdom of Solomon 7:5-6

Bishop


For a bishop to preach, 'tis to do other folks' office, as if the steward of the house should execute the porter's or the cook's place. 'Tis his business to see that they and all other about the house perform their duties.
John Seldon

A bishop should not go to a house where he may meet a young fellow leading out a wench.
Samuel Johnson

Blame


Blame is safer than praise.
R. W. Emerson

It makes a difference whose ox is gored.
Martin Luther

Blasphemy


[Blasphemy is] denying the being or providence of God, contumelious reproaches of our Saviour Christ, profane scoffing at the Holy Scripture, or exposing it to contempt or ridicule.
William Blackstone

Blessed


Judge none blessed before his death.
Ecclesiasticus 11:28

Blessing


May your glass be ever full.
May the roof over your head be always strong.
And may you be in heaven half an hour
Before the Devil knows you're dead.
Author unidentified

May you live as long as you want,
And never want as long as you live.
Author unidentified

May your neighbors respect you,
Trouble neglect you,
The angels protect you,
And heaven accept you.
Author unidentified

May the Good Lord take a liking to you, … but not too soon!
Author unidentified

The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace.
Numbers 6:24-26

It may well be a blessing in disguise. At the moment it seems quite effectively disguised.
Winston Churchill, when told that his election loss may be a blessing in disguise

The five blessings are long life, riches, serenity, the love of virtue, and the attainment of ambition.
The Hung-Fan

My God! how little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy.
Thomas Jefferson

Blessings never come in pairs; misfortunes never come alone.
Chinese proverb

Blind


In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
Desiderius Erasmus

Blindness


Why should I not submit with complacency to this loss of sight, which seems only withdrawn from the body without to increase the sight of the mind within?
John Milton

Then had I not been thus exil'd from light;
As in the land of darkness yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And buried; but O yet more miserable!
John Milton

Blood


The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.
Tertullian, paraphrased

All blood is alike ancient.
Thomas Fuller

Not by speechifying and counting majorities are the great questions of our times to be solved — that was the error of 1848 and 1849 — but by iron and blood (Eisen und Blut).
Otto von Bismarck

Bluestocking


I have always (at least from fifteen) thought the reputation of learning a misfortune to a woman.
Mary Wortley Montagu

Blushing


Blushing is virtue's color.
John Ray

Boasting


One who puts on his armor should not boast like one who takes it off.
1 Kings 20:11

Body


The body of a man is not a home but an inn — and that only briefly.
Seneca

The [body], for a time the unwilling sport
Of circumstances and passion, struggles on;
Fleets through its sad duration rapidly:
Then like an useless and worn-out machine,
Rots, perishes, and passes.
P. B. Shelley

Bolshevism


But my hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics, or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality. It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained.
Winston Churchill

Book


Reading all the good books is like a conversation with the finest men of past centuries.
René Descartes

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G. K. Chesterton

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folk have lent me.
Anatole France

The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.
Evelyn Waugh

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.
Henry Kissinger, of his memoirs

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them — peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.
Winston Churchill

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, or the Phoenicians, or whoever invented books.
Thomas Carlyle

The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.
Martin Luther

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Francis Bacon

A great [large] book is a great evil.
Joseph Addison

I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

My books are friends that never fail me.
Thomas Carlyle

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.
Thomas Carlyle

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
G. K. Chesterton

I buy books at a geometric rate, but read only arithmetically.
Tony Daniels (c.f. Malthus)

Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?
Duke of Gloucester, to Edward Gibbon

Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.
Ecclesiastes 12:12

Ignorant asses visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to inquire for good books, but new books.
John Webster

There's no book so bad that something good may not be found in it.
Cervantes

Sometimes I read a book with pleasure, and detest the author.
Jonathan Swift

I showed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it.
Oliver Goldsmith

Books with striking and ingenious titles are seldom worth reading.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The one fault of really good books is that they almost always produce a great prodigy of bad ones.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing.
Benjamin Disraeli

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
R. L. Stevenson

Books for general reading always smell badly; the odor of common people hangs about them.
F. W. Nietzsche

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
Woodrow Wilson

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.
Yoshida Kenkō

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.
John Milton

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.
John Milton

I have rather studied books than men.
Francis Bacon

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes

While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.
Terry Pratchett

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation, as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.
Joseph Addison

The ancient books are for authors; the new ones, for readers.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

The grave puts an end to flattery and artifice, and the information that we receive from books is pure from interest, fear, or ambition.
Samuel Johnson

We see that volumes [of books] may be perused, and perused with attention, to little effect; and that maxims of prudence, or principles of virtue, may be treasured in the memory without influencing the conduct.
Samuel Johnson

They liked the book the better the more it made them cry.
Oliver Goldsmith

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is unlikely to look out.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We really only learn from books we cannot judge. The author of a book we could really judge ought surely to be learning from us.
J. W. Goethe

Each country Book-club bows the knee to Baal,
And, hurling lawful Genius from the throne,
Erects a shrine and idol of its own.
Lord Byron

"What is the use of a book", thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?"
Lewis Carroll

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.
Raymond Chandler

He was a one-book man. Some men have only one book in them; others, a library.
Sydney Smith

Your borrowers of books — those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.
Charles Lamb

One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.
Joseph Conrad

The reading of good books is like a conversation with the best men of past centuries — in fact like a prepared conversation, in which they reveal only the best of their thoughts. (La lecture de tous les bons livres est comme une conversation avec les plus honêttes gens des siècles passés, qui en ont été les auteurs, et même une conversation étudiée en laquelle ils nous découvrent que les meilleures de leurs pensées.)
René Descartes

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A new book often seizes the attention of the publick, without any other claim than that it is new.
Samuel Johnson

Book of Job


The book of Job is pure Arab poetry of the highest and most antique cast.
S. T. Coleridge

Bookseller


Here lies a bookseller, the leaf of his life being finished, awaiting a new edition, augmented and corrected.
Epitaph on the grave of Jacob Tonson

Bore


Bore, n. A person who talks when you wish him to listen.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

A bore is one who, when you ask him, "How are you?," tells you.
Author unidentified

Boredom


When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored.
Eric Hoffer

Boredom is an evil that is not to be estimated lightly. It can come in the end to real despair. The public authority takes precautions against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.
C. C. Colton

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Bertrand Russell

Good-bye. I am leaving because I am bored.
George Saunders, last words

There is nothing so insupportable to man as complete repose, without passion, occupation, amusement, care. Then it is that he feels his nothingness, his isolation, his insufficiency, his dependence, his impotence, his emptiness.
Blaise Pascal

Borrowing And Lending


Borrowing is not much better than begging.
G. E. Lessing

Neither borrow money of a friend; but of a mere stranger; where paying for it, thou shalt hear of it no more: otherwise thou shalt eclipse thy credit, lose thy friend, and yet pay as dear to another.
William Cecil

The human species is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend.
Charles Lamb

Neither a borrower, nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare

The first chance you have to avoid a loss from a foolish loan is by refusing to make it. There is no second chance.
Charlie Munger

Boxing


Boxing's just show business with blood.
Frank Bruno

Boy


A boy is, of all wild beasts, the most difficult to manage.
Plato

The parent who could see his boy as he really is, would shake his head and say, "Willie is no good; I'll sell him."
Stephen Leacock

One boy is more trouble than a dozen girls.
English Proverb

The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men — were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.
Ambrose Bierce

A boy is a cross between a god and a goat.
Author unidentified

Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people.
Charles Lamb

So in some ways I'm relieved that I don't have daughters, although in other ways I envy people with daughters, because little girls tend to be thoughtful, whereas little boys tend to be — and I say this as a loving father who would not trade his son for anything in the world — jerks.
Dave Barry

Brain


We use our brains very little, and when we do, it is only to make excuses for our reflexes and instincts — only to make our acts appear more studied.
Martin H. Fischer

Brandy


Red wine for children, champagne for men, and brandy for soldiers.
Otto von Bismarck

Bravery


Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
Thomas Fuller

He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.
Jonathan Swift

Women are partial to the brave, and they think every man handsome who is going to the [soldier's] camp or the gallows.
John Gay

Bread


Bread and cheese is gude to eat when folk can get nae ither meat.
Scottish proverb

Breakfast


I advise all such as have plethorick and full bodies, especially living at rest, and which are of a phlegmatick temperament, that they not only eschew the use of breakfasts, but also oftentimes content themselves with one meal in a day.
Tobias Venner

Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast.
Oscar Wilde

Breast


Your breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies.
Song of Songs 4:5

Cover that bosom that I must not see: souls are wounded by such things.
Molière

Breeding


Birth's gude but breeding's better.
Scottish Proverb

Brendan Behan


[Brendan Behan was] too young to die, but too drunk to live.
Rene MacColl

Brevity


I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal

Do you wish to instruct? Be brief, that the mind may catch thy precepts and the more easily retain them.
Horace

In order to speak short upon any subject, think long.
H. H. Brackenridge

That which is brief, if it be good, is good twice over.
Spanish Proverb

It is not the burden but the overburden that kills the beast.
Spanish Proverb

Brevity is the soul of wit.
William Shakespeare

Let thy speech be short, comprehending much in a few words.
Ecclesiasticus 32:8

Brewery


We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond dreams of avarice.
Samuel Johnson

Bribe


Nothing to be done without a bribe I find, in love as well as law.
Susannah Centlivre

Bridegroom


A bridegroom is a guy who has lost his liberty in the pursuit of happiness.
Author unidentified

When the bride is in the cradle the bridegroom ought to be old enough to ride a horse.
Russian proverb

Britain


In Britain, everything is policed except crime.
Mark Steyn

For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population.
Mark Steyn

[The Suez crisis] is often said to have dealt the final blow to Britain's status as a great world power. That is not true. The status had been lost in 1947. Suez simply made it plain for all the world to see.
Paul Johnson

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.
Dean Acheson

Britannia needs no bulwarks,
No towers along the steep;
Her march is o’er the mountain waves,
Her home is on the deep.
Thomas Campbell

British


Socialism has been preached for so long, the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.
Lord Thomson of Fleet

I consider the British as our natural enemies, and as the only nation on earth who wish us ill from the bottom of their souls. And I am satisfied that, were out continent to be swallowed up the ocean, Great Britain would be in a bonfire from one end to the other.
Thomas Jefferson

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

No good man is a Briton. (Nemo bonus Britto est.)
Decius Magnus Ausonius

Brother


Am I my brother's keeper?
Genesis 4:9

We tell the ladies that good wives make good husbands; I believe it is a more certain position that good brothers make good sisters.
Samuel Johnson

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Shakespeare

Brotherhood


Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.
William Tecumseh Sherman

Buddhism


Buddhism is a hundred times as realistic as Christianity. It is part of its living heritage that it is able to face problems objectively and coolly. It is the product of long centuries of philosophical observation.
F. W. Nietzsche

The Buddhist doctrine [is] that real riches consist not in abundance of goods but in the paucity of wants.
Alfred Marshall

Building


Build and borrow,
A sackful of sorrow.
(Bauen und Borgen,
Ein Sack voll Sorgen.)
German Proverb

The easiest road to poverty is to build many houses.
The Greek Anthology

Burden


Light burdens, long borne, grow heavy.
George Herbert

None knows the weight of another’s burden.
George Herbert

The white man's burden.
Rudyard Kipling

Bureaucracy


I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
Thomas Jefferson

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.
Eugene McCarthy

Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman

The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
Robert Conquest

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life.
Alexis de Tocqueville

If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and special legislation like huge inverted pyramids over every one of the simple constitutional provisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more.
F. D. Roosevelt

Burial


All I desire for my own burial is not to be buried alive.
Lord Chesterfield

And times without number it happened that two priests would be on their way to bury someone, holding a cross before them, only to find that bearers carrying three or four additional biers would fall in behind them; so that whereas the priests had thought they only had one burial to attend to, they in fact had six or eight, and sometimes more.

(E infinite volte avvenne che, andando due preti con una croce per alcuno, si misero tre o quatro bare, da'portatori portate, di dietro a quella: e, dove un morto credevano avere i preti a seppilire, n'avevano sei o otto e tal fiate pií.)

Boccaccio, during the Black Death

Business


[I]n time every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties … Work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.
Laurence J. Peter, commonly referred to as the Peter Principle

The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.
Scott Adams

If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.
Bertrand Russell

Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.
Winston Churchill

Businessmen are notable for a peculiarly stalwart character, which enables them to enjoy without loss of self-reliance the benefits of tariffs, franchises, and even outright government subsidies.
Herbert J. Muller

The egalitarianism of the present tax structure is thought to be seriously dampening individual effort, initiative, and inspiration … [it] destroys ambition, penalizes success, discourages investment to create new jobs, and may well turn a nation of risk-taking entrepreneurs into a nation of softies.
Fred Maytag II

Planned Economy: Where everything is included in the plans except economy.
Carey McWilliams

No matter what you think your job is, your job is to make your boss's life easier.
Author unidentified

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
Northcote Parkinson ("Parkinson's Law")

A man's work is his dilemma: his job is his bondage, but it also gives him a fair share of his identity and keeps him from being a bystander in somebody else's world.
Melvin Maddocks

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job, it's a depression when you lose your own.
Harry S. Truman

He had talents equal to business, and aspired no higher.
Tacitus

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.
John Maynard Keynes

If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, the bank has a problem.
Author unidentified (updated for current currency values)

[The] clamour and sophistry of merchants and manufacturers easily persuade [the people], that the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part, of the society, is the general interest of the whole.
Adam Smith

To business that we love we rise betime,
And go to’t with delight.
Shakespeare

The most sensible people to be met with in society are men of business and of the world, who argue from what they see and know, instead of spinning cobweb distinctions of what things ought to be.
William Hazlitt

My own business always bores me to death; I prefer other people’s.
Oscar Wilde

In thousands of years there has been no advance in public morals, in philosophy, in religion or in politics, but the advance in business has been the greatest miracle the world has ever known.
E. W. Howe

When I hear artists or authors making fun of business men I think of a regiment in which the band makes fun of the cooks.
Author unidentified

Busy


None are so busy as the fool and knave.
John Dryden

He that is busy is tempted by but one devil; he that is idle, by a legion.
Thomas Fuller

The busiest men have the most leisure.
English Proverb

The busy have no time for tears.
Byron

Who is more busy than he that hath least to do?
John Clarke

The busier we are, the more acutely we feel that we live, the more conscious we are of life.
Immanuel Kant

Those who have most to do, and are willing to work, will find the most time.
Samuel Smiles

Busybody


It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis

For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? is commonplace; but to think what B ought to do is interesting, romantic, moral, self-flattering, and public-spirited all at once. It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole class of people ought to do is to feel one's self a power on earth, to win a public position, to clothe one's self in dignity. Hence we have an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general of society.
William Graham Sumner

Butcher


One butcher does not fear many sheep.
Ascribed to Alexander the Great

Buyer


Let the buyer beware. (Caveat emptor.)
Legal Maxim

Buying And Selling


There are more fools among buyers than among sellers.
French proverb

Cabbage


Cabbage twice cooked is death.
Greek Proverb.

Cake


You can’t eat your cake and have it. [Alternative version, "Wouldst thou both eat thy cake and have it?"]
English proverb

Calamity


To have been happy adds to the calamity.
John Fletcher

Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
Ambrose Bierce

California


California's like an artificial limb the rest of the country doesn't really need.
Saul Bellow

Calm


Keep calm and carry on.
Author unidentified. The text appears on a British World War II poster that was apparently never used.

Calumny


Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.
William Shakespeare

A man calumniated is doubly injured — first by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it.
Herodotus

Calumny disregarded is soon forgotten by the world, but if you get into a passion about it, it seems to have a foundation of truth about it.
Tacitus

As there is no mountain without mist, so there is no man of merit without calumniators.
Turkish proverb

Calumnies are answered best with silence.
Ben Johnson

Camel


The peasants either use a horse and a camel, a burro and a camel, a bull and a camel, or a bull and a horse. I am informed that they cannot use two camels because they fight each other. Any animal hooked up with a camel becomes disgusted and loses interest in life.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Canada


I wish the British Government would give you Canada at once. It is fit for nothing but to breed quarrels.
Lord Ashburton

Canada could have enjoyed:
English government,
French culture,
and American know-how.
Instead it ended up with:
English know-how,
French government,
and American culture.
John Robert Colombo

England would be better off without Canada; it keeps her in a prepared state for war at a great expense and constant irritation.
Napoleon I

Canadian


Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.
J. Bartlet Brebner

Candle-light


'Yes,' I answered you last night;
'No,' this morning, sir, I say.
Colours seen by candle-light
Will not look the same by day.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Candlelight


Choose not a woman nor a linen cloth by the candle.
James Sandford

Cannibal


Cannibals have the same notions of right and wrong that we have. They make war in the same anger and passion that move us, and the same crimes are committed everywhere. Eating fallen enemies is only an extra ceremonial. The wrong does not consist in roasting them, but in killing them.
Voltaire

Cannon


Cannons and firearms are cruel and damnable machines. I believe them to have been the direct suggestion of the devil.
Martin Luther

Capital


Capital must be propelled by self-interest; it cannot be enticed by benevolence.
Walter Bagehot

Capital And Labor


Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.
Pope Leo XIII

Capitalism


Those who pillory capitalism for "creating artificial needs" strike me as timid and dismal souls. You might just as well denounce Monet for creating an "artificial need" for Impressionism.
Paul Johnson

Despite the miracles of capitalism, it doesn't do well in popularity polls. One of the reasons is that capitalism is always evaluated against the non-existent, non-realizable utopias of socialism or communism. Any earthly system, when compared to a Utopia, will pale in comparison. But for the ordinary person, capitalism, with all of its warts, is superior to any system yet devised to deal with our everyday needs and desires.
Walter E. Williams

Industrial capitalism simply evolved, from the free and uncoordinated transactions and unimpeded movements of countless unknown individuals. It was not a political creation at all.
Paul Johnson

Industrial capitalism has done more to promote content among mankind than any other man-made phenomenon in history.
Paul Johnson

The market is the only kind of collective which conforms to nature and actually works after a fashion, because it is based upon the voluntary principle and remains a free combination of individuals.
Paul Johnson

We may indeed ask ourselves how it is that capitalism and free enterprise enable the United States not only to support its vast and varied life and needs, but also to supply these enormous sums to lighten the burden of others in distress.
Winston Churchill

Capitalism And Socialism


It is one of history's great ironies that capitalists built decent and humane societies on the basis of an amoral approach to the economics of pricing, whereas socialists built exploitative and inhumane societies on the basis of a morally inflamed approach to economics.
Kevin D. Williamson

When losses are made, under the present system those losses are borne by the individuals who sustained them and took the risk and judged things wrongly, whereas under State management all losses are quartered upon the taxpayers and the community as a whole. The elimination of the profit motive and of self-interest as a practical guide in the myriad transactions of daily life will restrict, paralyse and destroy British ingenuity, thrift, contrivance and good housekeeping at every stage in our life and production, and will reduce all our industries from a profit-making to a loss-making process.
Winston Churchill

When I see the present Socialist Government denouncing capitalism in all its forms, mocking with derision and contempt the tremendous free enterprise capitalist system on which the mighty production of the United States is founded, I cannot help feeling that as a nation we are not acting honourably or even honestly.
Winston Churchill

The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination; between concentrations of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals; between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition; between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity; between a policy of leveling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard.
Winston Churchill

Capitalist


The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.
Willi Schlamm

Capitalization


It offends my eyes to see rome, france, caesar, henry the fourth, etc., begin with small letters; and I do not conceive there can be any reason for doing it half so strong as the reason of long usage is to the contrary
Lord Chesterton

Cards


I am sorry I have not learned to play at cards. It is very useful in life: it generates kindness and consolidates society.
Samuel Johnson

From such assemblies (card games), in whatever humour I happened to enter them, I was quickly forced to retire; they were too trifling for me, when I was grave, and too dull, when I was cheerful.
Samuel Johnson

Care


Small cares speak; great ones are dumb.
Seneca

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,
And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.
Shakespeare

It is a great mistake to suppose that all care is wakeful. People sometimes sleep, as well as wake, by reason of their sorrow.
Leigh Hunt

What though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.
Shakespeare

I am sure care’s an enemy to life.
Shakespeare

Carefulness


If you can't be good be careful.
American Proverb

Be careful, and you will save many men from the sin of robbing you.
E. W. Howe

Carelessness


The wife of a careless man is almost a widow.
Hungarian Proverb

Careless she is with artful care,
Affecting to seem unaffected.
William Congreve

Caroline of England


Most gracious queen, we thee implore
To go away and sin no more,
But if that effort be too great,
To go away at any rate.
Anonymous: Verse circulated in London on the trial of Queen Caroline for adultery, 1820.

Cartel


People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
Adam Smith

In a free trade, an effectual combination cannot be established but by the unanimous consent of every single trader, and it cannot last longer than every single trader continues of the same mind. The majority of a corporation can enact a bye-law, with proper penalties, which will limit the competition more effectually and more durably than any voluntary combination whatever.
Adam Smith

Carthage


That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws; and every step of intestine discord was marked by some deplorable victory of savage man over civilized society.
Edward Gibbon

Case


Hard cases make bad law.
English proverb

Cash


In God we trust; all others must pay cash.
American Saying

Casuist


There is a demand today for men who can make wrong appear right.
Terrence, c. 160 B.C.

Cat


When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

Stately, kindly, lordly friend
Condescend
Here to sit by me.
Algernon Charles Swinburne, To a Cat.

Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to a fine of £10. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a cat.
Rule 46, Oxford Union Society (circa 1997)

I've never understood why women love cats. Cats are independent, they don't listen, they don't come in when you call, they like to stay out all night, and when they're home they like to be left alone and sleep. In other words, every quality that women hate in a man, they love in a cat.
Jay Leno

If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
Mark Twain

Cats are cleverer than we think, but less clever than they think.
Author unidentified

When the cat's away the mice will play.
English proverb

Cat mighty dignified till de dog come by.
American negro proverb

Those who’ll play with cats must expect to be scratched.
Cervantes

In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
Sir Terry Pratchett

Caterpillar


Luther, taking up a caterpillar, said: 'Tis an emblem of the devil in its crawling walk, and bears his colors in its changing hue.
Martin Luther

Cause


If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation it will triumph.
T. S. Eliot

Cause And Effect


The thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree I planted.
Byron

After this, therefore because of this. (Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.)
Latin Phrase (A familiar logical fallacy)

For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.
Hosea 8:7 (KJV)

The most important events are often determined by trivial causes.
Cicero

No man has a right to repine at evils which, against warning, against experience, he deliberately and leisurely brings upon his own head.
Samuel Johnson

Caution


The cautious seldom make mistakes.
Confucius

Think much and often, speak little, and write less.
Italian Proverb

If not chastely, then at least cautiously. (Nisi caste, saltem caute.)
Latin Proverb

Drive carefully. We have two cemeteries [but] no hospital.
Billboard outside of Branxton, New South Wales

Look before you leap.
English proverb

If your lips would keep from slips
Five things observe with care:
To whom you speak, of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.
Author unidentified

The most cautious woman gets the reputation of being the most chaste.
Spanish proverb

Celebrity


A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.
H. L. Mencken

Celibacy


Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.
Thomas Love Peacock

The interdiction of marriage to priests was an act of impious tyranny, not only contrary to the word of God, but at war with every principle of justice.
John Calvin

They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious, tenacious of their own practices and maxims.
Samuel Johnson

The Church of Rome have an idea that the pope is St. Peter's successor, and that the clergy ought not to marry. But I would ask, if it was lawful for St. Peter to have a wife, why not lawful for a priest or other preacher to have one?
Lorenzo Dow

Celt


The Celts or Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still more remote in the future; for they have endurance and productiveness.
R. W. Emerson

Cemetery


The fence around a cemetery is foolish, for those inside can't get out and those outside don't want to get in.
Arthur Brisbane

He who seeks equality should go to a cemetery.
German Proverb

Censorship


The first thing will be to establish a censorship of fiction. Let the censors accept any tale that is good, and reject any that is bad.
Plato

If there had been a censorship of the press in Rome we should have had today neither Horace nor Juvenal, nor the philosophical writings of Cicero.
Voltaire

I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offence against religion; that a question like this can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion?
Thomas Jefferson

There is no time in history [when] the people who were censoring speech were the good guys.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

In order to keep any coherence in the governmental process, to prevent the wildest anarchy in thought and act, the government must put limits upon the free play of opinion. In part, it can reach that end by mere propaganda, by the bald force of its authority — that is, by making certain doctrines officially infamous.
H. L. Mencken

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.
Heinrich Heine

We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.
John Stuart Mill

Censure


Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
Jonathan Swift

I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.
Thomas Jefferson

I am now too old to be much pained by hasty censure.
Samuel Johnson

Centralization


If ever this vast country is brought under a single government, it will be one of the most extensive corruption.
Thomas Jefferson

To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our national government. The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed.
F. D. Roosevelt

Cerberus


Cerberus, n. The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance — against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The hound of hell, in Greek, is called Cerberus; in Hebrew, Scorphur: he has three throats — sin, the law, and death.
Martin Luther

Certainty


The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.
H. L. Mencken

If you forsake a certainty and depend on an uncertainty, you will lose both the certainty and the uncertainty.
Sanskrit Proverb

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.
Bertrand Russell

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
Laurens Van der Post

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused.
Walter Mondale

A mind [David Howell's] not so much open as permanently vulnerable to a succession of opposing certainties.
W. Somerset Maugham

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The world is made up for the most part of morons and natural tyrants, sure of themselves, strong in their own opinions, never doubting anything.
Clarence Darrow

Champagne


A single glass of champagne imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced, the imagination is agreeably stirred, the wits become more nimble. A bottle produces a contrary effect.
Winston Churchill

Chance


The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11

A wise man turns chance into good fortune.
Thomas Fuller

A man, thus cut off from the prospect of that port to which his address and fortitude had been employed to steer him, often abandons himself to chance and to the wind, and glides careless and idle down the current of life, without resolution to make another effort, till he is swallowed up by the gulph of mortality.
Samuel Johnson

Change


Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.
Socrates

There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Everything changes but the avant-garde.
Paul Valéry

The more that things change, the more we need to depend upon those things that never change.
Rabbi Daniel Lapin

If nothing changes, nothing changes. If you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting what you're getting. You want change, make some.
Courtney C. Stevens

Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard his spots?
Jeremiah 23:13

All things are changed, and we change with them. (Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis.)
Lothair I

Times change and men deteriorate. (Tempora mutantur et homines deteriorantur.)
The Gesta Romanorum

Woman, wind, and luck soon change.
Portuguese proverb

When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.
Lucius Cary (Viscount Falkland)

Such is the state of life that none are happy but by the anticipation of change. The change itself is nothing: when we have made it the next wish is to change again.
Samuel Johnson

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Thomas à Kempis

Only the most intelligent and the most stupid do not change.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.
John Henry Cardinal Newman

Chapter


Life doesn't happen in chapters — at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn't write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children's books ("I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep") but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.
Terry Pratchett

Character


There are things about me you wouldn't understand, things you couldn't understand, things you shouldn't understand.
Pee Wee Herman

The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes another's.
Jean Paul Richter

If I keep my good character, I shall be rich enough.
Platonicus

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and that is character.
H. L. Mencken

The older I grow the less I esteem mere ideas. In politics, particularly, they are transient and unimportant … There are only men who have character and men who lack it.
H. L. Mencken

Mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character. The wisest man sometimes acts weakly, and the weakest sometimes wisely.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

When wealth is lost, nothing is lost;
When health is lost, something is lost;
When character is lost, all is lost!
Author unidentified

But the human character, however it may be exalted or depressed by a temporary enthusiasm, will return by degrees to its proper and natural level, and will resume those passions that seem the most adapted to its present condition.
Edward Gibbon

There never could be a man so brave that he would not sometime, or in the end, turn part or all coward; or so wise that he was not, from beginning to end, part ass if you knew where to look; or so good that nothing at all about him was despicable.
James Gould Cozzen

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
John Wooden

Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are; if I know how you spend your time, then I know what might become of you.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is in trifles, and when he is off his guard, that a man best shows his character.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Your character depends largely upon what the public doesn't know about you.
Author unidentified

One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.
Meister Eckhart

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds; and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar combination of outward with inward facts, which constitute a man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves wise about his character.
George Eliot

Charity


With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Abraham Lincoln

Charity and pride have different aims, yet both feed the poor.
Thomas Fuller

He gives twice that gives soon; i.e., he will soon be called to give again.
Benjamin Franklin

I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself.
Byron

Do not tell me of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.
R. W. Emerson

With one hand I take thousands of rubles from the poor, and with the other I hand back a few kopecks.
Leo Tolstoy

The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.
William Hutton

It was his doctrine that the poor
Were always able, never willing;
And so the beggar at the door
Had first abuse and then a shilling.
W. M. Praed

Whatever capital you divert to the support of to a shiftless and good-for-nothing person is so much diverted from some other employment, and that means from somebody else.
W. G. Sumner

I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose. I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.
Grover Cleveland

Charity begins at hame, but shouldna end there.
Scottish Proverb

Charity cannot take the place of justice unfairly withheld.
Pope Pius XI

But how shall we expect charity towards others, when we are uncharitable to ourselves? Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world; yet is every man his greatest enemy, and, as it were, his own executioner.
Sir Thomas Browne

"To wipe all tears from off all faces," is a task too hard for mortals; but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power: yet the opportunities which every day affords of relieving the most wretched of human beings are overlooked and neglected, with equal disregard of policy and goodness.
Samuel Johnson

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.
George Sand

Charles Dickens


Mr. Dickens writes too often and too fast …. If he persists much longer in this course, it requires no gift of prophecy to foretell his fate he has risen like a rocket, and he will come down like a stick.
Anonymous review 1838

Dickens was the incarnation of cockneydom, a caricaturist who aped the moralist; he should have kept to short stories. If his novels are read at all in the future people will wonder what we saw in him.
George Meredith

He [Charles Dickens] describes London like a special correspondent for posterity.
Walter Bagehot

Charles I


His [Charles I] policy was a series of intrigues which failed, and a succession of bargains in which he asked much, offered little, and got nothing.
C. H. Firth

Charm


Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave as outrageously as the world will let them.
Logan Pearsall Smith

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.
Oscar Wilde

Chastity


Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.
Saint Augustine

Chaste makes waste.
Author unidentified

An untempted woman cannot boast of her chastity.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

Although the progress of civilization has undoubtedly contributed to assuage the fiercer passions of human nature, it seems to have been less favorable to the virtue of chastity … The refinements of life corrupt while they polish the intercourse of the sexes.
Edward Gibbon

A reputation for chastity is necessary to a woman. Chastity itself is also sometimes useful.
Author unidentified

It is possible to meet with women who have never had an affair of gallantry; but it is rare to find any who have had only one.
La Rochefoucauld

Your women of honor, as you call 'em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons; and 'tis scandal that they would avoid, not men.
William Wycherley

A woman's resistance is no proof of her virtue; it is much more likely to be a proof of her experience. If we spoke sincerely, we should have to confess that our first impulse is to yield; we only resist on reflection.
Ninon D'Enclos

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery.
P. B. Shelley: Queen Mab, notes, 1813

The most virtuous woman always has something within her that is not quite chaste.
Honoré de Balzac

Che Guevara


Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a freethinker and a rebel.
Paul Berman

Cheapness


What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
Thomas Paine

Cheating


He that cheats me once, shame on him; he that cheats me twice, shame on me. (He that cheats me ance, shame fa' him; he that cheats me twice; shame fa' me.)
Scottish Proverb

'Tis no sin to cheat a cheater. (Fallere fallentem non est fraus.)
Medieval Latin Proverb

And while a rightful claim to pleasure or to affluence must be procured either by slow industry or uncertain hazard, there will always be multitudes whom cowardice or impatience incite to more safe and more speedy methods, who strive to pluck the fruit without cultivating the tree, and to share the advantages of victory without partaking the danger of the battle.
Samuel Johnson

Cheek


See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand!
Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand,
That I might touch that cheek!
Shakespeare

Cheerfulness


Be cheerful while you are alive.
Ptahhotpe

Health and cheerfulness mutually beget each other.
Joseph Addison

Chess


Life's too short for chess.
Henry J. Byron

[Chess is a] foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
George Bernard Shaw

Chicago


Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Claes Oldenburg

Child


The child is not the mere creature of the state.
U.S. Supreme Court, 1925

A child is a lifetime of worry.
Author unidentified

Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him with it much more effective.
P. J. O'Rourke

Teach your child to hold his tongue, he'll learn fast enough to speak.
Author unidentified

A child tells in the street what its father and mother say at home.
The Talmud

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
To have a thankless child!
Shakespeare

A naughty child is better sick than whole.
George Herbert

The fundamental theory of liberty upon which governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the state.
Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Oregon school case, 1925

Childhood


Grow up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The childhood shows the man
As morning shows the day.
John Milton

It is customary, but I think it is a mistake, to speak of happy childhood. Children are often overanxious and acutely sensitive. Man ought to be man and master of his fate; but children are at the mercy of those around them.
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)

Childless


The childless escape much misery.
Euripides

It is horrible to see oneself die without children.
Napoleon I

Children


I am married to Beatrice Salkeld, a painter. We have no children, except me.
Brendan Behan

Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your children.
Author unidentified

Anybody who hates children and dogs can't be all bad.
W. C. Fields

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde

Children seldom misquote you. In fact, they usually repeat word for word what you shouldn't have said.
Author unidentified

I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.
Robert Orben

My husband and I are either going to buy a dog or have a child. We can't decide whether to ruin our carpet or ruin our lives.
Rita Rudner

Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Mark 10:14

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises.
Francis Bacon

When children stand quiet they have done some ill.
George Herbert

We are given children to test us and make us more spiritual.
George F. Will

Learning to dislike children at an early age saves a lot of expense and aggravation later in life.
Robert Byrne

Every generation faces a barbarian invasion in the form of its own children, who need to be civilized.
Attributed to Irving Kristol

It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.
Kingsley Amis

It's never the right time to have kids, but it's always the right time for screwing. God's not a dumb shit. He knows how it works.
Samuel Halpern

Children's tongues are filled with questions,
Children cannot speak in wisdom.
Elias Lonnrot, The Kalevala

It is a great happiness to see our children rising round us, but from that good fortune spring the bitterest woes of man.
Aeschylus

What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?
Euripides

Children and chickens would ever be eating.
Thomas Tusser

Children are poor men's riches.
English Proverb

Children are certain cares and uncertain comforts.
English Proverb

Late children, early orphans.
Benjamin Franklin

Children have neither a past nor a future. Thus they enjoy the present — which seldom happens to us.
Jean de la Bruyère

Children should be seen and not heard.
English Proverb

All children are by nature evil, and while they have none but the natural evil principle to guide them, pious and prudent parents must check their naughty passions in any way that they have in their power, and force them into decent and proper behavior and into what are called good habits.
Martha Mary Butt

Children need models more than they need critics.
Joseph Joubert

Children are never too tender to be whipped: — like tough beefsteaks, the more you beat them the more tender they become.
E. A. Poe

Children are a torment, and nothing else.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

There are many loving parents in the world, but no loving children.
Chinese Proverb

A house without children is only a cemetery.
Sanskrit Proverb

The dearest child of all is the dead one.
Spanish Proverb

Little children, little sorrows; big children, great sorrows. (Variation: Small child, small problems. Big child, big problems.)
Danish Proverb

Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify?
Hannah More

Envy the kangaroo. That pouch setup is extraordinary; the baby crawls out of the womb when it is about two inches long, gets into the pouch, and proceeds to mature. I'd have a baby if it would develop in my handbag.
Rita Rudner

Chivalry


But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Edmund Burke

Chocolate


The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America which it has in Spain.
Thomas Jefferson

Choice


May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.
Nelson Mandela

It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.
J. K. Rowling

Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
Joan Didion

Christian


The Christians are unhappy men who are persuaded that they will survive death and live forever; in consequence, they despise death and are willing to sacrifice their lives to their faith.
Lucian

Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian.
Shakespeare

To make one a complete Christian he must have the works of a papist, the words of a Puritan, and the faith of a Protestant.
James Howell

I have sent for you that you may see how a Christian can die.
Joseph Addison, on his deathbed

A very heathen in the carnal part,
Yet still a sad, good Christian at her heart.
Alexander Pope

I think all Christians, whether papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.
Samuel Johnson

Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded
That all the Apostles would have done as they did.
Byron

Whatever makes men good Christians makes them good citizens.
Daniel Webster

Christianity is the bastard progeny of Judaism. It is the basest of all national religions.
Celsus

The Christian religion teaches me two points — that there is a God whom men can know, and that their nature is so corrupt that they are unworthy of Him.
Blaise Pascal

I would believe in Christianity if it dated from the beginning of the world.
Napoleon I

Offences by Christians are far more abominable than those by the heathen.
Martin Luther

Christianity


To be mistaken in believing that the Christian religion is true is no great loss to anyone; but how dreadful to be mistaken in believing it to be false!
Blaise Pascal

It is no fault of Christianity that a hypocrite falls into sin.
Saint Jerome

I discovered that the calamities of mankind during the Christian centuries occurred not because men and women practiced Christianity but because they failed to do so. Bad as it was with religion, mankind would be infinitely worse without it.
Paul Johnson

A shipwrecked sailor, landing on a lonely beach, observed a gallows. "Thank God," he exclaimed, "I am in a Christian country!
Author unidentified

Christianity teaches a man to spend the best part of his life preparing for the worst.
Author unidentified

The man who gave them their name, Christus, had been executed during the rule of Tiberius by the [prefect] Pontius Pilatus. The pernicious superstition had been temporarily suppressed, but it was starting to break out again, not just in Judaea, the starting point of the curse, but in Rome as well, where all that is abominable and shameful in the world flows together and gains popularity. And so, at first, those who confessed were apprehended, and subsequently, on the disclosures they made, a huge number were found guilty — more because of their hatred of mankind than because they were arsonists.
Tacitus

Of all the religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, [Christianity] is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms: all men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon — of such are the celestial elect.
H. L. Mencken

Christmas


Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat,
Please to put a penny in the old man's hat;
If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do,
If you haven't got a ha'penny, God bless you.
Old English Carol

Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity.
Don Cupitt

Christopher Columbus


When he [Christopher Columbus] started out he didn't know where he was going, when he got there he didn't know where he was, and when he got back he didn't know where he had been.
Author unidentified

Christopher Marlowe


Marlowe was happy in his buskin Muse —
Alas, unhappy in his life and end;
Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell,
Wit lent from Heaven, but vices sent from Hell.
Anonymous

Church


Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm.
William Blake

We must recall that the Church is always 'one generation away from extinction.'
George Carey

Church and State


Christianity, with its doctrine of humility, of forgiveness, of love, is incompatible with the state, with its haughtiness, its violence, its punishments, its wars.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

Cigar


Sublime tobacco! which from East to West,
Cheers the tar's labor or the Turkman's rest;
Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe,
When tipp'd with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe;
Like other charmers wooing the caress,
More dazzling when daring in full dress;
Yet thy true lovers more adore by far
Thy naked beauties — Give me a cigar!
Byron

And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
Rudyard Kipling

Circumstance


I never was truly my own master; but was always controlled by circumstances.
Napoleon

Circumstantial Evidence


Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.
H. D. Thoreau

Circus


A good circus is an oasis of Hellenism in a world that reads too much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful.
Oscar Wilde

Citizen


Civis, the most honorable name among the Romans; a citizen, a word of contempt among us.
Jonathan Swift

City


I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.
Steve McQueen

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.
Thomas Jefferson

I was rear'd
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,
And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.
S. T. Coleridge

If you would be known, and not know, vegetate in a village; if you would know, and not be known, live in a city.
C. C. Colton

A great city, a great solitude. (Magna civitas, magna solitudo.)
Latin Proverb

God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.
Abraham Cowley

Civic Duty


From a very early age, I had imbibed the opinion, that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave his country as good as he had found it.
William Cobbett

Civil Service


The business of the Civil Service is the orderly management of decline.
William Armstrong

Civil War


Thus ended the great American Civil War, which upon the whole must be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.
Winston Churchill

Say to the seceded States, "Wayward sisters, depart in peace."
Winfield Scott

Civility


Sleep not when others speak, sit not when others stand, speak not when you should hold your peace, walk not on when others stop.
George Washington

Civilization


Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.
Arnold Toynbee

Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.
Edward Gibbon

Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.
P. J. O'Rourke

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.
Will Durant

Civilization is not an evolution of mankind but the imposition of human good on human evil. It is not a historical inevitability. It is a battle that has to be fought every day, because evil doesn't recede willingly before the wheels of progress.
Andrew McCarthy

Some of us worry about a resurgent Islam and its attendant complications for a decayed Western civilization; some of us worry about global warming. In twenty years' time, one of us will be proved right.
Dennis Prager (Attributed)

Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.
Jean-François Revel

There is the moral of all human tales;
'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory — when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption — barbarism at last.
Lord Byron

We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star.
R. W. Emerson

Civilization is carried on by superior men, and not by people in the mass; if nature sends no such men, civilization declines.
Victor Duruy

All the civilizations we know have been created and directed by small intellectual aristocracies, never by people in the mass. The power of crowds is only to destroy.
Gustave Lebon

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.
Samuel Johnson

The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.
Thomas Carlyle

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops — no, but the kind of man the country turns out.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Clarity


A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.
Hugh Kingsmill

I prefer clarity to agreement.
Dennis Prager

Class


The class distinctions simply result from the different degrees of success with which men have availed themselves of the chances which were presented to them. Instead of endeavoring to redistribute the acquisitions which have been made between the existing classes, our aim should be to increase, multiply, and extend the chances.
William Graham Sumner

Classes


The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows over it.
Confucius

That some men are poorer than others ever was and ever will be; and that many are naturally querulous and envious is an evil as old as the world.
William Petty

Many faint with toil,
That few may know the cares and woe of sloth.
P. B. Shelley

Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more industrious, more persevering, and more sagacious.
John Ruskin

It is the tendency of all social burdens to crush out the middle class, and to force society into an organization of only two classes, one at each social extreme.
W. G. Sumner

Cleanliness


There was no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse.
Quentin Crisp

Cleanliness and order are not matters of instinct; they are matters of education, and like most great things, you must cultivate a taste for them.
Benjamin Disraeli

Cleanness of body was ever deemed to proceed from a due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.
Francis Bacon

Clergy


To a philosophic eye the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
Edward Gibbon

Cliché


They [clichés] will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
George Orwell

Client


Choose clients as you would friends.
Charlie Munger

Climate


In northern climates you will find people who have few vices, many virtues, and much sincerity and frankness. Go southward, and you will think that you have removed altogether from morality.
C. L. de Montesquieu

I wonder that any human being should remain in a cold country who could find room in a warm one.
Thomas Jefferson

I believe we should all behave quite differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all the time.
Noël Coward

Clothes


Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Mark Twain

She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on her with a pitchfork.
Jonathan Swift

And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.
Matthew 6:28-29

Cocaine


Cocaine is God's way of saying you're making too much money.
Robin Williams

[Is] cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to know. I've been using it for years.
Tallulah Bankhead

I said to a guy, I said, "Tell me, what is it about cocaine that makes it so wonderful?", and he said, "Well, it intensifies your personality." I said, "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"
Bill Cosby

Cocktail


A little whiskey to make it strong,
A little water to make it weak,
A little lemon to make it sour,
A little sugar to make it sweet.
Anonymous

Cod


Oh, no doubt the cod is a splendid swimmer — admirable for swimming purposes but not for eating.
Oscar Wilde

Coercion


Millions of innocent men, women and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burned, tortured, fined and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one-half of the world fools and the other half hypocrites.
Thomas Jefferson

Experience has taught us that men will not adopt and carry into execution measures the best calculated for their own good without the intervention of a coercive power.
George Washington

Coffee


Coffee, because adulting is hard.
Author unidentified

Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste.
Mark Twain

Coffee should be black as Hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.
Turkish Proverb

Cognac


Good cognac is like a woman. Do not assault it. Coddle and warm it in your hands before you sip it.
Winston Churchill

College


Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Colonialism


The colonial powers did not conspire against the natives. They conspired against each other. Each colonial power hated all the rest, despised their methods, rejoiced in their misfortunes and happily aggravated them when convenient. They would not cooperate even when imperative self-interest demanded it.
Paul Johnson

The Europeans have scarcely visited any coast but to gratify avarice and extend corruption; to arrogate dominion without right, and practice cruelty without incentive.
Samuel Johnson

Color


I cannot pretend to feel impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.
Winston Churchill

Any color — so long as it's black.
Henry Ford, on the choice of color for the Model T Ford

Comedy


The funniest thing about comedy is that you never know why people laugh. I know what makes them laugh but trying to get your hands on the why of it is like trying to pick an eel out of a tub of water.
W. C. Fields

They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian … They're not laughing now.
Bob Monkhouse

Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.
Angela Carter

Comfort


The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.
Confucius

The man who expects comfort in this life must be born deaf, dumb and blind.
Turkish Proverb

Human comfort and divine comfort are of different natures: human comfort consists in external, visible help, which a man may see, hold, and feel; divine comfort only in words and promises, where there is neither seeing, hearing, nor feeling.
Martin Luther

I do not ask you much: I beg cold comfort.
Shakespeare

Command


He that cannot obey, cannot command.
Author unidentified

[It] is sad to remember that, when anyone has fairly mastered the art of command, the necessity for that art usually expires — either through the termination of the war or through the advanced age of the commander.
George S. Patton, Jr.

No man is fit to command another that cannot command himself.
William Penn

Commander


In my experience, all very successful commanders are prima donnas, and must be so treated. Some officers require urging, others require suggestions, very few have to be restrained.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Comment


I think 'No Comment' is a splendid expression. I am using it again and again.
Winston Churchill

Commerce


As the sun of civilisation rose above the hills, the fair flowers of commerce unfolded, and the streams of supply and demand, hitherto congealed by the frost of barbarism, were thawed.
Winston Churchill

Committee


Committee: A group of the unfit appointed by the unwilling to do the unnecessary.
Carl C. Byers

I've searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.
G. K. Chesterton

Committee — a group of men who individually can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done.
Fred Allen (attributed)

Common People


If by the people you understand the multitude, the hoi polloi, 'tis no matter what they think; they are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong: their judgement is a mere lottery.
John Dryden

Common Sense


Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

[As] a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is obviously true; common men have less brains, but more sense.
Walter T. Stace

Common sense is not so common.
Voltaire

Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it. (Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée, car chacun pense en être bien pourvu.)
René Descartes

Communication


The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it.
William H. Whyte

Communism


The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
The Communist Manifesto

Communism requires of its adherents that they arise early and participate in a strenuous round of calisthenics. To someone who wishes that cigarettes came already lit the thought of such exertion at an hour when decent people are just nodding off is thoroughly abhorrent.
Fran Lebowitz

Communism is the opiate of the intellectuals.
Clare Booth Luce

I sometimes think that the entire [Communist movement] was just a front for the cement industry.
Author unidentified

Losing you is not a loss, and keeping you is no specific gain.
Khmer Rouge slogan

For over ten years, bombs rained down on every village and hamlet in South Vietnam, and no one budged. It took the coming of a Communist 'peace' to send hundreds of thousands of people out into the South China Sea, on anything that could float, or might float, to risk dehydration, piracy, drowning.
General Vernon Walters (paraphrased)

Were it possible to have a community of property, it would soon be found that no one would toil, but that men would be disposed to be satisfied with barely enough for the supply of their physical wants, since none would exert themselves to obtain advantages solely for the use of others.
J. Fenimore Cooper

All men have an equal right to the free development of their faculties; they have an equal right to the impartial protection of the state; but it is not true, it is against all the laws of reason and equity, it is against the eternal nature of things, that the indolent man and the laborious man, the spendthrift and the economist, the imprudent and the wise, should obtain and enjoy an equal amount of goods.
Victor Cousin

Institutions grounded on Communism always have brilliant beginnings, for Communism involves a great exaltation; but they decline rapidly, for Communism is in conflict with human nature.
Ernest Renan

When two friends have a common purse, one sings and the other weeps.
Spanish Proverb

Everyone can see how communism rots the soul of a nation. How it makes it abject in peace and proves it abominable in war.
Winston Churchill

A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. … From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.
Winston Churchill

I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.
Winston Churchill

If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, 'How shocking!'
Winston Churchill

Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism … As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction.
Winston Churchill

Fidel Castro is right. You do not quieten your enemy by talking with him like a priest, but by burning him.
Nicolae Ceauşescu

Communist


[A communist is] one who has nothing, and is eager to share it with others.
Author unidentified

What is a communist? One who hath yearnings For equal division of unequal earnings.
Ebenezer Elliott

Community Organizer


Like most people, I have no wish to live in a community organized by community organizers.
Mark Steyn

The thirteenth rule of radical tactics: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Saul Alinsky

The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced their cause is 100 percent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 percent on the side of the devil. He knows there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree.
Saul Alinsky

Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future.
Saul Alinsky

The classic statement on polarization comes from Christ: 'He that is not with me is against me.' (Luke 11:23) He allowed no middle ground to the moneychangers in the Temple. One acts decisively only in the conviction that all the angels are on one side and all the devils on the other.
Saul Alinsky

It should be borne in mind that the target is always trying to shift responsibility to get out of being the target. There is a constant squirming and moving and strategy … on the part of the designated target. The forces for change must keep this in mind and pin that target down securely. If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.
Saul Alinsky

Companion


The companion of an evening and the companion for life, require very different qualifications.
Samuel Johnson

Company


The wise man will want to be ever with him who is better than himself.
Plato

He that goeth to bed with dogs ariseth with fleas.
John Sanford

A man is known by the company he keeps.
English Proverb

Keep not ill company lest you increase the number.
George Herbert

Company in distress
Makes the sorrow less.
Thomas Fuller

Associate yourself with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for 'tis better to be alone than in bad company.
George Washington

Lay aside the best book whenever you can go into the best company; and depend upon it, you change for the better.
Lord Chesterfield

Bad company corrupts good character.
1 Corinthians 15:33

Comparison


Take thou heed that thou make no comparisons, and if any body happen to be praised for some brave act, or virtue, praise not another for the same virtue in his presence, for every comparison is odious.
Francis Hawkins

But how can it avail the man who languishes in the gloom of sorrow, without prospect of emerging into the sunshine of cheerfulness, to hear that others are sunk yet deeper in the dungeon of misery, shackled with heavier chains, and surrounded with darker desperation?
Samuel Johnson

Compassion


If we wish to feel good, compassion is excellent. But if we want to do good, our compassion must be guided by moral standards.
Dennis Prager

We should only affect compassion, and carefully avoid having any.
La Rochefoucauld

Compensation


Since I must be old and have the gout, I have long turned those disadvantages to my own account, and plead them to the utmost when they will save me from doing anything I dislike.
Horace Walpole

Competence


Of all the human qualities, the one I admire the most is competence. A tailor who is really able to cut and fit a coat seems to me an admirable man, and by the same token a university professor who knows little or nothing of the thing he presumes to teach seems to me to be a fraud and a rascal.
H. L. Mencken

Competition


The best competition I have is against myself to become better.
John Wooden

Complaining


Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others.
C. S. Lewis

Complaining about a problem without proposing a solution is called whining.
Author unidentified

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.
Edmund Burke

Complexity


Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling — the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration. Possibly this trend results from a mistaken belief that using a somewhat mysterious device confers an aura of power on the user.
Niklaus Wirth

Compliment


There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me — I always feel that they have not said enough.
Mark Twain

Women are never disarmed by compliments; men always are.
Oscar Wilde

Composer


The good composer is slowly discovered, the bad composer is slowly found out.
Ernest Newman

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger

Tchaikovsky thought of committing suicide for fear of being discovered as a homosexual, but today, if you are a composer and not homosexual, you might as well put a bullet through your head.
Sergei Diaghilev

Composing


You can't stop. Composing's not voluntary, you know. There's no choice, you're not free. You're landed with an idea and you have responsibility to that idea.
Harrison Birtwhistle

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
William Blake

Compromise


[A compromise] is an agreement between two men to do what both agree is wrong.
Lord Edward Cecil

Compulsion


Yet we are constantly annoyed, and the legislatures are kept constantly busy, by the people who have made up their minds that it is wise and conducive to happiness to live in a certain way, and who want to compel everybody else to live in their way.
William Graham Sumner

Computer


But they [computers] are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso

To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.
Author unidentified

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.
John von Neumann

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
Rick Cook

Whenever I'm on my computer, I don't type 'lol'. I type 'lqtm': 'laugh quietly to myself'. It's more honest.
Demetri Martin

A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
Mitch Ratcliffe

The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning.
Camille Paglia

Computers are anti-Faraday machines. He said he couldn't understand anything until he could count it, while computers count everything and understand nothing.
Ralph Cornes

Computer Programming


Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Author unidentified

A good programmer can overcome a poor language or a clumsy operating system, but even a great programming environment will not rescue a bad programmer.
Kernighan and Pike

[The C programming language] is a razor-sharp tool, with which one can create an elegant and efficient program or a bloody mess.
Kernighan and Pike

Sometimes a programmer confronted with a problem thinks, "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now he has two problems.
Jamie Zawinski, paraphrased

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to to, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
Donald Knuth

Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
Bill Gates

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
Maurice Wilkes, who discovered debugging c. 1949

[The C programming language] makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows your whole leg off.
Bjarne Stroustrup

Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why.
Author unidentified

When someone says, "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done," give him a lollipop.
Alan Perlis

That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer.
Fred Brooks, Jr.

PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil, perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals.
Jon Ribbens

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.
Donald Knuth

Correctness is clearly the prime quality. If a system does not do what it is supposed to do, then everything else about it matters little.
Bertrand Meyer

The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
Henry Petroski

To this very day, idiot software managers measure "programmer productivity" in terms of "lines of code produced," whereas the notion of "lines of code spent" is much more appropriate.
Dijkstra

Generally, the length of a variable name should be inversely related to its scope.
Author unidentified

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.
Gerald Weinberg (Attributed)

Con Man


[Con] men have long known … that their job is not to convince skeptics but to enable the gullible to continue to believe what they want to believe.
Thomas Sowell

Conceit


Do you see a person wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for them.
Proverbs 26:12

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.
La Rochefoucauld

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
Marian Evans (George Eliot)

Concupiscence


They are well-fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for another man’s wife.
Jeremiah 5:8

Condescension


There is nothing more likely to betray a man into absurdity than condescension.
Samuel Johnson

Conductor


Why do we have to have all these third-rate foreign conductors around-when we have so many second-rate ones of our own?
Thomas Beecham

Confession


What madness to confess by day what was concealed by the darkness of night, and to relate openly what thou hast done secretly.
Ovid

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.
The Book of Common Prayer

Confide


We seldom confide in those who are better than ourselves. (Nous nous confions rarement à ceux qui sont meilleurs que nous.)
Albert Camus

Confidence


Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one's voice.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
Edward Gibbon

Confidence comes from being prepared.
John Wooden

You need confidence to play a sport well. How do you get confidence? You get confidence from playing well.
Author unidentified

I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four Cs. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence.
Walt Disney

Conformity


Since it is now fashionable to laugh at the conservative French Academy, I have remained a rebel by joining it.
Jean Cocteau

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Author unknown

To think for himself! Oh, my God, teach him to think like other people!
Mary Godwin Shelley, On being advised to send her son to a school where he would be taught to think for himself

The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.
R. W. Emerson

Confusion


Confusion is always the most honest response.
Marty Indik

Congress


It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

Oh, I don't blame Congress. If I had $600 billion at my disposal, I'd be irresponsible, too.
Lichty and Wagner

Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.
Abraham Lincoln

We do not elect our wisest and best men to represent us in the Senate and the Congress. In general, we elect men of the type that subscribes to only one principle — to get reelected.
Terry M. Townsend

Congressman


You have no idea how destitute of talent are more than half of the members of Congress. Nine out of ten of your ordinary acquaintances are fully equal to them.
Sergeant S. Prentiss

You can't use tact with a Congressman. A Congressman is a hog. You must take a stick and hit him on the snout.
Henry Adams

Conqueror


What millions died — that Caesar might be great!
Thomas Campbell

The English conquered us, but they are far from being our equals.
Napoleon I

The greatest conqueror is he who overcomes the enemy without a blow.
Chinese Proverb

Conquest


A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.
Edward Gibbon

Resistance was fatal; flight was impracticable; and the patient submission of helpless innocence seldom found mercy from the Barbarian conqueror.
Edward Gibbon

To rejoice in conquest is to rejoice in murder.
Lao-Tsze

If there be one principle more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.
Thomas Jefferson

By adverting to the dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.
Edmund Burke

Conscience


The Anglo-Saxon conscience does not prevent the Anglo-Saxon from sinning, it merely prevents him from enjoying his sin.
Salvador De Madariaga

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
Author unidentified

Bachelors have consciences. Married men have wives.
H. L. Mencken

Cowardice asks: Is it safe? Expediency asks: Is it politic? But Conscience asks: Is it right?
William Punshon

A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
Author unidentified

First [a man facing temptation] sees difficulty, then he sees the danger, then he sees wrong.
H. L. Mencken

The laws of conscience, though we ascribe them to nature, actually come from custom.
Michel de Montaigne

A guilty conscience needs no accuser.
English Proverb

Conscience does make cowards of us all.
Shakespeare

I feel within me
A peace above all earthly dignities;
A still and quiet conscience.
Shakespeare and John Fletcher

A man that will enjoy a quiet conscience must lead a quiet life.
Lord Chesterfield

Conscience admonishes as a friend before punishing us as a judge.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinion of others.
Henry Taylor

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devis’d at first to keep the strong in awe.
Shakespeare

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
Samuel Butler

Consensus


Consensus is the absence of leadership.
Margaret Thatcher

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.
Margaret Thatcher

To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects.
Margaret Thatcher

The herd is usually wrong.
Author unidentified

Consent


A little still she strove, and much repented,
And whispering "I will ne'er consent" — consented.
Lord Byron

Consequence


If you do what you should not, you must hear what you would not.
Author unidentified

Grief often treads upon the Heels of Pleasure, Marry'd in Haste, we oft repent at Leisure.
Author unidentified

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.
Winston Churchill

Conservation


Because we can expect future generations to be richer than we are, no matter what we do about resources, asking us to refrain from using resources now so that future generations can have them later is like asking the poor to make gifts to the rich.
Julian Simon

Conservatism


Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.
Alexander Pope

What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?
Abraham Lincoln

Savages are the most conservative of human beings.
A. H. Sayce

Conservative


I am a Conservative to preserve all that is good in our constitution, a Radical to remove all that is bad. I seek to preserve property and to respect order, and I equally decry the appeal to the passions of the many or the prejudices of the few.
Benjamin Disraeli

[Conservatives are inclined] to believe that old wisdom is plentiful while new wisdom is scarce and suspect.
William Voegeli

The facts of life are conservative.
Author unidentified

Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce

Consistency


Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Oscar Wilde

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
John Maynard Keynes

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.
W. Somerset Maugham

Consolation


Before the affliction is digested consolation comes too soon, and after it is digested it comes too late.
Laurence Sterne

Do not try to console a man while the corpse is still in the house.
Hebrew Proverb

Constancy


The wife seldom rambles till the husband shows her the way.
John Vanbrugh

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
Balzac

Constitution


No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.
Thomas Jefferson

Constitutionality


I hope your committee will not permit doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block the suggested legislation.
F. D. Roosevelt

Constructive Criticism


Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince, than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, Sir.
Emily Dickinson

Consultation


Well, one can always consult a man and ask him, "Would you like your head cut off tomorrow?" and after he has said "I would rather not," cut it off. "Consultation" is a vague and elastic term.
Winston Churchill

Contempt


Many can bear adversity, but few contempt.
Thomas Fuller

Contempt is the sharpest reproof.
H. G. Bohn

Man is much more sensitive to the contempt of others than to self-contempt.
F. W. Nietzsche

Contentment


Content and riches
Seldom meet together.
Riches take thou,
Contentment I had rather.
Benjamin Franklin

The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied.
Lucretius

Poor and content is rich and rich enough.
Shakespeare

When we cannot find contentment in ourselves it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
La Rochefoucauld

Happy the man, of mortals happiest he,
Whose quiet mind from vain desires is free;
Whom neither hopes deceive, nor fears torment,
But lives at peace, within himself content.
George Granville

The utmost we can hope for in this world is contentment; if we aim at anything higher, we shall meet with nothing but grief and disappointment.
Joseph Addison

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.
Benjamin Franklin

My motto is "contented with little, yet wishing for more."
Charles Lamb

No man is content with his lot. (Nemo sua sorte contentus.)
Latin Proverb

Contest


The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin

Continence


Continence is a greater good than marriage. But I am aware of some that murmur: if all men should abstain from intercourse, how will the human race exist? Would that all would abstain; much more speedily would the City of God be filled, and the end of the world hastened.
St. Augustine

Contradiction


When we risk no contradiction,
It prompts the tongue to deal in fiction.
John Gay

Contrast


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Charles Dickens

I love to mark sad faces in fair weather,
And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder.
John Keats

Controversy


The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way.
Bertrand Russell

Convent


I like convents, but I wish they would not admit anyone under the age of fifty.
Napoleon I

Conversation


A gossip talks about others, a bore talks about himself — and a brilliant conversationalist talks about you.
Author unidentified

Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
Oscar Wilde

Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you.
Oscar Wilde

I like to do all the talking myself. It saves time, and prevents arguments.
Oscar Wilde

When I left the dining room from sitting next to Mr. Gladstone I thought he was the cleverest man in England, but after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.
Author unidentified, but sometimes attributed to Queen Victoria

Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.
Ernest Bramah

"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.

"I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least — at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing, you know."

"Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "Why, you might just as well say that 'I see what I eat' is the same thing as 'I eat what I see!'"

Lewis Carroll

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot

The more the bodily pleasures decrease, the greater grows the desire for the pleasure of conversation.
Plato

The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than about what others are saying, and we never listen when we are eager to speak.
La Rochefoucauld

If the minds of men were laid open, we should see but little difference between that of the wise man and that of the fool. The great difference is that the first knows how to pick and cull his thoughts for conversation, by suppressing some and communicating others; whereas the other lets them all indifferently fly out in words.
Joseph Addison

The pleasure which men are able to give in conversation holds no stated proportion to their knowledge or their virtue.
Samuel Johnson

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered, but a general effect of pleasing impression.
Samuel Johnson

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years' study of books.
H. W. Longfellow

Convert


A man who is converted from Protestantism to popery parts with nothing; he is only superadding to what he already had. But a convert from popery to Protestantism gives up as much of what he has held sacred as anything that he retains.
Samuel Johnson

Conviction


Convictions are more dangerous to truth than lies.
F. W. Nietzsche

Cook


Too many cooks spoil the broth.
English Proverb

Cooking


Cooking is the most ancient of the arts, for Adam was born hungry.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Cooperation


Many hands make light work.
English Proverb

The business of life is carried on by a general co-operation; in which the part of any single man can be no more distinguished, than the effect of a particular drop when the meadows are floated by a summer shower: yet every drop increases the inundation, and every hand adds to the happiness or misery of mankind.
Samuel Johnson

Coordination


In fact, it is my opinion that co-ordination is a very much-misused word and its accomplishment is difficult.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Copernicus


Copernicus did not publish his book until he was on his deathbed. He knew how dangerous it is to be right when the rest of the world is wrong.
Thomas B. Reed

Coquetry


Coquetry is of advantage only to the beautiful.
Propertius

Such is your cold coquette, who can't say "No,"
And won't say "Yes," and keeps you on and off-ing.
Byron

And what, after all, is the benefit which the gay coquette obtains by her flutters? … she has companions indeed, but no lovers; for love is respectful and timorous; and where among all her followers will she find a husband?
Samuel Johnson

Corporation


Corporations cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed, nor excommunicated, for they have no souls.
Edward Coke

Corporations … are many lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man.
Thomas Hobbes

Corruption's not of modern date;
It hath been tried in ev'ry state.
John Gay

Corpse


He'd make a lovely corpse.
Charles Dickens

Corruption


I want either less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
Ashleigh Brilliant

The only way to reduce corruption in government is to reduce the size of government.
Paul Johnson

All who have ever written on government are unanimous, that among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist.
Edmund Burke

There is not, perhaps, in all the stores of ideal anguish, a thought more painful, than the consciousness of having propagated corruption by vitiating principles, of having not only drawn others from the paths of virtue, but blocked up the way by which they should return, of having blinded them to every beauty but the paint of pleasure, and deafened them to every call but the alluring voice of the syrens of destruction.
Samuel Johnson

Corsican


Their prominent national character is never to forget a benefit or an injury. For the slightest insult in Corsica, a shot. Murders are consequently very common. At the same time, no people are more grateful for benefits conferred, and they will not scruple to sacrifice their lives for the person who bestowed them.
Napoleon I

Cosmetics


She looks like an old coach newly painted.
William Wycherley

Cosmopolitan


I don't set up for being a cosmopolite, which to my mind signifies being polite to every country except your own.
Thomas Hood

Cost


What costs little is less esteemed.
Thomas Fuller

Counsel


Give neither counsel nor salt till you are asked for it.
Italian Proverb

Who cannot give good counsel? 'tis cheap, it costs them nothing.
Robert Burton

Country


My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.
Senator Carl Schurz

Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition.
Mark Steyn

[A London clubman's view of the country:] A damp sort of place where all sorts of birds fly about uncooked.
Joseph Wood Krutch

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Walter Scott

I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood-identity of these makes men of one country.
S. T. Coleridge

Every man loves his own country best, even though it be Hell.
Persian Proverb

He likes the country, but in truth must own,
Most likes it, when he studies it in town.
William Cowper

When I am in the country I wish to vegetate like the country.
William Hazlitt

Courage


Courage arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength.
Edward Gibbon

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis

Do not take counsel of your fears.
George S. Patton, Jr.

No sane man is unafraid in battle, but discipline produces in him a form of vicarious courage which, with his manhood, makes for victory.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.
Shakespeare

Courage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence.
François Fénelon

I would define true courage to be a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
W. T. Sherman

The Lacedemonians (Spartans) are not wont to ask how many the enemy are, but where they are.
Ascribed to Agis II, King of Sparta, c. 415 B.C.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.
Samuel Johnson

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, it is the quality which guarantees all others.
Winston Churchill

Courage And Cowardice


The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
Mark Twain

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
Mark Twain

We must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.
Benjamin Franklin

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
William Shakespeare

To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Euripides

The better part of valor is discretion.
William Shakespeare

There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result.
Winston Churchill

Valor, n. A soldierly compound of vanity, duty, and the gambler's hope.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
Mark Twain

Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.
Joshua 1:9

There grows
No herb of help to heal a coward heart.
Algernon Charles Swinburne

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Mark Twain

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
G. K. Chesterton

I scorned the sword of Catiline, I will not quail before yours.
Cicero

Court


Is not uncertainty and inconstancy in the highest degree disreputable to a court?
Samuel Johnson

When counsel addresses an argument on the ground of natural justice to a court of law, he addresses it to the wrong tribunal. It may be a good argument for inducing the legislature to alter the law; but in a court of law all that we can deal with is the law of the land as we find it.
Mr. Justice North

Courtesy


The more courtesy, the more craft.
John Clarke

He may freely receive courtesies who knows how to requite them.
John Ray

Where there is o'er mickle courtesy there is little kindness.
James Kelly

An excess of courtesy is discourtesy.
Japanese Proverb

Courtship


Courtship to marriage is but as the music in the playhouse till the curtain's drawn.
William Congreve

Covetousness


In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain

The covetous man is full of fear; and he who lives in fear will ever be a bondman.
Horace

Riches have made more covetous men than covetousness hath made rich men.
Thomas Fuller

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
Exodus 20:17

Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.
Arthur Hugh Clough

Coward


Instinct is a great matter; I was a coward on instinct.
William Shakespeare

The coward calls himself cautious. (Timidus se vocat cautum.)
Publilius Syrus

It is the act of a coward to wish for death.
Ovid

Cowards fight when they can fly no further;
As doves do peck the falcon's piercing talons.
Shakespeare

Few cowards know the extent of their fear.
La Rochefoucauld

He who fights and runs away
May live to fight another day;
But he who is in battle slain
Can never rise and fight again.
Oliver Goldsmith

Were one-half of mankind brave and one-half cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave, they would lead a very uneasy life; all would be continually fighting; but being all cowards, we go on very well.
Samuel Johnson: Boswell's Life, 1778.

It is better to be a coward for a minute than dead the rest of your life.
Irish Proverb

He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have.
Ernest Hemingway

Cowardice


To know what is right and not do it is the worst cowardice.
Confucius

A cowardly act! What do I care about that? You may be sure that I should never fear to commit one if it were to my advantage.
Napoleon I

A curse upon cowardice and covetousness.
They breed villainy and vice, and destroy all virtue.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
Ernest Hemingway

Crazy


I teach that all men are crazy. (Doceo insanire omnes.)
Horace

Creation


Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
Alfonso the Wise, on studying the Ptolemaic system (Attributed)

Creativity


The most gifted members of the human species are at their creative best when they cannot have their way, and must compensate for what they miss by realizing and cultivating their capacities and talents.
Eric Hoffer

Credulity


The world is naturally averse
To all the truth it sees or hears,
But swallows nonsense, and a lie
With greediness and gluttony.
Samuel Butler

Better be too credulous than too skeptical.
Chinese Proverb

Credulity is the common failing of unexperienced virtue.
Samuel Johnson

Credulity is the man’s weakness, but the child’s strength.
Charles Lamb

Crime


Wrongdoing can only be avoided if those who are not wronged feel the same indignation at it as those who are.
Solon

The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.
Aristotle

All go free when multitudes offend. (Quicquid multis peccatur, inultum est.)
Lucan

What man was ever content with one crime?
Juvenal

Providence sees to it that no man gets happiness out of crime.
Vittorio Alfieri

Crime And Punishment


Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
H. L. Mencken

The argument that capital punishment degrades the state is moonshine, for if that were true then it would degrade the state to send men to war … The state, in truth, is degraded in its very nature: a few butcheries cannot do it any further damage.
H. L. Mencken

But I wonder where we will land if trial judges begin deciding that the fact that a man has committed an atrocious crime is proof sufficient that he is not responsible for his acts.
H. L. Mencken

[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.
Edward Gibbon

It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.
Antoine [Jacques Claude Joseph] Boulay de la Meurthe, On the execution of the Duc d’Enghien [1804]

No man who commits a crime in secret can ever be sure that he will not be detected, even though he has escaped 10,000 times in the past.
Epicurus

It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
Thomas Jefferson

And what makes robbers bold but too much lenity?
Shakespeare

To equal robbery with murder is to reduce murder to robbery; to confound in common minds the gradations of iniquity, and incite the commission of a greater crime to prevent the detection of a less.
Samuel Johnson

If only murder were punished with death, very few robbers would stain their hands in blood; but when, by the last act of cruelty, no new danger is incurred, and greater security may be obtained, upon what principle shall we bid them forbear?
Samuel Johnson

The gibbet, indeed, certainly disables those who die upon it from infesting the community; but their death seems not to contribute more to the reformation of their associates, than any other method of separation.
Samuel Johnson

Criminal


The learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave relates that he never saw a criminal dragged to execution without asking himself, "Who knows whether this man is not less culpable than me?"
Samuel Johnson

The criminal of today is the hero of our old legends.
Author unidentified

Prisoner, God has given you good abilities, instead of which you go about the country stealing ducks.
William Arabin

Critic


Critics are like eunuchs in a harem: they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
Brendan Behan

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.
Oscar Wilde

Critics, as they are birds of prey, have ever a natural inclination to carrion.
Alexander Pope

A fly, sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
Samuel Johnson

A poet that fails in writing becomes often a morose critic. The weak and insipid white wine makes at length excellent vinegar.
William Shenstone

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture, and is not obliged to speak the truth.
Samuel Johnson

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets, historians, biographers, if they could; they have tried their talents at one or the other, and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
S. T. Coleridge

Nature fits all her children with something to do: He who would write and can't write can surely review.
J. R. Lowell

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
Mark Twain

There are men to whom the satisfaction of throwing down a triumphant fallacy is as great as that which attends the discovery of a new truth.
T. H. Huxley

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.
F. W. Nietzsche

[A critic is] a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
Author unidentified

A true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.
Joseph Addison

The critick’s purpose is to conquer, the author only hopes to escape.
Samuel Johnson

God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won't even whore. They're all virtuous and sterile. And how well meaning and high minded. But they're all camp-followers.
Ernest Hemingway

Cosmopolitan critics, men who are the friends of every country save their own.
Benjamin Disraeli

You know who the critics are? The men who have failed in literature and art.
Benjamin Disraeli

Criticism


Taking to pieces is the trade of those who cannot construct.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

To avoid criticism do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard

The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves; and can readily discover some nice difference of age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.
Edward Gibbon

To find a fault is easy; to do better may be difficult.
Plutarch

Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who'll argue with you.
John Wooden

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Winston Churchill

Criticism is easy and art is difficult.
P. N. Destouches

Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense.
Samuel Johnson

You may abuse a tragedy though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.
Samuel Johnson

The duty of criticism is neither to depreciate, nor dignify by partial representations, but to hold out the light of reason, whatever it may discover; and to promulgate the determinations of truth, whatever she shall dictate.
Samuel Johnson

Others are furnished by criticism with a telescope. They see with great clearness whatever is too remote to be discovered by the rest of mankind, but are totally blind to all that lies immediately before them.
Samuel Johnson

Long experience has taught me that to be criticized is not always to be wrong.
Anthony Eden

Crocodile


How cheerfully he [the crocodile] seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
Lewis Carroll

Crowd


Observe any meetings of people, and you will always find their eagerness and impetuosity rise or fall in proportion to their numbers: when the numbers are very great, all sense and reason seem to subside, and one sudden frenzy to seize on all, even the coolest of them.
Lord Chesterfield

Large bodies are far more likely to err than individuals. The passions are inflamed by sympathy; the fear of punishment and the sense of shame are diminished by partition.
T. B. Macaulay

The individuals in a crowd, by their numbers, acquire a feeling of power which gives rein to instincts that, alone, they would have been forced to keep in check.
Gustave Lebon

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. (Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.)
Alcuin

Crown


Every noble crown is, and on earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.
Thomas Carlyle

Cruelty


All cruelty springs from weakness.
Seneca

I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.
William Shakespeare

The sins to which the Devil of Christian tradition has tempted human beings are varied indeed: apostasy, idolatry, heresy, fornication, gluttony, vanity, using cosmetics, dressing luxuriously, going to the theater, gambling, avarice, quarreling, spiritual sloth have all, at times, figured in the list. … I have looked in vain for a single instance … of the Devil tempting a human being to cruelty.
Norman Cohn

Scarcely anything awakens attention like a tale of cruelty. The writer of news never fails to tell how the enemy murdered children and ravished virgins; and if the scene of action be somewhat distant, scalps half the inhabitants of a province.
Samuel Johnson

Man is little inferior to the tiger and hyena in cruelty and savagery.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Being cruel to be kind is just ordinary cruelty with an excuse made for it. And it is right that it should be more resented, as it is.
Ivy Compton-Burnett

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself — it only requires opportunity.
George Eliot

Cucumber


A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.
Samuel Johnson

Culture


Culture is "to know the best that has been said and thought in the world."
Matthew Arnold

Hebraism and Hellenism — between these two points of influence moves our world.
Matthew Arnold

The great law of culture is: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle

Culture War


As a historian I have become increasingly fascinated by the perennial culture conflict … between radicals and conservatives: between, that is, those who believe the world can be reshaped by their own unaided intelligence and those who distrust reason in isolation and think it should be anchored in prescriptive wisdom, natural law and other restraints. … If you believe in the Hegelian dialectic, this is an example of its powerful spirit in action.
Paul Johnson

Cure


I dressed him; God cured him. (Je le pansay; Dieu le guarit.)
Ambrose Paré

The cure is worse than the disease.
Philip Massinger

Curfew


I don't give a shit what time you get home, just don't wake me up. That's your curfew: not waking me up.
Samuel Halpern

Curiosity


Curiosity is a lust of the mind.
Thomas Hobbes

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Dorothy Parker

Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only that the cat died nobly.
Arnold Edinborough

Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect.
Samuel Johnson

Curiosity is only vanity. Most frequently we wish not to know, but to talk. We would not take a sea voyage for the sole pleasure of seeing without hope of ever telling.
Blaise Pascal

Envy and idleness married together begot curiosity.
Thomas Fuller

A generous and elevated mind is distinguished by nothing more certainly than an eminent degree of curiosity.
Samuel Johnson

Yet it is dangerous to discourage well-intended labours, or innocent curiosity.
Samuel Johnson

The gratification of curiosity rather frees us from uneasiness than confers pleasure; we are more pained by ignorance, than delighted by instruction. Curiosity is the thirst of the soul; it inflames and torments us, and makes us taste every thing with joy, however otherwise insipid, by which it may be quenched.
Samuel Johnson

Curious


"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice.
Lewis Carroll

Currency


Too great a quantity of cash in circulation is a much greater evil than too small a quantity.
Noah Webster

Curse


May you live in interesting times.
Author unidentified, often described as a Chinese curse

Despair, and die!
William Shakespeare

To curse is to pray to the Devil.
German Proverb

Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost.
Robert Southey

Custom


Custom does often reason overrule
And only serves for reason to the fool.
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

You say that it is your [Hindu] custom to burn widows. Very well. We [British] also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.
Sir Charles Napier

Just because you don’t know why we do something doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it.
Jonah Goldberg

Custom without reason is only ancient error.
English Proverb

Customs, even the most foolish and the most cruel, have always their source in the real or apparent utility of the public.
C. A. Helvétius

As the good writer forbears to depart from the common use of words, so the good citizen should avoid deviating too far from custom.
G. C. Lichtenberg

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement.
J. S. Mill

Custom reconciles us to every thing.
Edmund Burke

When I am in Rome, I fast as the Romans do; when I am at Milan, I do not fast. So likewise you, whatever church you come to, observe the custom of the place.

(Cum Romanum venio, ieiuno Sabbato; cum hic sum, non ieiuno: sic etiam tu, ad quam forte ecclesiam veneris, eius morem serva, si cuiquam non vis esse scandalum nec quemquam tibi.)

St Ambrose

It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.
Samuel Johnson

Cynic


The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
H. W. Beecher

Cynicism


Cynicism — the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.
Russell Lynes

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.
H. L. Mencken

Cynic — a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness.
Bertrand Russell

Damage


The person who injures another must make good five kinds of damages: loss of bodily substance or function, pain, cost of healing, loss of income, and mental anguish.
The Talmud

Dancing


Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.
Henry Fielding

Music and dancing (the more's the pity) have become so closely associated with ideas of riot and debauchery among the less cultivated classes, that a taste for them, for their own sakes, can hardly be said to exist, and before they can be recommended as innocent or safe amusements, a very great change of ideas must take place.
John Herschel

Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it well, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

Listen, sister. I don't dance and I can't take time out now to learn.
Frank W. Wead

There are those who dance to the rhythm that is played to them, those who only dance to their own rhythm, and those who don't dance at all.
José Bergamín

How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mr. Lincoln at least you're a man of honor. You said you wanted to dance with me in the worst way, and I must say that you've kept your word. That's the worst way I've ever seen.
Lamar Trotti and John Ford

Through dancing many maidens have been un-maidened, whereby I may say it is the storehouse and nursery of bastardy.
John Northbrooke

You and I are past our dancing days.
Shakespeare

'Twas surely the Devil that taught women to dance and asses to bray.
Thomas Fuller

The greater the fool the better the dancer.
Theodore Hook

We lift up a solemn note of warning and entreaty … against dancing.
The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church

Promiscuous dancing is a means of fostering the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life. These things are not of the Father, but are of the world.
The Northern Presbytery of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland

Danger


Here be dragons.
Author unidentified

A man's wisdom is most conspicuous where he is able to distinguish among dangers and make choice of the least.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The more the danger, the more the honor.
John Fletcher

We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger.
Pierre Corneille

The danger past, and God forgotten.
John Ray

Beware of a mule's hind foot, a dog's tooth, and a woman's tongue.
C. H. Spurgeon

We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it.
Shakespeare

Daniel Webster


Daniel Webster struck me much like a steam engine in trousers.
Sydney Smith

Dark


The dark makes every woman beautiful.
Ovid

Dark Ages


The dark cloud, which had been cleared by the Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province [Britain] was again lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean.
Edward Gibbon

Daughter


Marry your son when you will; your daughter when you can.
George Herbert

It is harder to marry a daughter well than to bring her up well.
Thomas Fuller

The younger your daughter, the more apt she is to love you.
E. W. Howe

Dawn


Dawn, n. The time when men of reason go to bed. Certain old men prefer to rise at about that time, taking a cold bath and a long walk with an empty stomach, and otherwise mortifying the flesh. They then point with pride to these practices as the cause of their sturdy health and ripe years; the truth being that they are hearty and old, not because of their habits, but in spite of them. The reason we find only robust persons doing this thing is that it has killed all the others who have tried it.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

[Dawn is] that single hour of the twenty-four, when crime ceases, debauchery is exhausted, and even desolation finds a shelter.
Benjamin Disraeli

Day


Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow! (Carpe diem, quàm minimùm credula postero.)
Horace

The day is short and the work is long.
English Proverb

Each day is a little life; every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Wait till it is night before saying it has been a fine day.
French Proverb

We have seen better days.
Shakespeare

Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night.
William Blake

Day and Night


The day has eyes; the night has ears.
David Fergusson

Daybreak


Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountaintops.
Shakespeare

Deacon


Deacons likewise must be dignified, not two-faced, not given to excessive drinking, not greedy for gain, holding to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.
1 Timothy 3:8-9 (NET)

Dead


The wailing of the newborn infant is mingled with the dirge for the dead.
Lucretius

No one wept for the dead, because everyone expected death itself.
Agnolo di Tura

It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.
Anna Akhmatova

And I declared that the dead,
who had already died,
are happier than the living,
who are still alive.
Ecclesiastes 4:2

Say nothing but good of the dead. (De mortuis nil nisi bonum.)
Ascribed to Solon

There are no toils for the dead.
Sophocles

The dead have no tears, and forget all sorrow.
Euripides

The life of the dead consists in being present in the minds of the living.
Cicero

Mean and mighty, rotting
Together, have one dust.
Shakespeare

Dead men tell no tales.
English Proverb

He is gone to Kingdom come.
Francis Grose

I do not amuse myself by thinking of dead people.
Napoleon I

How very little the world misses anybody! How soon the chasm left by the best and wisest men closes!
T. B. Macaulay

If a man was great while living, he becomes tenfold greater when dead.
Thomas Carlyle

Strange, is it not, that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road,
Which to discover we must travel too?
Edward Fitzgerald

In the democracy of the dead, all men are equal. The poor man is as rich as the richest, and the rich man as poor as the pauper. The creditor loses his usury, and the debtor is acquitted of his obligation. There the proud man surrenders his dignity; the politician his honors; the worldling his pleasures; the invalid needs no physician; the laborer rests from toil. The wrongs of time are redressed; injustice is expiated, and the irony of fate is refuted.
Author unidentified

Time was I stood where thou dost now,
And view'd the dead, as thou dost me;
Ere long thou'lt be as low as I,
And others stand and look on thee.
Epitaph at Boughton, near Northampton, England

Be happy while y'er leevin, for y'er a lang time dead.
Scottish Proverb

He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf
At his heels a stone.
Shakespeare

Then I heard a voice from heaven say, "Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on." "Yes," says the Spirit, "they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them."
Revelation 14:13

Death


The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain, cable from Europe to the Associated Press

I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen

O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
1 Corinthians 15:55

A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
Joseph Stalin

Birth, copulation, and death.
That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks.
T. S. Eliot

Man weeps to think that he will die so soon; woman, that she was born so long ago.
H. L. Mencken

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.
Baron de Montesquieu

Death is nature's way of telling you to slow down.
Graffito

For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
Johnny Carson

The late F. W. H. Myers used to tell how he asked a man at a dinner table what he thought would happen to him when he died. The man tried to ignore the question, but, on being pressed, replied: "Oh well, I suppose I shall inherit eternal bliss, but I wish you wouldn't talk about such unpleasant subjects."
Bertrand Russell

I have had a number of threatening letters each week, some telling me the actual time and method of my death, and I don't like it.
Winston Churchill, during the partition of Ireland

After death there is nothing.
Seneca

From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
Algernon Charles Swinburne

For dust you are and to dust you will return.
Genesis 3:19

Naked a man comes from his mother's womb,
and as he comes, so he departs.
Ecclesiastes 5:15

[Sara and I] have parted forever, though my ashes will soon be mingling with hers. I'll have her in mind until thought and memory adjourn, but that is all … We were happy together, but all beautiful things must end.
H. L. Mencken

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.
George Santayana

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
Brendan Behan

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
Dave Barry

He was released from the miseries of life.
Edward Gibbon

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
Isaac Asimov

Death is not the worst than can happen to men.
Author unidentified

[Pyrrhus] grieved greatly over the death of Aeropus; not so much because he was dead, for that, he said, was the common lot of mankind, but because he himself had delayed repaying him a kindness until it was too late. Debts of money, he said, can be paid to the heirs of a creditor, but men of honour are grieved at not being able to return a kindness during the lifetime of their benefactor.
Plutarch

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
Leonardo da Vinci

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.
Bertolt Brecht

I guess that's how death works. It doesn't matter if we're ready or not. It just happens.
Randy K. Milholland

Of human life, the most glorious or humble prospects are alike and soon bounded by the sepulchre.
Edward Gibbon

Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Edmund Waller

Death is nothing; but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Death takes no bribes.
Benjamin Franklin

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
John Donne

A trail of tears and death …
Unidentified Choctaw leader describing the Choctaw removal

I will make you shorter by the head.
Elizabeth I

He has joined the great majority.
Petronius Arbiter

When you lose a parent, you lose your past; when you lose a spouse, you lose your present; when lose a child you lose your future.
Author unidentified

Anyone's death always releases something like an aura of stupefaction, so difficult is it to grasp this irruption of nothingness and to believe that it has actually taken place.
Gustave Flaubert

Say not in grief, "He is no more," but live in thankfulness that he was.
Author unidentified, reputed to be a Hebrew Proverb

Those we love don't go away,
They walk beside us everyday.
Author unidentified

For who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through Eternity,
To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
John Milton

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
Robert Oppenheimer, quoting (or misquoting) the Bhagavad-Gita

It is a sharp remedy, but a sure one for all ills.
Sir Walter Raleigh, feeling the axe edge before his execution.

When Edward [Gibbon] was three years old, a new baby was also christened Edward, in the obvious expectation that the first one would soon be dead.
Leo Damrosch

He is torn from the security of his tent and marched off to the king of terrors.
Job 18:14

Then people go to their eternal home and mourners go about the streets.
Ecclesiastes 12:5

We end as a little heap of dust.
Anacreon

Death is not the greatest of ills; it is worse to want to die, and not be able to.
Sophocles

It is good to die before one has done anything deserving death.
Anaxandrides

No man can be ignorant that he must die, nor be sure that he may not this very day.
Cicero

Wherever I look I see nothing but reminders of death.
Ovid

I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him.
Revelation 6:8

Death is a punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favor.
Seneca

It is a poor thing for anyone to fear that which is inevitable.
Tertullian

A good death does honor to a whole life.
Francesco Petrarch

Fear of death is worse than death itself. (Timor mortis morte pejor.)
Anonymous

Death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exit.
John Webster

Death devours lambs as well as sheep.
Cervantes

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
Francis Bacon

Death keeps no calendar.
George Herbert

He that fears death lives not.
George Herbert

We all labor against our own cure, for death is the cure of all diseases.
Thomas Browne

Old men go to death; death comes to young men.
George Herbert

Everything has been written which could by possibility persuade us that death is not an evil, and the weakest men as well as heroes have given a thousand celebrated examples to support this opinion. Nevertheless, I doubt whether any man of good sense ever believed it.
La Rochefoucauld

We shall never outwit nature: we shall all die as usual.
Bernard De Fontenelle

About midnight my dear wife expired to our great astonishment, especially mine.
Samuel Sewall

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
Jonathan Swift

Dogs, would you live forever? (Hunde, wollt ihr ewig leben?)
Frederick the Great

He who fears death dies every time he thinks of it.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

Death is an eternal sleep.
Motto on the gates of French cemeteries

The certain end of all pain, and of all capacity to suffer pain, is death. Of all the things that man thinks of as evils, this is the least.
J. G. Fichte

Man grows old, and dwindles, and decays,
And countless generations of mankind
Depart, and leave no vestige where they trod.
William Wordsworth

Oh, well, no matter what happens, there's always death.
Napoleon I

Death is the liberator of him whom freedom cannot release, the physician of him whom medicine cannot cure, and the comforter of him whom time cannot console.
C. C. Colton

Swing low, sweet chariot —
Comin' for to carry me home;
I looked over Jordan and what did I see?
A band of angels comin' after me —
Comin' for to carry me home.
American Negro spiritual

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
Mark Twain

When a man dies, and his kin are glad of it, they say, "He is better off."
E. W. Howe

Expect an early death — it will keep you busier.
Martin H. Fischer

We're here today and gone tomorrow.
American Proverb

Grim death took me without warning;
I was well at night, and dead in the morning.
Epitaph at Seven Oaks, Kent, England

Remember you must die. (Memento mori.)
Latin Motto

Do not rejoice over any one's death; remember that we must all die.
Ecclesiasticus 8:7

All living beings become old like a garment, for the decree from of old is, "You must die!"
Ecclesiasticus 14:17

Remember: it is not given to man to take his goods with him. No one goes away and then comes back.
The Song of the Harper

The best of all things for earthly men is not to be born and not to see the beams of the bright sun; but if born, then as quickly as possible to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie deep buried.
Theognis

Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.
Marcus Aurelius

And death makes equal the high and low.
John Heywood

First our pleasures die — and then
Our hopes, and then our fears — and when
These are dead, the debt is due,
Dust claims dust — and we die too.
P. B. Shelley

Of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth;
Let’s choose executors and talk of wills.
Shakespeare

A man can die but once; we owe God a death.
Shakespeare

Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die.
Shakespeare

The busy day, the peaceful night,
Unfelt, uncounted, glided by;
His frame was firm, his powers were bright,
Tho' now his eightieth year was nigh.

Then with no throbbing fiery pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.

Samuel Johnson, On the death of Robert Levet

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death.
Samuel Johnson

O death, how welcome is your sentence to one who is needy and failing in strength, worn down by age and anxious about everything; to one who is contrary, and has lost all patience!
Ecclesiasticus 41:2

Do not fear death's decree for you; remember those who went before you and those who will come after.
Ecclesiasticus 41:3

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that live must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.
Shakespeare

In such a regime, I say, you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest — without asking to be paid.
Chinua Achebe

The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
Shakespeare

Now cracks a noble heart.
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Shakespeare

Our adventure is ended. The winter of this year is as dead as the grave. Perhaps when we come to die, death will provide the meaning and the sequel and the ending of this unsuccessful adventure. (Notre aventure est finie. L'hiver de cette année est mort comme la tombe. Peut-être quand nous mourrons, peut-être la mort seule nous donnera la clef et la suite et la fin de cette aventure manquée.)
Alain-Fournier

But no frail man, however great or high,
Can be concluded blest before he die.
Ovid, translation by Addison

Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further.
Shakespeare

Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry.
Shakespeare

To neglect at any time preparation for death, is to sleep on our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age, is to sleep at an attack.
Samuel Johnson

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so,
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
John Donne

When my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly upon me, when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for they shall be equal but in dust.
John Donne

But it pleased God to visit us then with death daily, and with so general a disease that the living were scarce able to bury the dead.
William Bradford, of Plymouth Plantation

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
W. H. Auden, 'In Memory of W. B. Yeats'

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,

But oh! as to embrace me she inclin’d,
I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.
John Milton, On His Deceased Wife

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
Francis Bacon

Death … openeth the gate to good fame, and extinguisheth envy.
Francis Bacon

Is there any room at your head, Sanders?
Is there any room at your feet?
Or any room at your twa sides,
Where fain, fain I would sleep?

There is na room at my head, Margaret,
There is na room at my feet;
My bed it is the cold, cold grave;
Among the hungry worms I sleep.

'Clerk Sanders' Ballad

We die only once, and for such a long time!
Molière

Of all escape mechanisms, death is the most efficient.
H. L. Mencken

Now I am about to go the way of all the earth.
Joshua 23:14

Every instance of death may justly awaken our fears and quicken our vigilance; but its frequency so much weakens its effect, that we are seldom alarmed unless some close connexion is broken, some scheme frustrated, or some hope defeated.
Samuel Johnson

It has always appeared to me one of the most striking passages in the Visions of Quevedo, which stigmatises those as fools who complain that they failed of happiness by sudden death. "How," says he, "can death be sudden to a being who always knew that he must die, and that the time of his death was uncertain?"
Samuel Johnson, quoting the Visions of Quevedo by Dom Francisco de Quevedo

I am disappointed by that stroke of death [Garrick’s], which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

But death is not easily
escaped from by anyone:
all of us with souls, earth-dwellers
and children of men, must make our way
to a destination already ordained
where the body, after the banqueting,
sleeps on its deathbed.
Beowulf

What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?
Romans 7:24

O Death! the poor man's dearest friend,
The kindest and the best!
Robert Burns

Death gives meaning to life. Living in fear of death is living in denial. Actually, it's not really living at all, because there is no life without death. It's two sides of the one.
50 Cent and Kris Ex

The Fear of Death often proves Mortal, and sets People on Methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them.
Joseph Addison

The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff.

The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. They force us to learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we try to ignore — namely, that really we have no claim on a long life; that we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the short allotted span — for short it is at best.

Felix Adler

Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement. But fear not. All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul.
Darren Aronofsky

'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore,
And coming events cast their shadows before.
Thomas Campbell

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
Francis Bacon

I have often thought upon death, and I find it the least of all evils.
Francis Bacon

The pomp of death alarms us more than death itself. (Pompa mortis magis terret quam mors ipsa.)
Francis Bacon

The problem of death or the art of dying. This is something which all seriously ill people must inevitably face, and for which those in good health should prepare themselves, through correct thinking and sane anticipation.
Alice Bailey

What a power has Death to awe and hush the voices of this earth! How mute we stand when that presence confronts us, and we look upon the silence he has wrought in a human life! We can only gaze, and bow our heads, and creep with our broken, stammering utterances under the shelter of some great word which God has spoken, and in which we see through the history of human sorrow the outstretching and overshadowing of the eternal arms.
Walton W. Battershall

And when no longer we can see Thee, may we reach out our hands, and find Thee leading us through death to immortality and glory.
Henry Ward Beecher

So we fall asleep in Jesus. We have played long enough at the games of life, and at last we feel the approach of death. We are tired out, and we lay our heads back on the bosom of Christ, and quietly fall asleep.
Henry Ward Beecher

Nature’s lessons are sharp, but in the long run they are merciful, for they lead to the evolution of the soul and guide it to the winning of its immortality.
Annie Besant

For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve.
Bhagavad Gita

Sure 'tis a serious thing to die! My soul!
What a strange moment must it be, when, near
Thy journey's end, thou hast the gulf in view!
That awful gulf, no mortal e'er repass'd
To tell what's doing on the other side.
Robert Blair

But, oh! fell death's untimely frost,
That nipt my flower sae early.
Robert Burns

If we consider hell and heaven to be states of mind instead of places, it is easy to see the reason for such ideas. For each man, in the course of his normal living, enters periodically into states of great happiness and great unhappiness, and further more, while he is in them, he is apt to forget everything else. The mind, in other words, builds its own world.
H.P. Blavatsky

When I lived, I provided for every thing but death; now I must die, and am unprepared.
Cesare Borgia

Oh! death will find me, long before I tire
Of watching you; and swing me suddenly
Into the shade and loneliness and mire
Of the last land!
Rupert Brooke

Heaven gives its favourites — early death.
Lord Byron

Oh, God! it is a fearful thing
To see the human soul take wing
In any shape, in any mood!
Lord Byron

Now he goes along the darksome road, thither whence they say no one returns. (Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum Illuc, unde negant redire quemquam.)
Catullus

When I hear it contended that the least sensitive are, on the whole, the most happy, I recall the Indian proverb: "It’s better to sit than to stand, it is better lie down than to sit, but death is best of all."
Nicolas Chamfort

The new scientific society definitely discourages men from thinking about death; it is a fact, but it is considered a morbid fact.
G. K. Chesterton

I do not wish to die: but I care not if I were dead. (Emori nolo: sed me esse mortuum nihil aestimo.)
Cicero

Some men make a womanish complaint that it is a great misfortune to die before our time. I would ask what time? Is it that of Nature? But she, indeed, has lent us life, as we do a sum of money, only no certain day is fixed for payment. What reason then to complain if she demands it at pleasure, since it was on this condition that you received it?
Cicero

Death levels all things. (Omnia mors aequat.)
Claudianus

How well he fell asleep!
Like some proud river, widening toward the sea;
Calmly and grandly, silently and deep,
Life joined eternity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What argufies pride and ambition?
Soon or late death will take us in tow:
Each bullet has got its commission,
And when our time's come we must go.
Charles Dibdin

Living is an illness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death. (Vivre est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les 16 heures. C'est un palliatif. La mort est le remède.)
Nicolas-Sébastien Chamfort

If we could know
Which of us, darling, would be first to go,
Who would be first to breast the swelling tide
And step alone upon the other side —
If we could know!
Mrs. Foster Ely

Philosophy instructs us to pay homage to the gods, not through hope or fear, but from veneration of Their superior nature. It moreover enables us to conquer the fear of death, by teaching us that it is no proper object of terror; since, whilst we are, death is not, and when death arrives, we are not: so that it neither concerns the living nor the dead.

(Short variation: Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.)

Epicurus

Death hath so many doors to let out life.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger

When you take the wires of the cage apart, you do not hurt the bird, but help it. You let it out of its prison. How do you know that death does not help me when it takes the wires of my cage down? — that it does not release me, and put me into some better place, and better condition of life?
Bishop Randolph S. Foster

If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.
Viktor Frankl

This irrational fear of death results from the failure of having lived; it is the expression of our guilty conscience for having wasted our life and missed the chance of productive use of our capacities. To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.
Erich Fromm

Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Kahlil Gibran

When life is woe,
And hope is dumb,
The World says, "Go!"
The Grave says, "Come!"
Arthur Guiterman

And come he slow, or come he fast,
It is but Death who comes at last.
Sir Walter Scott

For dying is not to be feared — it is the final comfort. As we all learn, eventually.
Robert A. Heinlein

I know thou art gone to the home of thy rest—
Then why should my soul be so sad?
Thomas Kibble Hervey

How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.
Eric Hoffer

It [death] seems perfectly simple and inevitable, like lying down after a long day's work.
Erskine Childers, shortly before his execution

Behold — not him we knew!
This was the prison which his soul looked through.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

One more unfortunate
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Thomas Hood

We watch'd her breathing thro' the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As in her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.
Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.
Thomas Hood

Swift death rushes upon us. (Cita mors ruit.)
Horace

Sweet and glorious it is to die for our country. (Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.)
Horace

In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.
John James Ingalls

Pale death, the grand physician, cures all pain;
The dead rest well who lived for joys in vain.
John Clare

Death alone discloses how insignificant are the puny bodies of men. (Mors sola fatetur Quantula sint hominum corpuscula.)
Juvenal

They say you only live once, but come to think of it — you only die once as well.
Eyran Katsenelenbogen

Despite the solace of hypocritical religiosity and its seductive promise of an after-life of heavenly bliss, most of us will do anything to thwart the inevitable victory of biological death.
Jack Kevorkian

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.
Stephen King

When I have folded up this tent
And laid the soiled thing by,
I shall go forth 'neath different stars,
Under an unknown sky.
Frederic L. Knowles

Gone before
To that unknown and silent shore.
Charles Lamb

One destin'd period men in common have,
The great, the base, the coward, and the brave,
All food alike for worms, companions in the grave.
Lord Lansdowne

Things of real worth, such as the mental life of the ant or the crab, fill psychological and scientific literature; but such a thing as death, which involves the whole human race more intimately than anything else possibly can — since all must die — is regarded as hardly worthy of serious discussion!
C. W. Leadbeater

The young may die, but the old must!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing.
Manilius

This I ask, is it not madness to kill thyself in order to escape death? (Hic rogo non furor est ne moriare mori?)
Martial

When Life knocks at the door no one can wait,
When Death makes his arrest we have to go.
John Masefield

Death hath a thousand doors to let out life.
I shall find one.
Philip Massinger

There's nothing certain in man's life but this:
That he must lose it.
Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton)

How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap!
John Milton

Rome can give no dispensation from death. (On n'a point pour la mort de dispense de Rome.)
Molière

If we are not yet able to serve man, how can we serve spiritual beings? … If we do not yet know about life how can we know about death?
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

Everybody dies. The obstetrician slaps you on the ass with one hand and hands you a postdated death certificate with the other.
Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes

We are all bound thither; we are hastening to the same common goal. Black death calls all things under the sway of its laws. (Tendimus huc omnes; metam properamus ad unam. Omnia sub leges mors vocat atra suas.)
Ovid

Thou fool, what is sleep but the image of death? Fate will give an eternal rest. (Stulte, quid est somnus, gelidae nisi mortis imago? Longa quiescendi tempora fata dabunt.)
Ovid

Man should ever look to his last day, and no one should be called happy before his funeral. (Ultima semper Expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus Ante obitum nemo et suprema funera debet.)
Ovid

Death is not grievous to me, for I shall lay aside my pains by death. (Nec mihi mors gravis est posituro morte dolores.)
Ovid

Wherever you look there is nothing but the image of death. (Quocunque adspicias, nihil est nisi mortis imago.)
Ovid

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.
Cesare Pavese

He whom the gods love dies young, whilst he is full of health, perception, and judgment. (Quem dii diligunt, Adolescens moritur, dum valet, sentit, sapit.)
Plautus

Concerning the dead nothing but good shall be spoken. (De mortuis nil nisi bonum.)
Plutarch

Vital spark of heavenly flame!
Quit, oh quit this mortal frame.
Alexander Pope

A heap of dust remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be!
Alexander Pope

It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was, of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.
Terry Pratchett

Teach him how to live,
And, oh! still harder lesson! how to die.
Beilby Porteus

The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds. (

Der lange Schlaf des Todes schliesst unsere Narben zu, und der kutze des Lebens unsere Wunden

.)
Jean Paul Richter

And so, you see, simplicity
Requires that our lot
Be that we exit, when we must,
With only what we brought.
Bruce Holland Rogers

Death is the privilege of human nature,
And life without it were not worth our taking:
Thither the poor, the pris'ner, and the mourner
Fly for relief, and lay their burthens down.
Nicholas Rowe

Death must be an evil — and the gods agree;
for why else would they live for ever?
Sappho

We may have years, we may have hours, but sooner or later, we push up flowers.
Tim Schafer

Death ends a life, not a relationship.
Morrie Schwartz

Like the dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
Thou art gone, and for ever!
Walter Scott

What new thing then is it for a man to die, whose whole life is nothing else but a journey to death? (Quid est enim novi, hominem mori, cujus tota vita nihil aliud quam ad mortem iter est?)
Seneca the Younger

It is an extreme evil to depart from the company of the living before you die. (Ultimum malorum est ex vivorum numero exire antequam moriaris.)
Seneca the Younger

For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands. (In hoc enim fallimur, quod mortem prospicimus: magna pars eius iam praeterit; quidquid aetatis retro est mors tenet.)
Seneca the Younger

No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it. (Nulli potest secura vita contingere qui de producenda nimis cogitat.)
Seneca the Younger

They are not lost but sent before. (Non amittuntur sed praemittuntur.)
Seneca the Younger

It is uncertain in what place death may await thee; therefore expect it in any place. (Incertum est quo te loco mors expectet: itaque tu illam omni loco expecta.)
Seneca the Younger

This day, which thou fearest as thy last, is the birthday of eternity. (Dies iste, quem tamquam extremum reformidas, aeterni natalis est.)
Seneca the Younger

Sometimes death is a punishment; often a gift; it has been a favor to many.

(Interim paena est mori,
Sed saepe donum; pluribus veniae fuit
.)

Seneca the Younger

Come, soon or late, death’s undetermin’d day,
This mortal being only can decay.

(Cum volet illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis hujus
Jus habet, incerti spatium mihi finiat avi
.)

Welsted, based on Ovid

And when life's sweet fable ends,
Soul and body part like friends;
No quarrels, murmurs, no delay;
A kiss, a sigh, and so away.
Richard Crashaw

Any one may take life from man, but no one death; a thousand gates stand open to it.

(Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent
.)

Seneca the Younger

To be, or not to be, — that is the question: —
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? — To die, — to sleep, —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, — to sleep; —
To sleep! perchance to dream: — ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
Shakespeare

The babe is at peace within the womb,
The corpse is at rest within the tomb.
We begin in what we end.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.
James Shirley

To our graves we walk
In the thick footprints of departed men.
Alexander Smith

Your death and my death are mainly of importance to ourselves. The black plumes will be stripped off our hearses within the hour; tears will dry, hurt hearts close again, our graves grow level with the church-yard, and although we are away, the world wags on. It does not miss us; and those who are near us, when the first strangeness of vacancy wears off, will not miss us much either.
Alexander Smith

Death! to the happy thou art terrible;
But how the wretched love to think of thee,
O thou true comforter! the friend of all
Who have no friend beside!
Robert Southey

A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.
Baruch Spinoza

An honorable death is better than a dishonorable life. (Honesta mors turpi vita potior.)
Tacitus

As for myself, may the "sweet Muses," as Virgil says, bear me away to their holy places where sacred streams do flow, beyond the reach of anxiety and care, and free from the obligation of performing each day some task that goes against the grain.
Tacitus

No young man ever thinks he shall die.
William Hazlitt

God's finger touched him, and he slept.
Alfred Tennyson

Whatever crazy sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly long'd for death.
Alfred Tennyson

While there's life there’s hope, and only the dead have none. (τάχ᾽ αὔριον ἔσσετ᾽ ἄμεινον ἐλπίδες ἐν ζωοῖσιν, ἀνέλπιστοι δὲ θανόντες.)
Theocritus

Since every day a little of our life is taken from us — since we are dying every day — the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely completes the death process.
Paul Tillich

We live in a culture that is almost totally ignorant of death, as it is almost totally ignorant of anything that truly matters.
Eckhart Tolle

Memento mori — remember death! These are important words. If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different. If a person knows that he will die in a half hour, he certainly will not bother doing trivial, stupid, or, especially, bad things during this half hour. Perhaps you have half a century before you die — what makes this any different from a half hour?
Leo Tolstoy

However many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead.
Richard Dawkins

It is today, my dear, that I take a perilous leap. (C'est demain, ma belle amie, que je fais le saut perilleux.)
Voltaire, last words

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
Randall Wallace (Braveheart)

Softly his fainting head he lay
Upon his Maker's breast;
His Maker kiss'd his soul away,
And laid his flesh to rest.
Isaac Watts

One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die as a man.
Daniel Webster

And now she is like everyone else.
Charles de Gaulle, on the death of his daughter, who had Down's syndrome

I don't wanna die
But I ain't keen on living either
Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.
Lord Byron

He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, lik'd it not, and died.
Sir Henry Wotton

People don't die that easily, really. … As long as they've got something worth living for.
Phoenix Wright

Men drop so fast, ere life's mid stage we tread,
Few know so many friends alive, as dead.
Edward Young

I'd rather die on my feet, than live on my knees. (Prefiero morir de pie que vivir de rodillas.)
Emiliano Zapata

At that time those slain by the Lord will be everywhere — from one end of the earth to the other. They will not be mourned or gathered up or buried, but will be like dung lying on the ground.
Jeremiah 25:33

Every soul will know the taste of death.
Quran 21.35

Xerxes the great did die;
And so must you and I.
Anonymous

For thou mayst say this is the day [of one's death]
That no man living may 'scape away.
Everyman

Because I could not stop for Death —
He kindly stopped for me —
The Carriage held but just Ourselves —
And Immortality.
Emily Dickinson

Death is a sovereign remedy for all misfortunes.
Ernest Hemingway

There is no lonelier man in death, except the suicide, than that man who has lived many years with a good wife and then outlived her. If two people love each other there can be no happy end to it.
Ernest Hemingway

My spirit is too weak — mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die
Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky.
John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.
John Keats

Good-bye, proud world! I’m going home;
Thou art not my friend and I’m not thine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear,
To be we know not what, we know not where.
John Dryden

Like pilgrims to th'appointed place we tend;
The world's an inn, and death the journey's end.
John Dryden

The bodies of those that made such a noise and tumult when alive, when dead, lie as quietly among the graves of their neighbours as any others.
Jonathan Edwards

Webster was much possessed by death
And saw the skull beneath the skin.
T. S. Eliot

Death Penalty


Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Samuel Johnson

The heart of a good man cannot but recoil at the thought of punishing a slight injury with death.
Samuel Johnson

Debate


I like not brains that can dispute on both sides, and yet conclude nothing certain.
Martin Luther

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.
John Stuart Mill

Debt


Creditors have better memories than debtors.
Author unidentified

Debt is the slavery of the free.
Publilius Syrus

Sins and debts are always more than we think them to be.
Thomas Fuller

Debt is a preceptor whose lessons are needed most by those who suffer from it most.
R. W. Emerson

He is rich who owes nothing.
Hungarian Proverb

Better go without rice for a little than be in debt for long.
Japanese Proverb

Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound; great debts are like cannon, of loud noise but little danger.
Samuel Johnson

By no means run in debt: take thine own measure.
Who cannot live on twenty pound a year,
Cannot on forty.
George Herbert

Decay


All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
John Dryden

Deceit


We never deceive for a good purpose. Knavery always adds malice to falsehood.
Jean de la Bruyère

I defy any man to deceive me. He would have to be a real rogue to be as bad as imagine him.
Napoleon I

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.
Ascribed to Abraham Lincoln

It is more ignominious to mistrust our friends than to be deceived by them.
La Rochefoucauld

Deception


It's the easiest Thing in the World for a Man to deceive himself.
Author unidentified

Who has deceiv'd thee so oft as thy self?
Author unidentified

[Men] who cannot deceive others, are very often successful in deceiving themselves.
Samuel Johnson

The true way to be deceived is to think oneself more clever than others.
La Rochefoucauld

Decision


Give your decisions, never your reasons; your decisions may be right, your reasons are sure to be wrong.
Earl of Mansfield

Quick decisions are unsafe decisions.
Sophocles

Let men decide firmly what they will not do, and they will be free to do vigorously what they ought to do.
Mencius

Decisiveness


Make a decision, even if it's wrong.
Jarvis Klem

Declaration of Independence


It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776 … and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter [the Declaration of Independence]. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.
Calvin Coolidge

Yesterday, the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps never was nor will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.
John Adams

Decline


A people always ends by resembling its shadow.
Rudyard Kipling

Decoration


The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration, as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries.
Thomas Carlyle

Deed


Deeds are masculine; words are feminine. (Fatti maschii; parole femine.)
Motto of Maryland

Defamation


To sue for defamation merely draws attention to the charge.
Paul Johnson

Defect


It is the prerogative of great men to have great defects.
La Rochefoucauld

Defendant


When the rights of the parties are obscure, the defendant is to be favored against the plaintiff. (Quum sunt partium jura obscura, reo potius favendum est quam auctori.)
Legal Maxim

Defiance


Let them grumble, that is how it is going to be (Ainsi sera, groigne qui groinge).
Margaret of Austria (phrase made famous by Anne Boleyn, who learned it from Margaret)

Dejection


A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected.
Samuel Johnson

Delaware


[Delaware is a] state that has three counties when the tide is out, and two when it is in.
J. J. Ingalls

Delay


A delay is better than a disaster.
Author unidentified

Defer no time; delays have dangerous ends.
Shakespeare

Do not delay: the golden moments fly!
H. W. Longfellow

Deliberation


Deliberation, n. The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is buttered on.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Think long when you may decide only once.
Publilius Syrus

Delusion


The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances — of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped.
H. L. Mencken

Demagogue


The qualities necessary to a demagogue are these: to be foul-mouthed, base-born, a low, mean fellow.
Aristophanes

The demagogue, puffing up the people with, words, sways them to his interest. When calamity follows he escapes from justice.
Euripides

The shortest way to ruin a country is to give power to demagogues.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

The people are sovereign, but they are in the position of a sovereign eternally under age, who must therefore remain under tutelage, and cannot exercise his rights without grave danger. Like all minors, he is the sport of crafty scoundrels. These we call demagogues.
Arthur Schopenhauer

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
T. B. Macaulay

The honest man, whether rich or poor, who earns his own living and tries to deal justly by his fellows, has as much to fear from the insincere and unworthy demagogue, promising much and performing nothing, or else performing nothing but evil, who would set on the mob to plunder the rich, as from the crafty corruptionist who, for his own ends, would permit the common people to be exploited by the very wealthy.
Theodore Roosevelt

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.
H. L. Mencken

Demand


Demand is not a fixed quantity, that increases only as population increases. In each individual it rises with his power of getting the things demanded.
Henry George

If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbour, tho' he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Democracy


Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed and are right.
H. L. Mencken

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
Reinhold Niebuhr

Democracy is a kingless regime infested by many kings who are sometimes more exclusive, tyrannical, and destructive than one, if he be a tyrant.
Benito Mussolini

Democracy is … a form of religion; it is the worship of jackals by jackasses.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
Oscar Wilde

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
H. L. Mencken

Under a democratical government, the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.
Edward Gibbon

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
John Adams

But a wild democracy … too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
Edward Gibbon

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
Thomas Jefferson

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time.
E. B. White

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.
Bertrand Russell

You can be right or you can be popular. And we live in a democracy.
Walter O'Brien

Every flaw in consumers is worse in voters.
Michael Munger

A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.
Aristotle

A democracy, when put to the strain, grows weak, and is supplanted by oligarchy.
Aristotle

Public affairs ought to advance, and have a certain progress, neither too slow nor too quick. But the people have always too much action or too little. Sometimes, with 100,000 arms, they overturn everything; at other times, with 100,000 feet, they crawl like insects.
C. L. de Montesquieu

Democracy has two excesses to be wary of: the spirit of inequality, which leads it to aristocracy, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads it to despotism.
C. L. de Montesquieu

In a democracy the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents. A democracy, consequently, will be confined to a small spot. A republic may be extended over a large region.
James Madison

[Democracy is] an aristocracy of blackguards.
Byron

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
J. Fenimore Cooper

Democracies are prone to war, and war consumes them.
W. H. Seward

Ten million ignorances do not constitute one knowledge.
Clemens von Metternich

I do not deny the rights of democracy, but I have no illusions as to the uses that will be made of those rights so long as wisdom is rare and pride abundant.
H. F. Amiel

Even in the purest democracies, such as the United States and Switzerland, a privileged minority stands against the vast enslaved majority.
M. A. Bakunin

To put political power in the hands of men embittered and degraded by poverty is to tie firebrands to foxes and turn them loose amid the standing corn.
Henry George

I should be very sorry to find myself on board a ship in which the voices of the cook and the loblolly boys counted for as much as those of the officers upon a question of steering, or reefing topsails; or where the "great heart" of the crew was called upon to settle the ship's course.
T. H. Huxley

Those who bewail the loss of personal liberty have not learned one of the essentials of a democracy. They should know that no one has the personal liberty in a republic to do what the majority has properly declared shall not be done.
Wesley L. Jones

It would be folly to argue that the people cannot make political mistakes. They can and do make grave mistakes. They know it, they pay the penalty, but compared with the mistakes which have been made by every kind of autocracy they are unimportant.
Calvin Coolidge

Democracy is talking itself to death. The people do not know what they want; they do not know what is the best for them. There is too much foolishness, too much lost motion. I have stopped the talk and the nonsense. I am a man of action. Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice it is a fallacy. You in America will see that some day.
Benito Mussolini

Envy is the basis of democracy.
Bertrand Russell

One of the weaknesses of a democracy, a system of which I am trying to make the best, is that until it is right up against it, it will never face the truth.
Stanley Baldwin

But I am thoroughly convinced, nonetheless, that the democratic nations are happier than any other. The United States today, indeed, is probably the happiest the world has ever seen.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy, in fact, is always inventing class distinctions, despite its theoretical abhorrence of them.
H. L. Mencken

One cannot observe it [democracy] objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself — its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity.
H. L. Mencken

I confess, for my part, that it greatly delights me. I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down.
H. L. Mencken

Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time;
Winston Churchill

Democrat


I belong to no organized party — I am a Democrat.
Will Rogers

Republicans raise dahlias, Dalmatians, and eyebrows. Democrats raise Airedales, kids, and taxes.
Will Stanton

Republicans sleep in twin beds — some even in separate rooms. That is why there are more Democrats.
Will Stanton

Grandmother: Pat, I've been worrying about you. You're not turning into a Democrat, are you?
P. J. O'Rourke: Grandma! Democrats and Republicans are both fascist pigs! LBJ is slaughtering helpless Vietcong and causing riots in America's inner cities and oppressing workers and ripping off the masses! I'm not a Democrat! I'm a Maoist!
Grandmother: Just so long as you're not a Democrat.
P. J. O'Rourke

[My grandmother] was given to statements such as, "No one's ever so poor they can't pick up their yard." And she wouldn't even speak the word "Democrat" if there were children in the room. She'd say "bastards" instead.
P. J. O'Rourke

Democratic Party


The Democratic party is like a mule. It has neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity.
Ignatius Donnelly

That party [the Democratic party] never had but two objects — grand and petit larceny.
R. G. Ingersoll

[The Democratic party is a] hopeless assortment of discordant differences, as incapable of positive action as it is capable of infinite clamor.
Thomas B. Reed

Denial


If you turn on the television, you'll find the mothers of the most obvious criminals that man could ever diagnose, and they all think their sons are innocent. That's simple psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so you just distort it until it's bearable. We all do that to some extent, and it's a common psychological misjudgment that causes terrible problems.
Charlie Munger

Dependence


So he, who poverty with horror views,
Who sells his freedom in exchange for gold,
(Freedom for mines of wealth too cheaply sold)
Shall make eternal servitude his fate,
And feel a haughty master’s galling weight.
Francis, based on Horace

There is no state more contrary to the dignity of wisdom than perpetual and unlimited dependance, in which the understanding lies useless, and every motion is received from external impulse.
Samuel Johnson

Depression


He's turned his life around. He used to be depressed and miserable. Now he's miserable and depressed.
David Frost

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith

Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.
Richard Brookhiser

Some lawns have all the cheer of old cemeteries.
Richard Brookhiser

My daily routine is very simple. I wake up and I suffer. It's a peaceful life.
Author unidentified

I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober.
Samuel Johnson

I now live in cheerless solitude.
Samuel Johnson

I seek at midnight clubs the social band,
But midnight clubs, where wit with noise conspires,
Delight no more; I seek my lonely bed,
And call on sleep to soothe my languid head,
But sleep from these sad lids flies far away;
I mourn all night, and dread the coming day … .
A dreary void, where fears with grief combined
Waste all within, and desolate the mind.
Samuel Johnson

I would consent to have a limb amputated to recover my spirits.
Samuel Johnson

I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through. I like to stand right back and if possible to get a pillar between me and the train. I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything. A few drops of desperation.
Winston Churchill

Depth


Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.
William Shakespeare

Dermatology


Dermatology is the best speciality. The patient never dies — and never gets well.
Author unidentified

Design


Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.
Samuel Johnson

Desire


Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?
William Shakespeare

We should aim rather at leveling down our desires than leveling up our means.
Aristotle

We desire most what we ought not to have.
Publilius Syrus

There is not a man in the world who doth not look at another's wife, if beautiful and young, with a degree of desire.
The Hitopadesa

He begins to die that quits his desires.
George Herbert

The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires is like cutting off our feet when we want shoes.
Jonathan Swift

Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who, while he was chill, was harmless; but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison.
Samuel Johnson

The fundamental principle of human action — the law that is to political economy what the law of gravitation is to physics — is that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion.
Henry George

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments; any enlargement of wishes is therefore equally destructive to happiness with the diminution of possession, and he that teaches another to long for what he never shall obtain is no less an enemy to his quiet than if he had robbed him of part of his patrimony.
Samuel Johnson

The desires of mankind are much more numerous than their attainments, and the capacity of imagination much larger than actual enjoyment.
Samuel Johnson

Thus it comes to pass, that our desires always increase with our possessions; the knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed, impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
Samuel Johnson

Despair


I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Ecclesiastes 1:14

[Job's] wife said to him, "Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!"
Job 2:9

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.
Attributed to Edmund Burke

Despair is a sin.
Author unidentified

What if this is as good as it gets?
Mark Andrus

If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
Earl Wilson

Never flinch, never weary, never despair.
Winston Churchill

I'm so tired of trying.
Author unidentified

Aside from my normal sense of despair, I feel fine.
Author unidentified

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted — nevermore!
Edgar Allan Poe

All I do here is work in my cubicle and hope for death.
Dilbert cartoon

He who has resolved to conquer or die is seldom conquered; such noble despair perishes with difficulty.
Pierre Corneille

I will indulge my sorrows, and give way
To all the pangs and fury of despair.
Joseph Addison

Despair exaggerates not only our misery but also our weakness.
Luc de Vauvenargues

It was at length the same to me,
Fetter'd or fetterless to be,
I learn'd to love despair.
Byron

Past hope, past cure, past help!
Shakespeare

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart has turned to wax; it has melted within me.
Psalms 22:14

We must not despair, we must not for a moment pretend that we cannot face these things. Dangers come upon the world; other nations face them.
Winston Churchill

So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run, and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.
Samuel Johnson

Avaunt despair! (Nil desperandum.)
Horace

Desperation


The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
Henry David Thoreau

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.
James Thurber

Tempt not a desperate man.
William Shakespeare

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
William Shakespeare

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
Pink Floyd

Despondency


From torpid despondency, can come no advantage; it is the frost of the soul, which binds up all its powers, and congeals life in perpetual sterility. He that has no hopes of success, will make no attempts; and where nothing is attempted, nothing can be done.
Samuel Johnson

Despot


A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.
Edward Gibbon

There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the prince. The second is called the pope. The third is called the people.
Oscar Wilde

Despotism


Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things.
Oscar Wilde

The progress of despotism tends to disappoint its own purpose.
Edward Gibbon

Despotism has forever had a powerful hold upon the world. Autocratic government, not self-government, has been the prevailing state of mankind. The record of past history is the record, not of the success of republics, but of their failure.
Calvin Coolidge

Destiny


Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
William Jennings Bryan

'Tis vain to quarrel with our destiny.
Thomas Middleton

Often the prudent, far from making their destinies, succumb to them; it is destiny which makes them prudent.
Voltaire

Destruction


To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
Winston Churchill

When a man takes the road to destruction, the gods help him along.
Aeschylus

Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction.
Matthew 7:13

Detail


Our life is frittered away by detail … Simplify, simplify!
Henry David Thoreau

It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.
John Wooden

Great engines turn on small pivots.
English proverb

Determinism


We are little better than straws upon the water: we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.
Mary Wortley Montagu

Detroit


Detroit's political leadership is a parasite that has outgrown its host.
Kevin D. Williamson

Devil


Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
James 4:7

Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
1 Peter 5:8 KJV

The Devil can equivocate as well as a shopkeeper.
Ben Jonson

The heart of man is the place the Devil's in: I feel sometimes a Hell within myself.
Thomas Browne

Talk of the Devil, and he's presently at your elbow.
Giovanni Torriano

An apology for the Devil: It must be remembered that we have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Samuel Butler

When the priest's away the Devil will play.
Russian Proverb

For, where God build a church there the devil would also build a chapel.
Martin Luther

Thus is the devil ever God's ape.
Martin Luther

The devil is like a fowler; of the birds he catches, he wrings most of their necks, but keeps a few alive, to allure other birds to his snare, by singing the song he will have in a cage. I hope he will not get me into his cage.
Martin Luther

Devils are not so black as they are painted.
Thomas Lodge

The prince of darkness is a gentleman.
Shakespeare

The devil's most devilish when respectable.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.
Fedor Dostoevsky

Diary


What is more dull than a discreet diary? One might just as well have a discreet soul.
Henry ('Chips') Channon

Dictator


Dictators ride to and for on tigers from which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.
Winston Churchill

All mountebank dictators, from Napoleon III to Mussolini and Hitler, liked to be able to claim, with some plausibility, that they had been put in power by a "free vote," and that the people had, as it were, walked willingly into the dungeon before the portcullis slammed down for the last time.
Paul Johnson

We know as a people, as a nation, that we are at the cross-roads in America. Soon we must determine whether or not we are going to preserve Anglo-Saxon institutions in this country or join the other nations of the earth under a dictator.
Hatton W. Sumners

Dictionary


Defining what is unknown in terms of something equally unknown.
Flann O'Brien, on dictionaries

To make dictionaries is dull work.
Samuel Johnson

Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel Johnson

Die


The die is cast. (Iacta alea est.)
Julius Caesar, at the crossing of the Rubicon

Diet


The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook.
Julia Child (Attributed)

I'm on a whisky diet. I've lost three days already.
Tommy Cooper (Attributed)

You'd never say to an alcoholic — have just one glass of wine — so don't [offer food] to people who are trying to lose weight.
Stephen Furst

I may eat a healthy selection, but I never leave anything on my plate. (I think it goes back to all those starving children overseas that my parents told me about. I always wondered how stuffing my face helped those starving kids, but who was I to question my parents?)
Stephen Furst

I find something deeply corrupt and decadent in eating very expensive food especially designed to keep you slim. After all, the idea of the retributory coronary striking dead the self-indulgent patrician helps to persuade the poor that there is some justice in the world. A culinary system which mitigate this sanction is therefore antisocial.
Paul Johnson

Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother.
George Herbert

He that takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his doctors.
Chinese Proverb

The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it's bad for you.
Isaac Asimov (Attributed)

Difference


[The] difference of language, dress, and manners … severs and alienates the nations of the globe.
Edward Gibbon

One of the most common defects of half-instructed minds is to think much of that in which they differ from others, and little of that in which they agree with others.
Walter Bagehot

Difficulty


When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Will Rogers

There is no excellence without difficulty.
Ovid

Three things are difficult: to know oneself, to conquer one's appetite, and to keep one's secret.
Welsh Proverb

Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as he loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit. He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.
Edmund Burke

Dignity


It is base and unworthy to live below the dignity of our nature.
Benjamin Whichcote

Diligence


Everything yields to diligence.
Antiphanes

Make hay while the sun shines.
English Proverb

Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.
Samuel Johnson

The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform. It is true, that no diligence can ascertain success; death may intercept the swiftest career; but he who is cut off in the execution of an honest undertaking, has at least the honour of falling in his rank, and has fought the battle though he missed the victory.
Samuel Johnson

Diligence is the mother of good fortune, and idleness, its opposite, never led to good intention's goal. (La diligencia es madre de la buena ventura y la pereza, su contrario, jamás llegó al término que pide un buen deseo.)
Cervantes

Dimple


A dimple in the chin; a devil within.
Irish Proverb

Dinner


We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink, for dining alone is leading the life of a lion or wolf.
Epicurus

Strange to see how a good dinner and feasting reconciles everybody.
Samuel Pepys

Oh, the pleasure of eating my dinner alone!
Charles Lamb

Diplomacy


I liken the French/British relationship to a very old married couple who often think of killing each other but would never dream of divorce.
Denis MacShane

The French are masters of 'the dog ate my homework' school of diplomatic relations.
P. J. O'Rourke

An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.
Henry Wotton

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
Winston Churchill

What do you expect when I'm between two men of whom one [Lloyd George] thinks he is Napoleon and the other [Woodrow Wilson] thinks he is Jesus Christ?
Georges Clemenceau, when asked why he capitulated

Diplomat


I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.
Camillo Di Cavour

Direction


If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going.
Chinese Proverb

Dirt


Poverty comes from God, but not dirt.
Hebrew Proverb

Disagreement


When you start off by telling those who disagree with you that they are not merely in error but in sin, how much of a dialogue do you expect?
Thomas Sowell

Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing.
Oscar Wilde

Do not argue with the loud of mouth, and do not heap wood on their fire.
Ecclesiasticus 8:3

Disappointment


Like all the rest of mankind, she is every day mortified with the defeat of her schemes, and the disappointment of her hopes.
Samuel Johnson

Disapproval


No man likes to live under the eye of perpetual disapprobation.
Samuel Johnson

Discipline


He who spares the rod hates his son,
but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.
Proverbs 13:24

[The] LORD disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son.
Hebrews 12:6

Boys have their ears on their backsides; they listen when they are beaten.
Egyptian proverb

Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.
George Washington

Diogenes struck the father when the son swore.
Robert Burton

Discomfort


Get comfortable being uncomfortable.
U.S. Navy SEALs Saying

Discontent


Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.
Shakespeare

Discord


When two goats meet upon a narrow bridge over deep water, how do they behave? neither of them can turn back again, neither can pass the other, because the bridge is too narrow; if they should thrust one another, they might both fall into the water and be drowned; nature, then, has taught them, that if the one lays himself down and permits the other to go over him, both remain without hurt. Even so people should rather endure to be trod upon, than to fall into debate and discord one with another.
Martin Luther

The different apprehensions, the discordant passions, the jarring interests of men, will scarcely permit that many should unite in one undertaking.
Samuel Johnson

Discretion


Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest.
Shakespeare

Disease


Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.
Samuel Johnson

Pneumonia is the old man's friend [because it offers a relatively quick and painless death to the aged].
Sir William Osler, paraphrased

There are more pernicious diseases of the soul than of the body.
Cicero

A long disease doesn't lie. It always kills at last.
Irish Proverb

Cure the disease and kill the patient.
Francis Bacon

It was a principle among the ancients, that acute diseases are from heaven, and chronical from ourselves.
Samuel Johnson

There are many diseases both of the body and mind, which it is far easier to prevent than to cure.
Samuel Johnson

Truth is, indeed, not often welcome for its own sake; it is generally unpleasing, because contrary to our wishes and opposite to our practice; and as our attention naturally follows our interest, we hear unwillingly what we are afraid to know, and soon forget what we have no inclination to impress upon our memories.
Samuel Johnson

If a lot of cures are suggested for a disease, it means that the disease is incurable.
Anton Chekhov

Disgrace


Disgrace is immortal, and lives long after one thinks it is dead.
Plautus

This was one of the heaviest blows I can recall during the war. … It was a bitter moment. Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.
Winston Churchill, on The Fall of Tobruk

Dishonesty


What is come by dishonestly vanishes in profligacy.
Cicero

Dishonor


There is no death, however slow and painful, that I would not prefer to dishonor.
Napoleon I

No man, I suppose, ever admits to himself candidly that he gets his living in a dishonourable way.
H. L. Mencken

Disorder


A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness.
Robert Herrick

Disposition


The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.
Samuel Johnson

Dispute


I never saw an instance of one of two disputants convincing the other by argument. I have seen many, on their getting warm, becoming rude, and shooting one another.
Thomas Jefferson

Dissembling


O, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
Shakespeare

Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me downstairs?
Isaac Bickerstaffe

Dissimulation


I hate as I hate the gates of Hell that man whose words conceal his thoughts.
Homer

Distance


Over there, where you are not — there is happiness.
G. P. Schmidt von Lübeck

’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.
Thomas Campbell

It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.
William Hazlitt

Distinction


There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction, which inclines every man first to hope, and then to believe, that Nature has given him something peculiar to himself.
Samuel Johnson

Diversity


What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.
General George W. Casey Jr.

Divinity


Divinity consists in use and practice, not in speculation and meditation.
Martin Luther

Division


A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.
Abraham Lincoln

Divorce


Conrad Hilton was very generous to me in the divorce settlement. He gave me 5,000 Gideon Bibles.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

Alimony is a system by which, when two people make a mistake, one of them continues to pay for it.
Peggy Joyce

Alimony is like buying oats for a dead horse.
Arthur 'Bugs' Baer

I heard from my cat's lawyer today. My cat wants $12,000 a week for Tender Vittles.
Johnny Carson

He taught me housekeeping; when I divorce, I keep the house.
Zsa Zsa Gabor, of her fifth husband

She cried — and the judge wiped her tears with my checkbook.
Tommy Manville

For a while we pondered whether to take a vacation or get a divorce. We decided that a trip to Bermuda is over in two weeks, but a divorce is something you always have.
Woody Allen

The difference between divorce and legal separation is that a legal separation gives a husband time to hide his money.
Johnny Carson

The happiest time of anyone's life is just after the first divorce.
John Kenneth Galbraith

You don't know a woman till you've met her in court.
Norman Mailer

Alimony, n. The ransom that the happy pay to the devil.
H. L. Mencken

Whenever I date a guy, I think, "Is this the man I want my children to spend their weekends with?"
Rita Rudner

Passion, interest, or caprice, suggested daily motives for the dissolution of marriage; a word, a sign, a message, a letter, the mandate of a freedman, declared the separation; the most tender of human connections was degraded to a transient society of profit or pleasure.
Edward Gibbon

[The] liberty of divorce does not contribute to happiness and virtue. The facility of separation would destroy all mutual confidence, and inflame every trifling dispute.
Edward Gibbon

The husband was a teetotaller, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife.
Arthur Conan Doyle

I don't think I'll get married again. I'll just find a woman I don't like and give her a house.
Lewis Grizzard (Attributed)

A TV host asked my wife, 'Have you ever considered divorce?' She replied: 'Divorce never, murder often.'
Charlton Heston

Well, we never wanted to get divorced at the same time.
Bruce Paltrow, when asked why his marriage lasted so long

Love the quest; marriage the conquest; divorce the inquest.
Helen Rowland

Divorce is born of perverted morals, and leads, as experience shows, to vicious habits in public and private life.
Pope Leo XIII

Doctor


God heals, and the physician gets the thanks. [Benjamin Franklin's variant: God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.]
George Herbert

Our doctor would never really operate unless it was necessary. He was just that way. If he didn't need the money, he wouldn't lay a hand on you.
Herb Shriner

Doctors are busy playing God when so few of us have the qualifications. And besides, the job is taken.
Bernie S. Siegel, MD

Diaulus, once a doctor, is now an undertaker; what he does as an undertaker he used to do also as a doctor.
Martial

If the doctor cures the sun sees it; if he kills the earth hides it.
James Kelly

That patient is not like to recover who makes the doctor his heir.
Thomas Fuller

A single doctor like a sculler plies,
And all his art and all his physic tries;
But two physicians, like a pair of oars,
Conduct you soonest to the Stygian shores.
Author unidentified

Heaven defend me from a busy doctor.
Welsh Proverb

I have noticed that doctors who fail in the practice of medicine have a tendency to seek one another's company and aid in consultation. A doctor who cannot take out your appendix properly will recommend you to a doctor who will be unable to remove your tonsils with success.
Ernest Hemingway

Dog


The more one gets to know of men, the more one values dogs.
A. Toussenel

Let sleeping dogs lie.
English Proverb

It's a hard Winter when dogs eat dogs.
Thomas Fuller

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.
Samuel Butler

A house without either a dog or a cat is the house of a scoundrel.
Portuguese Proverb

Dogma


There's nothing within science per se that says medical researchers must not experiment on human subjects; it is the imposition of ethical dogma that constrains the scientist.
Jonah Goldberg

Doing


A man must do as he can when he cannot as he would.
Thomas Draxe

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces.
Shakespeare

Dollar


Each dollar is a soldier that does your bidding.
Ascribed to Vincent Astor

Doomsday


Everyone's death day is his Doomsday.
John Lyly

Doubt


If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.
Sir Francis Bacon

Doubt is not a pleasant mental state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

When men are in doubt they always believe what is most agreeable.
Flavius Arrianus

Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win,
By fearing to attempt.
Shakespeare

To believe with certainty we must begin with doubting.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

What a state of society is this in which free-thinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as a sin!
W. Winwood Reade

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Wilson Mizner

Down


He that is down, needs fear no fall,
He that is low, no pride.
John Bunyan

Dream


People who insist on telling their dreams are among the terrors of the breakfast table.
Max Beerbohm

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.
J. K. Rowling

We see sleeping what we wish for waking.
George Pettie

All dreams, as in old Galen I have read,
Are from repletion and complexion bred,
From rising fumes of indigested food,
And noxious humors that infect the blood.
John Dryden

Dreams are excursions to the limbo of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison.
H. F. Amiel

As one who catches at a shadow and pursues the wind, so is anyone who believes in dreams.
Ecclesiasticus 34:2

Dress


The desire to please by outward charms, which we know naturally invite lust, does not spring from a sound conscience. Why should you rouse an evil passion?
Tertullian

Singularity in dress is ridiculous; in fact, it is generally looked upon as a proof that the mind is somewhat deranged. The fashion of the country wherein one lives is the rule which should be followed in the choice and form of dress.
St. John Baptist de la Salle

I have always a sacred veneration for anyone I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher.
Jonathan Swift

It is not every man that can afford to wear a shabby coat; worldly wisdom dictates to her disciples the propriety of dressing somewhat beyond their means, but of living within them; for every one sees how we dress, but none see how we live, except we choose to let them.
C. C. Colton

Eat what you will, but dress as others do.
Arab Proverb

A really rich man is careless of his dress.
Chinese Proverb

Drink


An Irish queer: a fellow who prefers women to drink.
Sean O'Faolain

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish,
And wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.
Proverbs 31:6 (KJV)

And these also stagger from wine and reel from beer: Priests and prophets stagger from beer and are befuddled with wine; they reel from beer, they stagger when seeing visions, they stumble when rendering decisions.
Isaiah 28:7

Fermented spirits please our common people because they banish care and all consideration of future or present evils.
Edmund Burke

When drink's in, wit's out.
Scottish Proverb

It [drink] provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance.
Shakespeare

Drinking


They talk of my drinking but never my thirst.
Old saying

The whole world is about three drinks behind.
Humphrey Bogart

The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.
Russian Proverb

A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her.
W. C. Fields

One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I'm having a good time.
Nancy Astor

Actually, it only takes one drink to get me loaded. Trouble is, I can't remember if it's the thirteenth or the fourteenth.
George Burns

I always keep a stimulant handy in case I see a snake — which I also keep handy.
W. C. Fields

What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?
W. C. Fields

I don't drink. I don't like it. It makes me feel good.
Oscar Levant

I drink to forget I drink.
Joe E. Lewis

One more drink and I'll be under the host.
Dorothy Parker

Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
W. C. Fields

Not all men who drink are poets. Some of us drink because we aren't poets.
Author unidentified

Drink and be merry, for our time on earth is short, and death lasts forever.
Amphis

Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.
Thomas Fuller

I envy people who drink. At least they have something to blame everything on.
Oscar Levant

I only take a drink on two occasions — when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.
Brendan Behan

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.
Henny Youngman

One martini is all right. Two are too many, and three are not enough.
James Thurber

I don't get hangovers. You have to stop drinking to get a hangover.
Lemmy

He that spills the Rum, loses that only; He that drinks it, often loses both that and himself.
Author unidentified

Drink does not drown Care, but waters it, and makes it grow faster.
Author unidentified

When I was younger I made it a rule never to take a strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.
Winston Churchill

I neither want it [brandy] nor need it but I think it pretty hazardous to interfere with the ineradicable habit of a lifetime.
Winston Churchill

Claret is the liquor for boys, port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.
Samuel Johnson

I exercise strong self control. I never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.
W. C. Fields

As regards drink, I can only say that in Dublin during the Depression when I was growing up, drunkenness was not regarded as a social disgrace. To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory.
Brendan Behan

Remember: it’s not what you drink, or how much you drink, it’s how fast you drink it.
Lemmy

Kalsarikännit, n (Finnish). The feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear — with no intention of going out.
Finnish word

While we sit bousin, at the nappy,
And gettin fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and stiles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Whare sits our sulky, sullen dame,
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

(While we sit boozing strong ale,
And getting drunk and very happy,
We don’t think of the long Scots miles,
The marshes, waters, steps and stiles,
That lie between us and our home,
Where sits our sulky, sullen dame [wife],
Gathering her brows like a gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath, to keep it warm.)

Robert Burns

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi' tippeny, we fear nae evil;
Wi' usquabae, we'll face the devil!

(Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn! [whisky]
What dangers you can make us scorn!
With ale, we fear no evil;
With whisky, we’ll face the Devil!)

Robert Burns

When men drink, then they are rich and successful and win lawsuits and are happy and help their friends.
Quickly, bring me a beaker of wine, so that I may wet my mind and say something clever.
Aristophanes

Now is the time for drinking, now the time to beat the earth with unfettered foot.
Horace

"Come," each one cries, "let me get wine! Let us drink our fill of beer! And tomorrow will be like today, or even far better."
Isaiah 56:12

Long quaffing maketh a short life.
John Lyly

I drink when I have occasion for it, and sometimes when I have not.
Cervantes

Drink today, and drown all sorrow;
You shall perhaps not do it tomorrow;
Best, while you have it, use your breath;
There is no drinking after death.
John Fletcher and Ben Jonson

He bids the ruddy cup go round
Till sense and sorrow both are drowned.
Walter Scott

A thousand drink themselves to death before one dies of thirst. (Es trinken tausend sich den Tod Ehe einer stirbt vor Durstes Noth.)
German Proverb

One draught above heat makes him a fool, the second mads him, and a third drowns him.
Shakespeare

If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons we should drink;
Good wine — a friend — or being dry —
Or lest we should be by and by —
Or any other reason why.
Henry Aldrich

Come,
Let’s have one other gaudy night.
Call to me
All my sad captains, fill our bowls once more;
Let’s mock the midnight bell.
Shakespeare

Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame
When once it is within thee.
George Herbert

Where the drink goes in, there the wit goes out.
George Herbert

A man who exposes himself when he is intoxicated, has not the art of getting drunk.
Samuel Johnson

Mrs. Williams: I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves [by drinking].
Dr. Johnson: I wonder, Madam, that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
Samuel Johnson

Thanks be to God, since my leaving drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company.
Samuel Pepys

Were I to prescribe a rule for drinking, it should be formed upon a saying quoted by Sir William Temple: the first glass for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the fourth for mine enemies.
Joseph Addison

I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.
George Farquhar

We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
Robert Burns

There's death in the cup — so beware!
Nay, more — there is danger in touching;
But who can avoid the fell snare,
The man and his wine's so bewitching!
Robert Burns

And drink when you're dry — but don't drink beyond reason
Or you will be the worse for it when you've work to do.
William Langland

I am sure the Americans can fix nothing without a drink. If you meet, you drink; if you part, you drink; if you make acquaintance, you drink … They commence it early in life, and they continue it, until they drop into the grave.
Frederick Marryat

I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure.
Ernest Hemingway

Drinking And Drugs


No use saying sorry, it's something that I enjoy.
Ozzy Osbourne, Randy Rhoads, Bob Daisley, and Lee Kerslake

Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations — wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
Edmund Burke

My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.
Tallulah Bankhead

Drowned


Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
Shakespeare

Drugs


Uppers are no longer stylish, Methedrine is almost as rare as pure acid or DMT. "Consciousness Expansion" went out with LBJ and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system.
P. J. O'Rourke

Reality is just a crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.
Lily Tomlin

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
Hunter S. Thompson

A fool who, after plain warning, persists in dosing himself with dangerous drugs should be free to do so, for his death is a benefit to the race in general.
H. L. Mencken

I'm a heroin addict. I need to have sex with women who have saved someone's life.
Mitch Hedberg

Charm … it's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have.
J. M. Barrie

Drunk


You are not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
Dean Martin

"Mr. Churchill, you are drunk."
"Madame, you are ugly."
"Mr. Churchill, you are extremely drunk!"
"And you, Madame, are extremely ugly. But tomorrow, I shall be sober."
Winston Churchill (Attributed to Churchill and Bessie Braddock, but most likely apocryphal)

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
Ernest Hemingway

My dad was the town drunk. Usually that's not so bad, but New York City?
Henny Youngman (Attributed)

He that killeth a man when he is drunk shall be hanged when he is sober.
John Heywood

Astute people, when they want to ascertain a man's true character, make him drunk.
Martin Luther

The variety of behavior in men that have drunk too much is the same with that of madmen: some of them being raging, others loving, others laughing, all extravagantly, but according to their several domineering passions.
Thomas Hobbes

Man, being reasonable, must get drunk;
The best of life is but intoxication.
Byron

Not drunk is he who from the floor
Can rise alone and still drink more;
But drunk is he who prostrate lies,
Without the power to drink or rise.
Thomas Love Peacock

What a man says drunk he has thought sober.
Flemish Proverb

Drunkard


[One] must not demand prudence from a man who is never sober.
Cicero

Nothing more like a Fool, than a drunken Man.
Author unidentified

One evening in October, when I was one-third sober,
An' taking home a 'load' with manly pride;
My poor feet began to stutter, so I lay down in the gutter,
And a pig came up an' lay down by my side;
Then we sang 'It's all fair weather when good fellows get together,'
Till a lady passing by was heard to say:
'You can tell a man who "boozes" by the company he chooses'
And the pig got up and slowly walked away.
Benjamin Hapgood Burt

Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags.
Proverbs 23:20-21

He is a drunkard who takes more than three glasses, though he be not drunk.
Epictetus

Sweet fellowship in shame!
One drunkard loves another of the name.
Shakespeare

Drunkards have a fool's tongue and a knave's heart.
H. G. Bohn

Drunkenness


You must allow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure.
Lord Chesterfield

Drunkenness is the vice … of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting drunk, but forgets the pains of getting sober.
C. C. Colton

Drunkenness makes some men fools, some beasts, and some devils.
H. G. Bohn

Drunkenness is a joy reserved for the gods: so men do partake of it impiously, and so they are very properly punished for their audacity.
James Branch Cabell

Drunkenness is temporary suicide: the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.
Bertrand Russell

Dryden


What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden, lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit, he found it brick, and he left it marble.
Samuel Johnson

Duel


I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
Mark Twain

It is too bad that death often results from duelling, for duels otherwise help keep up politeness in society.
Napoleon I

Dullness


He is not only dull himself, but the cause of dullness in others.
Samuel Foote

Dust


Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection.
The Book of Common Prayer (The Burial of the Dead)

Dutch


The Dutch are a stupid people.
Napoleon I

In matters of commerce, the fault of the Dutch
Is offering too little and asking too much.
George Canning

Duty


Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
Winston Churchill

Duties are not performed for duties' sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty — the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
Mark Twain

Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
Mark Twain

[It] is all wrong to preach to the Forgotten Man that it is his duty to go and remedy other people's neglect. It is not his duty … The exhortations ought to be expended on the negligent — that they take care of themselves.
William Graham Sumner

For it is a poor service to God and the kingdom to take their pay and to decline their work.
Thomas Rainsborough

It is better to begin doing our duty late than never.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Do your duty, and leave the rest to heaven.
Pierre Corneille

Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail.
Thomas Jefferson

England expects every officer and man to do his duty this day.
Horatio Nelson

There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from, but the consciousness of duty disregarded. A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity.
Daniel Webster

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty;
I woke and found that life was duty.
Anonymous

The path of duty lies in what is near, but men seek it in what is remote.
Chinese Proverb

Unhappy the child who forgets his duty to his parents, for his own children, in their turn, will repay him in the same coin.
Euripides

That duty demands and requires, that what is right should not only be made known, but made prevalent; that what is evil should not only be detected, but defeated.
Edmund Burke

It is not, what a lawyer tells me I may do; but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do.
Edmund Burke

I am well aware, that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme disrelish to be told of their duty.
Edmund Burke

If we owe to it [civil society] any duty, it is not subject to our will. Duties are not voluntary.
Edmund Burke

If we do our duty we shall not fail.
Rudyard Kipling

Every man may be certain that he has no time to waste. The duties of life are commensurate to its duration, and every day brings its task, which if neglected is doubled on the morrow.
Samuel Johnson

When I’m not thanked at all, I’m thanked enough;
I’ve done my duty, and I’ve done no more.
Henry Fielding

The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country, than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger.
Andrew Jackson

Dying


The long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.
Thomas Browne

He was dying all his life.
Hector Berlioz (of Chopin)

It is the duty of a doctor to prolong life and it is not his duty to prolong the act of dying.
Thomas, Lord Horder

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming and terrified like his passengers.
Author unidentified

Nearby, a younger man was nursing a martini and a cigarette, slowly dying by his own hand.
Herb Caen

Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. My advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
W. Somerset Maughm

The dying man doesn't struggle much and he isn't much afraid. As his alkalies give out he succumbs to a blest stupidity. His mind fogs. His will power vanishes. He submits decently. He scarcely gives a damn.
H. L. Mencken

Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.
Oscar Wilde, Last words as he lay dying in a drab Paris hotel room

We begin to die at birth; the end flows from the beginning.
Marcus Manilius

[The] groans of the dying excited only the envy of their surviving friends.
Mariana de Rebus Hispanicis

For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure.
St. Paul, 2 Timothy 4:6

When I die, I die. I could give a shit, 'cause it ain't my problem. I'd just rather not shit my pants on the way there.
Samuel Halpern

I'm always angry when I'm dying
Clifford Mortimer, last words

Do you know the famous last words of the Fatted Calf? 'I hear the young master has returned.'
Monja Danischewsky

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
Socrates

To die will be an awfully big adventure.
J. M. Barrie

I know I have not long to live, for my head is like a knife, from which the steel is wholly whetted away, and which is become mere iron; the iron will cut no more, even so it is with my head. Now, loving Lord God, I hope my time is not for hence; God help me, and give me a happy hour; I desire to live no longer.
Martin Luther

Of all the boons that man asks of the gods, he prays most fervently for an easy death.
Posidippus

I end a life of consummate misery by a death the most revolting.
Germanicus

O wretched little soul of mine, imprisoned in an unworthy body, go forth, be free!
Cornificia

I have lived in doubt, I die in anxiety, I know not whither I go. (Vixi dubius, anxius morior, nescio quo vada.)
Author unidentified

I am going to seek a great perhaps. Draw the curtain: the farce is played out.
Ascribed to François Rabelais

'Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord,
When men are unprepared and look not for it.
Shakespeare

Nothing in his life
Became him like the leaving it; he died
As one that had been studied in his death —
To throw away the dearest thing he ow'd,
As 'twere a careless trifle.
Shakespeare

My desire is to make what haste I may to be gone.
Oliver Cromwell: Last words, 1658.

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
Thomas Hobbes: On his deathbed, Dec. 4, 1679.

I imagined it was more difficult to die. (J'avais cru plus difficile de mourir.)
Louis XIV of France: Last words, 1715.

He is miserable that dieth not before he desires to die.
Thomas Fuller

The conscience of the dying man calumniates his life.
Luc de Varvenargues

He left a world he was weary of with the cool indifference you quit a dirty inn, to continue your journey to a place where you hope for better accommodation.
Mary Wortley Montagu

It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is of no importance, it lasts so short a time.
Samuel Johnson

No rational man can die without uneasy apprehensions.
Samuel Johnson

Perhaps nature wants us, at the end of our days, to be disgusted with life, so that we may leave this world with less regret.
Frederick the Great

I do not like the apparatus [of death] at all, and hope I shall know no more of my going out of the world than I did of my coming into it. Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
Horace Walpole

Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go.
George Washington: Last words, Dec. 14, 1799.

Soldiers, straight at my heart! (Soldats, droit au coeur!)
Michel Ney: Last words at his execution, Dec. 7, 1815.

I am ready at any time. Do not keep me waiting.
John Brown: Last words on the scaffold, 1859.

The best way to get praise is to die.
Italian Proverb

A plague o’ both your houses!
They have made worms’ meat of me.
Shakespeare

How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry!
Shakespeare

If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy.
Shakespeare

I saw him now going the way of all flesh.
John Webster

I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.
Samuel Johnson, On his final illness

He had been, he said, an unconscionable time dying; he hoped that they would excuse it.
Charles II

"You're not going to die, are you sir?" he said.
"Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about."
Terry Pratchett

Vital spark of heav’nly flame!
Quit, oh quit, this mortal frame:
Trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying,
Oh the pain, the bliss of dying!
Alexander Pope

It hath been often said, that it is not death, but dying which is terrible.
Henry Fielding

Now, God be with you, my children: I have breakfasted with you and shall sup with my Jesus Christ this night.
Robert Bruce

Old man! 'tis not so difficult to die.
Lord Byron

I've said I'm not afraid of death, and that's true. Dying, though, is another matter. Dying slowly in great pain is something I actively try to avoid.
K. J. Parker

Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you.
Ernest Hemingway

Eagle


I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character … like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor, and often very lousy …. The turkey … is a much more respectable bird, and withal a true original native of America.
Benjamin Franklin

Ear


Nature has given man one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear twice as much as we speak.
Diogenes Laertius

Earl of Chesterfield


This man I thought had been a lord among wits, but I find he is only a wit among lords. [His letters to his son] teach the morals of a whore, and the manners of a dancing-master.
Samuel Johnson

Earnestness


Earnestness is just stupidity sent to college.
P. J. O'Rourke

Earth


All things come from earth, and to earth they all return.
Menander

Six feet of earth make all men equal.
James Howell

He saw with his own eyes the moon was round,
Was also certain that the earth was square.
Because he had journey'd fifty miles, and found
No sign that it was circular anywhere.
Byron

Look round and survey the various beauties of the globe, which heaven has destined for the seat of the human race, and consider whether a world thus exquisitely framed could be meant for the abode of misery and pain.
Samuel Johnson

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.
Thomas Jefferson

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is clearly Ocean.
Arthur C. Clarke

Ease


It is in vain, I perceive, to look for ease and happiness in a world of troubles.
George Washington

Honor and ease are seldom bedfellows.
John Clarke

Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.
Chinese Proverb

Ease, if it is not rising into pleasure, will be falling towards pain.
Samuel Johnson

East


Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
Rudyard Kipling

Easy


Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.
Publilius

Eating


In general they [my children] refused to eat anything that hadn't danced on TV.
Erma Bombeck

"There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint" … "I didn't say there was nothing better," the King replied, "I said there was nothing like it."
Lewis Carroll

We each day dig our graves with our teeth.
Samuel Smiles

He found that a fork in his inexperienced hand was an instrument of chase rather than capture.
H. G. Wells

Don't graze — unless you are a cow or want to be the size of one.
Zoë Harcombe

We have the nature and manner of all wild beasts in eating. The wolves eat sheep; we also. The foxes eat hens, geese, etc.; we also. The hawks and kites eat fowl and birds; we also. Pikes eat other fish; we also. With oxen, horse, and kine, we also eat salads, grass, etc.
Martin Luther

A full gorged belly never produced a sprightly mind.
Jeremy Taylor

Lord, Madame, I have fed like a farmer, I shall grow as fat as a porpoise.
Jonathan Swift

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are. (Dismoi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.)
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

He that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.
H. G. Bohn

In eating, a third of the stomach should be filled with food, a third with drink, and the rest left empty.
The Talmud

The choleric drinks, the melancholic eats, the phlegmatic sleeps.
George Herbert

Be the first to stop, as befits good manners, and do not be insatiable, or you will give offense.
Ecclesiasticus 31:17

Ecclesiastic


And of all plagues with which mankind are curst,
Ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst.
Daniel Defoe

Economics


The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
Adam Smith

No nation was ever ruined by trade.
Benjamin Franklin

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.
Adam Smith

There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Milton Friedman

The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
John Maynard Keynes

Blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent their own people from trading. What protectionism teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
Henry George

It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.
Ludwig von Mises

At least half of the popular fallacies about economics come from assuming that economic activity is a zero-sum game, in which what is gained by someone is lost by someone else. But transactions would not continue unless both sides gained, whether in international trade, employment, or renting an apartment.
Thomas Sowell

[The] zero-sum caricature [applies] much more accurately to socialism, which stifles the creation of new wealth and thus fosters a dog-eat-dog struggle over existing material resources.
George Gilder

The active, insatiate principle of self-love can alone supply the arts of life and the wages of industry; and as soon as civil government and exclusive property have been introduced, they become necessary to the existence of the human race.
Edward Gibbon

The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government union-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system.
Milton Friedman

There is no such thing on this earth as something for nothing.
William Graham Sumner

There cannot be overproduction of anything which men and women want. And their wants are unlimited, except by the size of their stomachs.
Thomas Edison

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound nought and six, result misery.
Charles Dickens

Economist


An economist is someone who sees something working in practice and wonders if it will work in theory.
Ronald Reagan

Economy


The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
George Bernard Shaw

I would rather have my people laugh at my economies than weep for my extravagance.
King Oscar II of Sweden

I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith

There can be no economy where there is no efficiency.
Benjamin Disraeli

Edible


Edible, adj. Good to eat, and wholesome to digest, as a worm to a toad, a toad to a snake, a snake to a pig, a pig to a man, and a man to a worm.
Ambrose Bierce

Editor


[An editor is] person employed on a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
Elbert Hubbard

Edmund Burke


I believe in any body of men in England I should have been in the minority; I have always been in the minority.
Edmund Burke

You could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen.
Samuel Johnson

Education


I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
Chinese Proverb

"Whom are you?" he asked, for he had attended business college.
George Ade

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats

I find the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.
Clark Kerr

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Mark Twain

It takes me several days, after I get back to Boston, to realize that the reference "the president" refers to the president of Harvard and not to a minor official in Washington.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I've over-educated myself in all the things I shouldn't have known at all.
Noel Coward

I prefer the company of peasants because they have not been educated sufficiently to reason incorrectly
Michel de Montaigne

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Alexander Pope

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
William Arthur Ward

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.
George Bernard Shaw

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde

The learned are seldom pretty fellows, and in many cases their appearance tends to discourage a love of study in the young.
H. L. Mencken

The trouble is not chiefly that our universities are unfit for students but that many present-day students are unfit for universities.
Eric Hoffer

I was a modest, good-humored boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.
Max Beerbohm

School teachers, taking them by and large, are probably the most ignorant and stupid class of men in the whole group of mental workers.
H. L. Mencken

The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
H. L. Mencken

More than any other class of blind leaders of the blind they are responsible for the degrading standardization which now afflicts the American people.
H. L. Mencken, on pedagogues

Children are educated by what the grown-up is and not by his talk.
Carl Gustav Jung

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain

Give your ears, hear the sayings,
Give your heart to understand them;
It profits to put them in your heart.
Amenemope

The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
Edward Gibbon

It is better to learn late than never.
Publilius Syrus

Personally I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught.
Winston Churchill

When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Cicero

[It] is not sufficiently considered, that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.
Samuel Johnson

In the productions of the mind, as in those of the soil, the gifts of nature are excelled by industry and skill.
Edward Gibbon

Genius may anticipate the season of maturity; but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised, before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded: nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors.
Edward Gibbon

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
Mark Twain

The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.
Louis L'Amour

If I am through learning, I am through.
John Wooden

One of the benefits of a bad education is the constant pleasure of discovery.
Richard Brookhiser

No other society in human history has placed such a strong and consistent emphasis on education at all levels as the United States has from its very inception. But there has been a failure somewhere. … There is a universal complaint in Europe and North America that the young emerge from high school (and often from university) with only tolerable literacy, unable to write their own language well, ignorant of other languages, knowing little of their country's history, literature, and culture — fitter candidates for a mob than for a citizenry.
Paul Johnson

The purpose of a college education is to give you the correct view of minorities, and the means to live as far away from them as possible.
Joseph Sobran

[Bilingual education:] a school system that can't teach its charges in one language has smoothly diversified into not teaching them in two.
Mark Steyn

In modern education, girls are treated as the gold standard, and boys are treated as "defective girls."
Dennis Prager

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
Author unidentified

Learn of [from] the skillful: He that teaches himself, hath a fool for his master.
Author unidentified

[Authentic] education is not "value-neutral" but includes moral education that explains the standards for right and wrong.
The 1776 Report

[Education experts] have not completely killed the habit among children of reading worthwhile books but they have certainly had a go.
Paul Johnson

Do not train boys to learning by force and harshness, but lead them by what amuses them, so that they may better discover the bent of their minds.
Plato: The Republic, vII, c. 370 B.C.

Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion.
Menander

The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects.
Adam Smith

I have never thought a boy should undertake abstruse or difficult sciences, such as mathematics in general, till fifteen years of age at soonest. Before that time, they are best employed in learning the languages, which is merely a matter of memory.
Thomas Jefferson

Education, however indispensable in a cultivated age, produces nothing on the side of genius. When education ends, genius often begins.
Isaac D'Israeli

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.
Edward Gibbon

Repetition is the mother of education.
Jean Paul Richter

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
R. W. Emerson

No child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy or religion, for wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity. The child should give its attention either to subjects where no error is possible at all, such as mathematics, or to those in which there is no particular danger in making a mistake, such as languages, natural science, history, and so on.
Arthur Schopenhauer

No mother's mark is more permanent than the mental naevi and moles, and excrescences, and mutilations, that students carry with them out of the lecture room.
O. W. Holmes

Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Benjamin Disraeli

The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)

We need education in the obvious more than investigation of the obscure.
O. W. Holmes II

The state has a right to insist that its citizens shall be educated.
Pastoral Letter of the American Roman Catholic hierarchy, Feb., 1920

The parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists.
W. J. Bryan

The effects of infantile instruction are, like those of syphilis, never completely cured.
Robert Briffault

There is now less flogging in our great schools than formerly, but then less is learned there; so that what the boys get at one end they lose at the other.
Samuel Johnson

To spend too much time in studies is sloth.
Francis Bacon

Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it, merely to show that you have one.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or I could not learn.
Winston Churchill

Certainly the prolonged education indispensable to the progress of Society is not natural to mankind.
Winston Churchill

Why then should women be denied the benefits of instruction? If knowledge and understanding had been useless additions to the sex, God almighty would never have given them capacities.
Daniel Defoe

Effort


In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present, merely means that there has been stored-up effort in the past.
Theodore Roosevelt

He who does his best, however little, is always to be distinguished from him who does nothing.
Samuel Johnson

Ego


I don't let the hate go to my heart, and I don't let the praise go to my head.
Dennis Prager

Egoism


If she think not well of me,
What care I how fair she be?
George Wither

I am clever; and make no scruple of declaring it; why should I?
La Rochefoucauld

We cannot possibly feel for others; it is solely for ourselves that we feel. It is not father or mother, wife or child, that we love, but the agreeable emotions that they set up in us — emotions of pride and self-love.
G. C. Lichtenberg

Egotist


An egotist is a man who thinks that if he hadn't been born, people would have wondered why.
Dan Post

Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
George Eliot

Egypt


The riches of Egypt all go to foreigners.
Arab Proverb

Election


Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
Franklin P. Adams

Whatever one may think about democratic government, it is just as well to have practical experience of its rough and slatternly foundations. No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.
Winston Churchill

Elephant


When you have got an elephant by the hind leg, and he is trying to run away, it's best to let him run.
Abraham Lincoln

Eloquence


Eloquent speakers are inclined to ambition; for eloquence seemeth wisdom, both to themselves and others.
Thomas Hobbes

Eloquence, smooth and cutting, is like a razor whetted with oil.
Jonathan Swift

Can there be a more horrible object in existence than an eloquent man not speaking the truth?
Thomas Carlyle

Who can speak well can also lie well.
Japanese Proverb

Emacs


Emacs is a nice [operating system], but a weird editor.
M. J. Blom

Embroidery


A little daily embroidery had been a constant element in Mrs Transome's life; that soothing occupation of taking stitches to produce what neither she nor any one else wanted, was then the resource of many a well-born and unhappy woman.
George Eliot

Eminence


Nearest the king, nearest the gallows.
Danish Proverb

Every man ought to endeavour at eminence, not by pulling others down, but by raising himself.
Samuel Johnson

It is no less a proof of eminence to have many enemies than many friends, and I look upon every letter, whether it contains encomiums or reproaches, as an equal attestation of rising credit.
Samuel Johnson

He who ascends to mountaintops, shall find
The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;
He who surpasses or subdues mankind
Must look down on the hate of those below.
Lord Byron

Empathy


Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
William Blake

Emperor


Because I pillage with one little ship I am called a pirate; because you do it with a great navy you are called an emperor.
A captured pirate to Alexander of Macedon, c. 330 B.C.

Empire


[An] extensive empire must be supported by a refined system of policy and oppression; in the centre, an absolute power, prompt in action and rich in resources; a swift and easy communication with the extreme parts; fortifications to check the first effort of rebellion; a regular administration to protect and punish; and a well-disciplined army to inspire fear, without provoking discontent and despair.
Edward Gibbon

One reason empires fail is that they are too big to run; they are easier to create than to administer, consolidate and defend.
Paul Johnson

The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.
Camille Paglia

I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.
Winston Churchill

Employee Retention


Train people well enough so they can leave, pay them well enough so they don't want to.
Richard Branson

Employment


A man who qualifies himself well for his calling never fails of employment in it.
Thomas Jefferson

Employment gives health, sobriety, and morals. Constant employment and well-paid labor produce, in a country like ours, general prosperity, content, and cheerfulness.
Daniel Webster

When men are employed, they are best contented; for on the days they worked they were good-natured and cheerful, and, with the consciousness of having done a good day’s work, they spent the evening jollily; but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome.
Benjamin Franklin

End


Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Winston Churchill

All lovely things will have an ending,
All lovely things will fade and die,
All youth, that's now so bravely spending,
Will beg a penny by and by.
Conrad Aiken

The line, often adopted by strong men in controversy, of justifying the means by the end.
Saint Jerome

He who wills the end wills the means.
English Proverb

May God make our end better than our beginning.
Arab Saying

Endurance


What can't be cured must be endured.
English Proverb

Enemy


A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
Oscar Wilde

Whoever has his foe at his mercy, and does not kill him, is his own enemy.
Sa'di

He makes no friend who never made a foe.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

We should forgive our enemies, but only after they have been hanged first.
Heinrich Heine

Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Thomas Jones

The savage nations of the globe are the common enemies of civilized society; and we may inquire, with anxious curiosity, whether Europe is still threatened with a repetition of those calamities, which formerly oppressed the arms and institutions of Rome.
Edward Gibbon

Yet this apparent security should not tempt us to forget, that new enemies, and unknown dangers, may possibly arise from some obscure people, scarcely visible in the map of the world. The Arabs or Saracens, who spread their conquests from India to Spain, had languished in poverty and contempt, till [Muhammad] breathed into those savage bodies the soul of enthusiasm.
Edward Gibbon

I have made plenty of enemies in my lifetime, but none has ever done me as much injury as I do myself.
Kathryn L. Nelson

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
Napoleon Bonaparte

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea.
Victor Hugo

Wise men learn much from their enemies.
Aristophanes

A man has no enemy worse than himself.
Cicero

How pleasant it is to pity the fate of an enemy when we have nothing more to fear from him.
Pierre Corneille

The gifts of an enemy are justly to be dreaded.
Voltaire

If we are bound to forgive an enemy, we are not bound to trust him.
Thomas Fuller

There is not a more prudent maxim than to live with one's enemies as if they may one day become one's friends.
Lord Chesterfield

All things human have their ends, and some day England will lose its liberty, and perish. It will perish when its legislative power becomes more corrupt than its executive power.
C. L. de Montesquieu

When an army in the field becomes imbued with the idea that the enemy are vermin who cumber the earth, instances of barbarity may easily be the outcome.
Winston Churchill

Engineer


There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers. While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain.
Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800

If you can write code and understand systems, you're a geek. If you can communicate, coordinate, and control — you're an engineer.
Author unidentified

England


To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.
W. Somerset Maugham

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
Rupert Brooke

Industrialization came to England but has since left.
P. J. O'Rourke

England is the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of horses.
John Florio

Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones!
Shakespeare

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune.
Shakespeare

England is a moon shone upon by France. France has all things within herself; and she possesses the power of recovering from the severest blows. England is an artificial country: take away her commerce, and what has she?
Ascribed to Edmund Burke

You cannot imagine, you say, that England will ever be ruined and conquered; and for no other reason that I can find, but because it seems so very odd it should be ruined and conquered. Alas! so reasoned, in their time, the Austrian, Russian and Prussian Plymleys. But the English are brave; so were all these nations.
Sydney Smith

I consider the government of England as totally without morality, insolent beyond bearing, inflated with vanity and ambition, aiming at the exclusive dominion of the sea, lost in corruption, of deep-rooted hatred towards us, hostile to liberty wherever it endeavors to show its head, and the eternal disturber of the peace of the world.
Thomas Jefferson

It was never good times in England since the poor began to speculate upon their condition.
Charles Lamb

Oh, England is a pleasant place for them that's rich and high,
But England is a cruel place for such poor folks as I.
Charles Kingsley

Bognor has always meant to me the quintessential English seaside experience (before all this global warming stuff): driving in the rain to get there, walking around in the rain looking for something to do when you're there, and driving home in the rain again.
Terry Pratchett

Be England what she will,
With all her faults she is my country still.
Charles Churchill

Our cloudy climate, and our chilly women.
Lord Byron

The English winter — ending in July,
To recommence in August.
Lord Byron

England a happy land we know,
Where follies naturally grow.
Charles Churchill

Our severest winter, commonly called the spring.
William Cowper

England's not a bad country … It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.
Margaret Drabble

I feel in regard to this aged England … that she sees a little better on a cloudy day, and that, in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigour and a pulse like a cannon.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

English


The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: The one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.
William Hazlitt

The English instinctively admire any man who has no talent and is modest about it.
James Agee

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
George Bernard Shaw

The most dangerous thing in the world is to make a friend of an Englishman, because he'll come sleep in your closet rather than spend ten shillings on a hotel.
Truman Capote

The English find ill-health not only interesting but respectable and often experience death in the effort to avoid a fuss.
Pamela Frankau

The English are a huge force for good and evil.
Paul Johnson

The [Medieval] English thought war was a business, which should turn in a profit.
Paul Johnson

The English take their pleasures sadly.
Maximilien de Bethune

Raw meat makes animals fierce, and it has the same effect on man. The English, who eat their meat red and bloody, show the savagery that goes with such food.
J. O. de la Mettrie

The English are a busy people. They haven't the time to become polished.
C. L. Montesquieu

Though I love my country, I do not love my countrymen.
Byron

They doubt a man's sound judgment if he does not eat with appetite, and shake their heads if he is particularly chaste.
R. W. Emerson

Historians have noticed, all down the centuries, one peculiarity of the English people which has cost them dear. We have always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages we gained in the struggle.
Winston Churchill

English And Irish


I could wish that the English kept history in mind more, that the Irish kept it in mind less.
Elizabeth Bowen

English Language


If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!
"Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)

Naturally I am biased in favor of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for is not knowing English, I would whip them hard for that.
Winston Churchill

I have labored to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations.
Samuel Johnson

Good English is plain, easy and smooth in the mouth of an unaffected English gentleman.
Samuel Johnson

It may be doubted whether a composite language like the English is not a happier instrument of expression than a homogeneous one like the German. We possess a wonderful richness and variety of modified meanings in our Saxon and Latin quasi-synonyms, which the Germans have not.
S. T. Coleridge

View'd freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.
Walt Whitman

There is one expression that continually comes to my mind whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others: it seems to me positively and expressly masculine. It is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it.
Otto Jespersen

Englishman


How hard it is to make an Englishman acknowledge that he is happy.
W. M. Thackeray

An Englishman,
Being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.
George Chapman

Enjoyment


The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
Mark Twain

The poor have little, — beggars none;
The rich too much — enough not one.
Benjamin Franklin

Ennui


Ennui: nothing is so intolerable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without work. He then feels his nothingness, his abandonment, his insufficiency, his dependence, his powerlessness, his emptiness. Immediately from the depth of his heart will emerge ennui, gloom, sadness, resentment, vexation, despair.
Blaise Pascal

Enough


You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake

Entertainment


The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things — bread and circuses!
Juvenal

Enthusiasm


Enthusiasm is that temper of the mind in which the imagination has got the better of the judgment.
William Warburton

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Enthusiast


No wild enthusiast ever yet could rest,
Till half mankind were like himself possess'd.
William Cowper

Opposition always inflames the enthusiast, never converts him.
J. C. F. Schiller

Environment


People are easily anesthetized by overstatement, and there is a danger that the environmental movement will fall flat on its face when it is most needed, simply because it has pitched its tale too strongly.
John Maddox

Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
P. J. O'Rourke

Worshiping the earth is more fun than going to church. It's also closer.
P. J. O'Rourke

A pleasant natural environment is a good — a luxury good, philosophical good, a moral goody-good, a good time for all. Whatever, we want it. If we want something, we should pay for it, with our labor or our cash. We shouldn't beg it, steal it, sit around wishing for it, or euchre the government into taking it by force.
P. J. O'Rourke

[The land] was then covered with morasses and forests, which spread to a boundless extent, whenever man has ceased to exercise his dominion over the earth.
Edward Gibbon

Once ecology became a fashionable good cause, as it did in the late 1960s, reason, logic and proportion flew out of the window. It became a campaign not against pollution, but against growth itself, and especially against free enterprise growth — totalitarian communist growth was somehow less morally offensive.
Paul Johnson

Generally speaking, [climate] skeptics are not skeptical of any human influence. We are skeptical of (1) the size of the influence, (2) whether it presents any substantial danger, and (3) whether doing something about it with current alternative energy technologies would do more good than harm.
Roy Spencer

The [climate] models are what are being relied upon for proposed changes in energy policy; the observations are, apparently, a mere curiosity.
Roy Spencer

Wherever the material condition of the laboring classes has been improved, improvement in their personal qualities has followed, and wherever their material condition has been depressed, deterioration in these qualities has been the result.
Henry George

Environmentalism


Truly environmentalism has displaced economics as the dismal science.
Steven Hayward

One should never underestimate the ruthlessness of the men and women possessed with the transcendental notion that only their acts can save the human race from imminent destruction.
Paul Johnson

Environmentalist


Benign environmentalists are opposed to pollution, as all sensible people are; malign environmentalists are opposed to energy and most of what it enables.
Kevin D. Williamson

Envy


Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
Mark Twain

Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple.
Job 5:2

[They] saw, they envied.
Edward Gibbon

The covetous man is ever in want.
Horace

Few men have the strength of character to rejoice in a friend's success without a touch of envy.
Aeschylus

It is a nobler fate to be envied than to be pitied.
Pindar

Envy is to be overcome only by death.
Horace

Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both.
Robert Burton

A man shall never be enriched by envy.
Thomas Draxe

Envy not greatness, for thou mak'st thereby Thyself the worse, and so the distance greater.
George Herbert

The envious man shall never want woe.
William Camden

Envy is more irreconcilable than hatred.
La Rochefoucauld

Honor is always attended on by envy.
William Winstanley

There is but one man who can believe himself free from envy, and it is he who has never examined his own heart.
C. A. Helvétius

Envy, among other ingredients, has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.
William Hazlitt

All kinds of enmity are curable save that which flows out of envy.
Hebrew Proverb

Envy and anger shorten life.
Hebrew Proverb

The dullard's envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.
Max Beerbohm

Such is the state of every age, every sex, and every condition: all have their cares, either from nature or from folly: and whoever therefore finds himself inclined to envy another, should remember that he knows not the real condition which he desires to obtain.
Samuel Johnson

There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.
Richard Sheridan

Envy is, indeed, a stubborn weed of the mind, and seldom yields to the culture of philosophy.
Samuel Johnson

Epigram


What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.
S. T. Coleridge

Short, it is easily retained in the memory; pithy, it contains in the compass of a few lines the sum of an argument; and the result of experience it often expresses the wisdom of ages.
H. P. Dodd

Epitaph


If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.
H. L. Mencken

Pause, stranger, when you pass me by.
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you will be.
So prepare for death and follow me.
Author unidentified

Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.
W. C. Fields

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust enclosed here;
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.
William Shakespeare's epitaph

Once I was not. Now I am not. I know nothing about it, and it is no concern of mine.
Author unidentified

Here halt, I pray you, make a little stay,
O wayfarer, to read what I have writ,
And know by my fate what thy fate shall be.
What thou art now, wayfarer, world renowned,
I was: what I am now, so shall thou be.
The world’s delight I followed with a heart
Unsatisfied: ashes am I, and dust.
Alcuin

Go tell the Spartans, thou that passeth by,
That here, obedient to the laws, we lie.

Alternative translation:
Go, tell the Spartans
stranger passing by,
that here, obedient to Spartan law,
we dead of Sparta lie.

Simonides: Epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, 480 B.C.

Here, lapped in hallowed slumber, Saon lies,
Asleep, not dead; a good man never dies.
Callimachus

May the earth lie light upon thee. (Sit tibi terra levis.)
Epitaph common on Roman tombs

All hope of never dying here lies dead.
Richard Crashaw

The body of Benjamin Franklin, Printer (like the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and stript of its lettering and gilding), lies here, food for worms; but the work shall not be lost, for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more elegant edition, revised and corrected by the Author.
Benjamin Franklin

Let my epitaph be, "Here lies Joseph, who failed in everything he undertook."
Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor: Last words

And when I lie in the green kirkyard,
With the mold upon my breast,
Say not that she did well, or ill,
Only, She did her best.
Dinah Mulock Craik: Epitaph for herself

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.
Ambrose Bierce

This turf has drank
A widow's tear;
Three of her husbands
Slumber here.
Epitaph in a churchyard in Staffordshire England

Here lies our sovereign lord the King,
Whose promise none relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.
John Wilmot, of Charles II

Near this spot are deposited the remains of one who possessed beauty without vanity, strength without insolence, courage without ferocity, and all the virtues of Man, without his vices.
Lord Byron, Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog

Good to the poor, to kindred dear,
To servants kind, to friendship clear,
To nothing but herself severe.
Thomas Carew, epitaph for Lady Mary Wentworth

If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.
Robert Burns, epitaph on William Muir

By many lands and over many a wave
I come, my brother, to your piteous grave,
To bring you the last offering in death
And o'er dumb dust expend an idle breath
Yet take these gifts, brought as our fathers bade
For sorrow's tribute to the passing shade;
A brother's tears have wet them o'er and o'er;
And so, my brother, hail, and farewell evermore!

(Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus
Advenio has miseras, frater, ad inferias,
Ut te postremo donarem munere mortis
Et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem …
Nunc tamen interea haec prisco quae more parentum
Tradita sunt tristi munere ad inferias,
Accipe fraterno multum manantia fletu,
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale
.)

Catullus

O, lift one thought in prayer for S. T. C.;
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, epitaph for himself

Toll for the brave —
The brave! that are no more:
All sunk beneath the wave,
Fast by their native shore.
William Cowper

Equal


If I wish to walk with my equals, I have to go to the Capuchin crypt.
Joseph II

Equality


The Romans had aspired to be equal; they were leveled by the equality of servitude.
Edward Gibbon

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization.
William Graham Sumner

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
Aristotle

It is not true that equality is a law of nature. Nature knows no equality. Its sovereign law is subordination and dependence.
Luc de Varvenargues

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.
Samuel Johnson

A musical instrument composed of chords, keys or pipes, all perfectly equal in size and power, might as well be expected to produce harmony as a society composed of members all perfectly equal to be productive of peace and order.
Jonathan Boucher

The best way to make every one poor is to insist on equality of wealth.
Napoleon I

Equality, in a social sense, may be divided into that of condition and that of rights. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.
J. Fenimore Cooper

The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.
Henry Becque

The only real equality is in the cemetery.
German Proverb

Equity


Law and equity are two things which God hath joined, but which man hath put asunder.
C. C. Colton

Equivocation


Equivocation is half way to lying, as lying is the whole way to Hell.
William Penn

Erasmus


Erasmus of Rotterdam is the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth. He made several attempts to draw me into his snares, and I should have been in danger, but that God lent me special aid.
Martin Luther

Whenever I pray, I pray for a curse upon Erasmus.
Martin Luther

I hold Erasmus of Rotterdam to be Christ's most bitter enemy.
Martin Luther

Ernest Hemingway


He [Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.
William Faulkner

Error


The world always makes the assumption that the exposure of an error is identical with the discovery of the truth — that error and truth are simply opposite. They are nothing of the sort. What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one.
H. L. Mencken

Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson

Where error is irretrievable, repentance is useless.
Edward Gibbon

It is almost as difficult to make a man unlearn his errors as his knowledge. Mal-information is more hopeless than non-information; for error is always more busy than ignorance.
C. C. Colton

An old error is always more popular than a new truth.
German Proverb

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error, and another to put him in possession of truth.
John Locke

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
John Dryden

Escape


It may be laid down as a position which will seldom deceive, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong. He must fly from himself, either because he feels a tediousness in life from the equipoise of an empty mind, which, having no tendency to one motion more than another, but as it is impelled by some external power, must always have recourse to foreign objects; or he must be afraid of the intrusion of some unpleasing ideas, and perhaps is struggling to escape from the remembrance of a loss, the fear of a calamity, or some other thought of greater horrour.
Samuel Johnson

Men, not having been able to cure death, misery, and ignorance, have imagined to make themselves happy by not thinking of these things.
Blaise Pascal

Esteem


[Every] man desires to be most esteemed by those whom he loves.
Samuel Johnson

We are usually mistaken in esteeming men too much; rarely in esteeming them too little.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

Eternity


Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end?
Tom Stoppard

Like a drop of water from the sea and a grain of sand, so are a few years among the days of eternity.
Ecclesiasticus 18:10

Ethics


Our whole dignity consists in thought. Let us endeavor, then, to think well: this is the principle of ethics.
Blaise Pascal

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of another. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.
Immanuel Kant

Eugenics


Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Go through the towns and ask yourselves whether these people should reproduce! Let them go to their whores!
Friedrich Nietzsche

The best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior as seldom, as possible.
Plato

Euphemism


[Euphemism is] … a human device to conceal the horrors of reality.
Paul Johnson

Europe


Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians; since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.
Edward Gibbon

When life becomes an extended picnic, with nothing of importance to do, ideas of greatness become an irritant. Such is the nature of the Europe syndrome.
Charles Murray

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?
Mark Steyn

Europe, as an entity, was the offspring of the marriage between the culture of ancient Greece and Rome and the morality of Judeo Christianity.
Paul Johnson

European


Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
Charles Darwin

European Union


The world is already drifting into three huge trading systems — the Americas, East Asia, and Europe. There is no doubt that the French, and the bulk of the Brussels machine, see the EC as an internal free-trading area, surrounded by a high protective wall — Fortress Europe. If the French determine the European pattern, then the Big Three will emerge as fiercely antagonistic, repelling one another's trade and fostering their own. The scene would be set for the greatest trade wars the world has ever known — and history teaches that trade wars lead to real ones. We could well face the nightmare of that tripartite world, engaged in perpetual warfare, foreseen in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Paul Johnson

Evening


Every evening we are poorer by a day.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Evil


The beginning of evil is the assault on truth. The first sin, of Adam, was preceded by the first lie, Satan's, and its unthinking repetition by Eve. The metaphor of Genesis teaches that anti-truth is the cause of active evil. Lying is the prolegomenon, the foreword, to the encyclopaedia of evil.
Paul Johnson

[Back] in Sudan, the killing went on: hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. With machetes … The mound of corpses piled up around the world at the turn of the century was not from high-tech nuclear states but from low-tech psycho states.
Mark Steyn

Instead of learning to fight evil, the Germans learned that fighting is evil.
Dennis Prager (paraphrased)

Let those who love the Lord hate evil, for he guards the lives of his faithful ones and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.
Psalm 97:10

To fear the Lord is to hate evil; I hate pride and arrogance, evil behavior and perverse speech.
Proverbs 8:13

There are very few true monsters in the world. Most evil is committed by banal men holding evil beliefs.
Dennis Prager

It is characteristic of the accretive subtlety of Christianity that it ascribes evil in the world to a multiplicity of causes. Marx, by contrast, has a single-cause theory: all the evils of society arise from private property; abolish that, and they will disappear. But the result is not happiness. It is the Gulag.
Paul Johnson

He who is bent on doing evil can never want occasion.
Publilius

Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.
Phaedrus

I would rather live with a lion and a dragon than live with an evil woman.
Ecclesiasticus 25:16

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?
St. Augustine

And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol’n forth of holy writ,
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.
Shakespeare

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.
Edmund Burke

The gods can either take away evil from the world and will not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing. If they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are not omnipotent. If they can, but will not, then they are not benevolent. If they are neither able nor willing, then they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent. Lastly, if they are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it exist?
Epicurus

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.
St. Augustine

Of two evils we should always choose the less.
Thomas à Kempis

A beast is but like itself, but an evil man is half a beast and half a devil.
Joseph Hall (Bishop of Norwich)

There are men of whom we can never believe evil without having seen it. Yet there are few in whom we should be surprised to see it.
La Rochefoucauld

The three evils are the sea, fire, and woman.
Greek Proverb

Whenever God prepares evil for a man, He first damages his mind, with which he deliberates.
Anonymous

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
W. H. Auden

We believe no evil till the evil’s done.
Jean de La Fontaine

Shame be to the man who has evil in his mind. (Hony soyt qui mal pence.)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad

As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy.
Christopher Dawson

Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.
John 3:20

Evil Doing


No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.
La Rochefoucauld

Who would do ill ne’er wants occasion.
George Herbert

Evolution


It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
T. H. Huxley

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Terry Pratchett

Nature does not proceed by leaps.
Linnaeus [Carl von Linné]

Exactness


Delusive exactness is a source of fallacy throughout the law.
Mr. Justice O. W. Holmes

Exactness is the sublimity of fools.
Author unidentified

Examination


Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
C. C. Colton

Example


Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds
Makes ill deeds done!
Shakespeare

Example is better than precept.
English Proverb

Example is a dangerous lure: where the wasp got through the gnat is stuck.
Jean de la Fontaine

Example is always more efficacious than precept.
Samuel Johnson

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
Edmund Burke

He who will not be warned by the example of others shall become an example to others.
Author unidentified

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
Catherine Aird

Excellence


We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Will Durant

By different methods different men excel,
But where is he who can do all things well?
Charles Churchill

I trust a good deal to common fame, as we all must. If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.
R. W. Emerson

Excess


Nothing in excess.
Ascribed to Thales (and others)

Even nectar is poison if taken to excess.
Hindu Proverb

Excommunication


From the year of our Lord 1518, to the present time, every Maundy Thursday, at Rome, I have been by the pope excommunicated and cast into hell; yet I still live.
Martin Luther

Excuse


And oftentimes excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.
Shakespeare

Execution


Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they don't answer their purpose.
Samuel Johnson

Thou wilt show my head to the people: it is worth showing.
Georges Jacques Danton, to his executioner

Exegesis


We must be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are far-fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers.
St. Augustine

Exercise


Not less than two hours a day should be devoted to exercise.
Thomas Jefferson

Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness.
The Earl of Derby

Whenever I feel like exercise I lie down until the feeling passes.
Ascribed to Robert M. Hutchins

Existence


There is nothing in the essence of man which makes his existence necessary; it may equally well happen that this or that man does or does not exist.
Baruch Spinoza

Mere existence is so much better than nothing that one would rather exist even in pain than not exist.
Samuel Johnson

Expectation


Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.
Alexander Pope

It is generally allowed, that no man ever found the happiness of possession proportionate to that expectation which incited his desire, and invigorated his pursuit; nor has any man found the evils of life so formidable in reality, as they were described to him by his own imagination: every species of distress brings with it some peculiar supports, some unforeseen means of resisting, or power of enduring.
Samuel Johnson

For the pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.
Samuel Johnson

To whom nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.
Henry Fielding

Expense


It may, however, be laid down as a rule never to be broken, that a man's voluntary expense should not exceed his revenue.
Samuel Johnson

Experience


Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.
Vernon Law

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde

Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice.
Saint Jerome

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.
Shakespeare

The reward of suffering is experience.
Aeschylus

It is costly wisdom that is bought by experience. … Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.
Roger Ascham

Man really knows nothing save what he has learned by his own experience.
C. M. Wieland

To most men, experience is like the stern lights of a ship, which illumine only the track it has passed.
S. T. Coleridge

Experience is of no ethical value; it is simply the name we give our mistakes. It demonstrates that the future will be the same as the past.
Oscar Wilde

If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced — Even a proverb is no Proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it.
John Keats

Experiment


The true worth of an experimenter consists in his pursuing not only what he seeks in his experiment, but also what he did not seek.
Claude Bernard

Expert


An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less.
Nicholas Murray Butler

Explanation


Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.
H. L. Mencken

Exploration


A few strike out, without map or chart,
Where never a man has been,
From the beaten paths they draw apart
To see what no man has seen.
Edgar Guest

Expression


Whatever we conceive well we express clearly, and words flow with ease.
Nicolas Boileau

Extremism


Many people do not realize that the real adversary of extremism is not its opposite, but moderation.
Dennis Prager

Because extremes, as we all know, in every point which relates either to our duties or satisfactions in life, are destructive both to virtue and enjoyment.
Edmund Burke

Eye


The error of our eye directs our mind.
Shakespeare

He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.
Charles Dickens

Eye And Ear


That which is conveyed through the ear affects us less than what the eye receives.
Horace

What a mercy it would be if we were able to open and close our ears as easily as we open and close our eyes!
G. C. Lichtenberg

Face


A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
Oscar Wilde

God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.
Shakespeare

If it was the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed.
Mary Wortley Montagu

A man of fifty is responsible for his face.
Edwin M. Stanton

Facebook


I don't invest in what I don't understand. And I don't want to understand Facebook.
Charlie Munger

Fact


Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.
Patrick Moynihan

I never ponder counterfactuals.
John Derbyshire

Facts which at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop the cloak which has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
Galileo Galilei

I grow daily to honor facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing — a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.
Thomas Carlyle

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
T. H. Huxley

Faction


Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.
Edmund Burke

This sanguinary fury [regular warfare] at length subsides, and nations are divided into factions, by controversies about points that will never be decided.
Samuel Johnson

Failure


Mistakes are often the stepping stones to utter failure.
Author unidentified

In your code, never check for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
Author unidentified

Restlessness is discontent — and discontent is the first necessity of progress. Show me a thoroughly satisfied man — and I will show you a failure.
Thomas Alva Edison

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure — which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope

The doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
Frank Lloyd Wright (Attributed)

[After an appendectomy and a devastating electoral loss, Churchill found himself] without an office, without a seat, without a party, and without an appendix.
Winston Churchill

Experience, n. A series of failures. Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
H. L. Mencken

Our achievements speak for themselves. What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end results of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of decline and decay.
Eric Hoffer

Three failures denote uncommon strength. A weakling has not enough grit to fail thrice.
Minna Thomas Antrim

The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it.
Mark Steyn

Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
John Wooden

It is hard to fail; but is worse never to have tried to succeed.
Theodore Roosevelt

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
George Orwell

In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
Longinus

Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping.
J. C. and A. W. Hare

Failure in a great enterprise is at least a noble fault.
Greek Proverb

I regard it as very unfair. But capitalism without failure is like religion without hell.
Charlie Munger

I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.
John Keats

Fairness


[Tests] are not unfair. Life is unfair and tests measure the results.
David Riesman (Attributed)

Faith


Those of little faith are of little hatred.
Eric Hoffer

Failure of faith almost always arises from lack of humility. Pride destroys faith, and pride is the déformation professionnelle of the theologian.
Paul Johnson

He was of the faith chiefly in the sense that the church he currently did not attend was Catholic.
Kingsley Amis

Faith has to do with things that are not seen, and hope with things that are not in hand.
Thomas Aquinas

Faith is a knowledge of the benevolence of God toward us, and a certain persuasion of His veracity.
John Calvin

How many things that were articles of faith yesterday are fables today.
Michel de Montaigne

To believe only possibilities is not faith, but mere philosophy.
Thomas Browne

'Twas an unhappy division that has been made between faith and works. Tho' in my intellect I may divide them, just as in the candle I know there is both light and heat; but yet put out the candle, and they are both gone; one remains not without the other: So 'tis betwixt faith and works. Nay, in a right conception, fides est opus; if I believe a thing because I am commanded, that is opus.
John Selden

I hear the message well enough; what I lack is faith.
J. W. Goethe

All tragedies are finished by a death,
All comedies are ended by a marriage;
The future states of both are left to faith.
Lord Byron

People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral.
Heinrich Heine

Faithfulness


"Do you cheat on your wife?" asked the psychiatrist.

"Who else?" answered the patient.

Author unidentified

"Before we get married," said the young woman to her fiance, "I want to confess some affairs that I've had in the past."

"But you told me all about those a few weeks ago," her young man replied.

"Yes, darling," she explained, "but that was a few weeks ago."

Author unidentified

Semper fidelis [Ever faithful].
Author unidentified

I will follow the good side right to the fire, but not into it if I can help it.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Fall


He that lies upon the ground can fall no lower.
English Proverb

He that is fallen cannot help him that is down.
George Herbert

Fallacy


Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
G. K. Chesterton

False


False views, if supported by some evidence, do little harm, for everyone takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
Charles Darwin

Fame


Now when I bore people at a party, they think it's their fault.
Henry Kissinger, on fame

In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
Andy Warhol

Fame may last a minute, but infamy lasts a lifetime.
Author unidentified

Fame due to the achievements of the mind never perishes.
Propertius

I do not like the man who squanders life for fame.
Martial

If fame is to come only after death, I am in no hurry for it.
Martial

The desire for fame tempts even noble minds.
St. Augustine

For my name and memory, I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next ages.
Francis Bacon

The fame of men ought always to be estimated by the means used to acquire it.
La Rochefoucauld

What a heavy burden is a name that becomes famous too soon.
Voltaire

All fame is dangerous: good bringeth envy; bad, shame.
Thomas Fuller

From fame to infamy is a beaten road.
Thomas Fuller

If we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented on by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed.
Samuel Johnson

I awoke one morning and found myself famous.
Byron

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame — to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton

Fame is the beauty-parlor of the dead.
Benjamin Decasseres

Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.
Thomas Fuller

As he that once miscarries does not easily persuade mankind to favour another attempt, an ineffectual struggle for fame is often followed by perpetual obscurity.
Samuel Johnson

Fame cannot spread wide or endure long that is not rooted in nature, and matured by art.
Samuel Johnson

Fame is a food that dead men eat, —
I have no stomach for such meat.
Henry Austin Dobson

Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
George Eliot

Familiarity


Few men have been admired by their own households.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Family


The threat to the family posed by modern radical collectivism is in the long run no less grave, and far more stealthy and difficult to fight. Nor is it a theoretical or distant threat. It is real and imminent, especially in the America of the 1980s. I can sum it up in one sentence: the United States is in the process of establishing a social and legal system in which marriage has no legitimate status and the family no natural role.
Paul Johnson

If the family structure breaks down, you'll need the government welfare state to expand to take care of the women and children, and you'll need the police state to expand to take care of the young men.
George Gilder (paraphrased from Dennis Prager Show, 10/3/2012)

There's no family but there's a whore or a knave of it.
James Howell

The larger your family, the more disgrace is in store for you.
Hindu Proverb

The worst families are those in which the members never really speak their minds to one another; they maintain an atmosphere of unreality, and everyone always lives in an atmosphere of suppressed ill-feeling.
Walter Bagehot

Famine


African famine is not a visitation of fate. It is largely man-made, and the men who made it are largely Africans.
P. J. O'Rourke

Fanatic


A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Winston Churchill

Recluse fanatics have few ideas or sentiments to communicate.
Edward Gibbon

The fiercest fanatics are often selfish people who were forced, by innate shortcomings or external circumstances, to lose faith in their own selves. They separate the excellent instrument of their selfishness from their ineffectual selves and attach it to the service of some holy cause.
Eric Hoffer

Fanaticism


Goose pimples rose all over me, my hair stood on end, my eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude for this greatest of all conquerors of human misery and shame, and my breath came in little gasps. If I had not known that the Leader would have scorned such adulation, I might have fallen to my knees in unashamed worship, but instead I drew myself to attention, raised my arm in the eternal salute of the ancient Roman Legions and repeated the holy words, "Heil Hitler!"
George Lincoln Rockwell

Whenever the spirit of fanaticism, at once so credulous and so crafty, has insinuated itself into a noble mind, it insensibly corrodes the vital principles of virtue and veracity.
Edward Gibbon

[Fanaticism] obliterates the feelings of humanity.
Edward Gibbon

There is only one step from fanaticism to barbarism.
Denis Diderot

We know the crimes that fanaticism in religion has caused; let us be careful not to introduce fanaticism in philosophy.
Frederick the Great

Farewell


All farewells should be sudden, when forever.
Byron

Farm


Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and. your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms, and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.
W. J. Bryan

A farm is like a man — however great the income, if there is extravagance but little is left.
Cato the Elder

Farmer


The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything he produces at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.
John F. Kennedy

It is from the tillers of the soil that spring the best citizens, the staunchest soldiers. Farmers are, of all men, the least given to vice.
Cato

A plain country fellow is one that manures his ground well, but lets himself lie fallow and untilled. He has reason enough to do his business, and not enough to be idle or melancholy.
John Earle (Bishop of Salisbury)

Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
Jonathan Swift

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of civilization.
Daniel Webster

Even if a farmer intends to loaf, he gets up in time to get an early start.
E. W. Howe

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.
Thomas Jefferson

Fascism


Fascism, before being a party, is a religion.
Benito Mussolini

Fashion


Every generation laughs at the old fashions but religiously follows the new.
Henry David Thoreau

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Jean Cocteau

And by my grave you'd pray to have me back
So I could see how well you look in black.
Marco Carson

Sweatpants are a sign of defeat.
Karl Lagerfeld

Old fashions please me best.
Shakespeare

Fools may invent fashions that wise men will, wear.
Thomas Fuller

What has been the fashion once will come into fashion again.
Japanese Proverb

Fasting


When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.
Saint Jerome

Fasting is a medicine.
St. John Chrysostom

Fat


Fat men are more likely to die suddenly than the slender.
Hippocrates

I cannot but bless the memory of Julius Caesar, for the great esteem he expressed for fat men, and his aversion to lean ones.
David Hume

Fate


Fate gives the Wound, and Man is born to bear.
Alexander Pope

The nobly born must nobly meet his fate.
Euripides

The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.
Daniel Defoe

But transient is the smile of fate:
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter's day,
Is all the proud and mighty have
Between the cradle and the grave.
John Dyer

Father


When asked why he did not become a father, Thales answered, "Because I am fond of children."
Diogenes Laertius

No man is responsible for his father. That was entirely his mother's affair.
Maraget Turnbull

Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.
Oscar Wilde

With the growth of modern civilization the role of the father is being increasingly taken over by the state, and there is reason to think that a father may cease before long to be biologically advantageous, at any rate in the wage-earning class.
Bertrand Russell

Becoming a father isn't difficult,
But it's very difficult to be a father.

(Vater werden ist nicht schwer
Vater sein dagegen sehr
.)

Wilhelm Busch

My father established our relationship when I was seven years old. He looked at me and said, "You know, I brought you in this world, and I can take you out. And it don't make no difference to me, I'll make another one look just like you."
Bill Cosby

Fault


If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Be to her virtues very kind. Be to her faults a little blind.
Matthew Prior

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Neglect mending a small Fault, and 'twill soon be a great one.
Author unidentified

He who overlooks one fault invites another.
Publilius Syrus

If a friend tell thee a fault, imagine always that he telleth thee not the whole.
Thomas Fuller

No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.
Samuel Johnson

Favor


Never let your inferiors do you a favor. It will be extremely costly.
H. L. Mencken

Accept a favor, and you sell your liberty.
Publilius Syrus

Almost everyone takes pleasure in repaying small favors, and many people are grateful also for moderate ones, but hardly anyone fails to show ingratitude for great ones.
La Rochefoucauld

The feelings of men looking for favors are very different from those of the same men after obtaining them.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

Favours of every kind are doubled when they are speedily conferred.
Samuel Johnson

You’ve told me, Maro, whilst you live,
You’d not a single penny give,
But that whene’er you chance to die,
You’d leave a handsome legacy:
You must be mad beyond redress,
If my next wish you cannot guess.

(Nil mihi das vivus: dicis, post fata daturum. Si non es stultus, scis, Maro, quid cupiam.)

F. Lewis, based on Martial

Fear


I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot

[It] was fear that was then making you a good citizen, which is never a lasting teacher of duty.
Cicero

[The] sentiment of fear is nearly allied to that of hatred.
Edward Gibbon

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
Edmund Burke

I'm saying, if something's scaring you out, don't run from it. Find out everything you can about it. Then it ain't the unknown anymore and it ain't scary … Or I guess it could be a shitload scarier. Mostly the former, though.
Samuel Halpern

I just mean that every time you're uncomfortable and you get the option to sit something out, you sit it out. So all I was saying to you was: when your asshole gets tight, don't listen to your gut, 'cause you've filled it with shit.
Samuel Halpern

When it's asshole-tightening time, that's when you see what people are made of. Or at least what their asshole is made of.
Samuel Halpern

I was scared then, I'm not now. How long do you want me to be scared?
Elmore Leonard and Scott Frank [from Get Shorty]

Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.
George S. Patton, Jr.

All men [in war] are frightened. The more intelligent they are, the more they are frightened. The courageous man is the man who forces himself, in spite of his fear, to carry on. Discipline, pride, self-respect, self-confidence, and the love of glory are attributes which will make a man courageous even when he is afraid.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.
William Shakespeare

Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The concessions of the weak are the concessions of fear.
Edmund Burke

When our actions do not,
Our fears do make us traitors.
Shakespeare

He who is feared by many must fear many.
Publilius Syrus

But fear depends upon an apprehension of punishment, which is never to be dispelled.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The souls of men are full of dread.
Shakespeare

There is no medicine for fear.
David Fergusson

How often the fear of one evil leads us into a worse!
Nicolas Boileau

The first duty of man is that of subduing fear. We must get rid of fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he have got fear under his feet.
Thomas Carlyle

To be always afraid of losing life is, indeed, scarcely to enjoy a life that can deserve the care of preservation. He that once indulges idle fears will never be at rest.
Samuel Johnson

Whatever we ardently wish to gain, we must in the same degree be afraid to lose, and fear and pleasure cannot dwell together.
Samuel Johnson

And feels a thousand deaths, in fearing one.
Edward Young

It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 'Always do what you are afraid to do.'
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Feelings


We're used to saying, "I'm fine," but it's rarely true. I often joke, "If a woman says she's fine, call 911."
Ruchi Koval

Fellowship


What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.
H. D. Thoreau

Feminism


Feminism has betrayed women, alienated men and women, replaced dialogue with political correctness.
Camille Paglia

Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could "have it all." It is not male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman.
Camille Paglia

Men have sacrificed and crippled themselves physically and emotionally to feed, house, and protect women and children. None of their pain or achievement is registered in feminist rhetoric, which portrays men as oppressive and callous exploiters.
Camille Paglia

Fence


Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.
G. K. Chesterton

Fetter


Fetters of gold are still fetters, and the softest lining can never make them so easy as liberty.
Mary Astell

Fiction


I hate things all fiction … there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.
Lord Byron

Fiddler


Fiddlers, dogs and flies come to feasts uncalled.
David Fergusson

He was a fiddler, and consequently a rogue.
Jonathan Swift

Fidelity


Fidelity that is bought with money may be overcome by money.
Seneca

Fighting


Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.
Arthur Miller

The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out.
Author unidentified

[If] a man consults whether he is to fight, when he has the power in his own hands, it is certain that his opinion is against fighting.
Horatio Nelson

Have fun and don't screw with anyone bigger than you.
Samuel Halpern

It is fighting at great disadvantage to fight those who have nothing to lose.
Francesco Guicciardini

There is a time to pray and a time to fight. This is the time to fight.
John P. G. Muhlenberg

We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.
Winston Churchill

Finality


It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man's head off.
Charles Dickens

Finery


If lust and wanton eyes are the death of the soul, can any women think themselves innocent who, with naked breasts, patched faces, and every ornament of dress, invite the eye to offend?
William Law

Finland


Finland is the country of the Devil.
Russian Proverb

Fishing


Occasionally we passed grim and taciturn men, huddled from the wind under wide green umbrellas, working the waters with every conceivable device of piscatorial ingenuity, in the pursuit of bream, tench, gudgeon and other inedible creatures. What pleasure did they derive from this dank and unrewarding pastime? Was it, perhaps, the negative comfort of escaping from wives, mothers, girlfriends, into one of the last bastions of unreformed masculinity?
Paul Johnson

Fly fishing may be a very pleasant amusement; but angling or float fishing I can only only compare to a stick and a string, with a worm at one end and a fool at the other.
Author unidentified, though attributed to Samuel Johnson in 1824

Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.
Leigh Hunt

As the lone Angler, patient man,
At Mewry-Water, or the Banne,
Leaves off, against his placid wish,
Impaling worms to torture fish.
George Colman, the Younger

Flag


The land and the people and the flag — the land a continent, the people of every race, the flag a symbol of what humanity may aspire to when the wars are over and the barriers are down; to these each generation must be dedicated and consecrated anew, to defend with life itself, if need be, but, above all, in friendliness, in hope, in courage, to live for.
Author unidentified

Flattery


'Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools —
Yet now and then your men of wit
Will condescend to take a bit.
Jonathan Swift

Flattery is a foolish suicide; she destroys herself with her own hands.
Edward Gibbon

[Flattery] adheres to power, and envy to superior merit.
Edward Gibbon

Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver.
Edmund Burke

Crows pick out the eyes of the dead, when they are no longer of any use. But flatterers destroy the souls of the living by blinding their eyes.
Epictetus

Flatterers look like friends, as wolves like dogs.
George Chapman

If we did not flatter ourselves, the flattery of others would not hurt us.
La Rochefoucauld

When a woman thinks she can't be flattered, tell her it's true; that flatters her.
Author unidentified

Flatterers, like cats, lick and then scratch.
German Proverb

Just praise is only a debt, but flattery is a present.
Samuel Johnson

Flea


The flea, though he kill none, he does all the harm he can.
John Donne

Well washed and combed domestic pets grow dull; they miss the stimulus of fleas.
Francis Galton

Flute


The flute is not an instrument with a good moral effect. It is too exciting.
Aristotle

Fly


Some men are more vexed with a fly than with a wound.
Jeremy Taylor

Flying


You know the oxygen masks on airplanes? I don't think there's really any oxygen. They're just to muffle the screams.
Rita Rudner

The air [flying] is an extremely dangerous mistress. Once under the spell most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age.
Winston Churchill

Follower


A man who tries to surpass another may perhaps succeed in equalling if not actually surpassing him, but one who merely follows can never quite come up with him: a follower, necessarily, is always behind.
Quintilian

Folly


The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when had the opportunity.
Helen Rowland

The common curse of mankind, — folly and ignorance.
Shakespeare

The chief disease that reigns this year is folly.
George Herbert

He who lives without folly is not so wise as he thinks.
La Rochefoucauld

The follies of the fathers are no warning to the children.
Bernard de Fontenelle

I enjoy vast delight in the folly of mankind: and, God be praised, that is an inexhaustible source of entertainment.
Mary Wortley Montagu

The first degree of folly is to conceit one's self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise counsel.
Benjamin Franklin

The follies of the fool are known to the world, but are hidden from himself; the follies of the wise are known to himself, but hidden from the world.
C. C. Colton

Each age has its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people.
R. W. Emerson

… a man advanced in years and no less advanced in folly.
2 Maccabees 4:40

Food


Nobody really likes capers no matter what you do with them. Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it, tastes even better with capers not in it.
Nora Ephorn

I am an epicure; you are a gourmand; he has both feet in the trough.
Competition, New Statesman

The best number for a dinner party is two — myself and a damn good head waiter.
Nubar Gulbenkian

I don't even butter my bread. I consider that cooking.
Katherine Cebrian

[Cheese is] milk's leap toward immortality.
Clifton Fadiman

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead — not sick, not wounded — dead.
Woody Allen

Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
Satchel Paige

I don't think of myself as a "foodie." I'm more of an "eatie."
Jim Gaffigan, paraphrased

The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a star.
Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

Fool


Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain

It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority for any town?
Mark Twain

'Tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln

Who loves not wine, women, and song
Remains a fool his whole life long.
Author unidentified

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Alexander Pope

Never call a man a fool. Borrow from him.
Author unidentified

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
Herbert Spencer

Wise men store up knowledge,
but the mouth of a fool invites ruin.
Proverbs 10:14

A fool's lips bring him strife,
and his mouth invites a beating.
Proverbs 18:6

A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one.
Molière

Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other, and scarce in that.
Author unidentified

It is Ill-Manners to silence a Fool, and Cruelty to let him go on.
Benjamin Franklin

The learned Fool writes his Nonsense in better Language than the unlearned; but still 'tis Nonsense.
Author unidentified

Most Fools think they are only ignorant.
Author unidentified

Half Wits talk much but say little.
Author unidentified

The World is full of fools and faint hearts; and yet every one has courage enough to bear the misfortunes, and wisdom enough to manage the Affairs of his neighbor.
Author unidentified

Tricks and treachery are the Practice of Fools, that have not Wit enough to be honest.
Author unidentified

Fools multiply folly.
Author unidentified

What fools these mortals be.
Seneca

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Shakespeare

This fellow’s wise enough to play the fool,
And to do that well craves a kind of wit.
Shakespeare

When I was a little boy, I had but a little wit,
'Tis a long time ago, and I have no more yet;
Nor ever ever shall, until that I die,
For the longer I live the more fool am I.
Anonymous

Whoever brings a fool into the world does so to his grief, and the father of a fool has no joy.
Proverbs 17:21 (NET)

A foolish son brings grief to his father and bitterness to the mother who bore him.
Proverbs 17:25

There is always a majority of fools.
Heraclitus (Ascribed)

Who is not a fool? (Qui non stultus?)
Horace

A fool and his money are soon parted.
English Proverb

There is in human nature, generally more of the fool than of the wise.
Francis Bacon

None is a fool always; everyone sometimes.
George Herbert

Some fools have wit, but none have discretion.
La Rochefoucauld

Wise men learn by other men's harms; fools by their own.
Thomas Fuller

The fool is happy that he knows no more.
Alexander Pope

A fool must now and then be right by chance.
William Cowper

Ever since Adam fools have been in the majority.
Casimir Delavigne

I am always afraid of a fool. One cannot be sure that he is not a knave as well.
William Hazlitt

It is better to be silent like a fool than to talk like one.
German Proverb

Women and luck always favor fools.
German Proverb

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.
Elbert Hubbard

At thirty, a man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves, and re-resolves; then dies the same.
Edward Young

The world is made up for the most part of fools and knaves, both irreconcilable foes to truth.
George Villiers

One can fool some men, or fool all men in some places and times, but one cannot fool all men in all places and ages. (Ont pû tromper quelques hommes, ou les tromper tous dans certains lieux & en certains tems, mais non pas tous les hommes, dans tous les lieux & dans tous les siècles.)
Jacques Abbadie

Foolishness


A rough rule in life is that an organization foolish in one way in dealing with a complex system is all too likely to be foolish in another.
Charlie Munger

Forbearance


There is however a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue. Men may tolerate injuries, whilst they are only personal to themselves. But it is not the first of virtues to bear with moderation the indignities that are offered to our country.
Edmund Burke

Force


Who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe.
John Milton

Forecaster


The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
Edgar R. Fiedler

Foreign Aid


Foreign aid is the transfer of wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.
Lord Bauer, paraphrased

Foreign Relations


Nations that want protectors will have masters.
Fisher Ames

I have ever deemed it fundamental for the United States never to take active part in the quarrels of Europe. Their political interests are entirely distinct from ours. Their mutual jealousies, their balance of power, their complicated alliances, their forms and principles of government, are all foreign to us. They are nations of eternal war.
Thomas Jefferson

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.
George Washington

Foresight


'Tis easy to see, hard to foresee.
Author unidentified

Eaten bread is soon forgotten. Dangers which are warded off by effective precautions and foresight are never even remembered.
Winston Churchill

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
Francis Bacon

In respect to foresight and firmness, the people are more prudent, more stable, and have better judgment than princes.
Niccolò Machiavelli

A miser of sixty refuses himself necessaries that he may not want them when he is a hundred. Almost all of us make ourselves unhappy by too much foresight.
Stanislaus Leszcynski (King of Poland)

Forethought


Yet is one good forewit worth two afterwits.
John Heywood

Excessive forethought and too great solicitude for the future are often productive of misfortune; for the affairs of the world are subject to so many accidents that seldom do things turn out as even the wisest predicted; and whoever refuses to take advantage of present good from fear of future danger, provided the danger be not certain and near, often discovers to his annoyance and disgrace that he has lost opportunities full of profit and glory, from dread of dangers which have turned out to be wholly imaginary.
Francesco Guicciardini

Forgetfulness


It is often wise to forget what you know.
Publilius Syrus

Forgiveness


Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.
Aesop

God may forgive you, but I never can.
Elizabeth I

There is nothing so advantageous to a man as a forgiving disposition.
Terence

In taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy, but in passing it over he is superior, for it is a prince's part to pardon.
Francis Bacon

To err is human, to forgive divine.
Alexander Pope

A wise man will make haste to forgive, because he knows the true value of time, and will not suffer it to pass away in unnecessary pain.
Samuel Johnson

Forgiving the unrepentant is like drawing pictures on water.
Japanese Proverb

Only the brave know how to forgive …. A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.
Laurence Sterne

To forgive enemies H— does pretend,
Who never in his life forgave a friend.
William Blake

It is easiest to forgive, while there is yet little to be forgiven.
Samuel Johnson

You ought certainly to forgive them, as a Christian, but never to admit them in your sight, or allow their names to be mentioned in your hearing.
Jane Austen

Fortitude


Bear all inward and outward sufferings in silence, complaining only to God.
E. L. Gruber

Fortune


Fortune is fickle and soon asks back what he has given.
Latin Proverb

I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.
Cicero

The fortune of nations has often depended on accidents.
Edward Gibbon

Fortune favors the bold. (Alternative version: Fortune favors the brave.)
Latin proverb

Fortune can take from us nothing but what she gave us.
Publilius Syrus

Man's life is ruled by fortune, not by wisdom.
Cicero

Not many men have both good fortune and good sense.
Livy

Nothing is more perilous to men than a sudden change of fortune.
Quintilian

It is an ill wind that blows nobody good.
English Proverb

Fortune knocks at least once at every man's door.
English Proverb

It is a law of the gods, never broken, to sell somewhat dearly the great benefits they confer upon us.
Pierre Corneille

Great fortune brings with it great misfortune.
George Herbert

Fortune is always on the side of the largest battalions.
Marie de Sévigné

I am not now in fortune’s power: He that is down can fall no lower.
Samuel Butler

For in every ill-turn of fortune the most unhappy sort of unfortunate man is the one who has been happy. (Nam in omni adversitate fortunae infelicissimum est genus infortunii, fuisse felicem.)
Boethius

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.
Edward Gibbon

Each man is the smith of his own fortune. (Faber est suae quisque fortunae.)
Appius Claudius Caecus

On fickle wings the minutes haste,
And fortune's favours never last.

(Volat ambiguis
Mobilis alis hora, nec ulli
Praestat velox Fortuna fidem
.)

F. Lewis, based on Seneca

Be happy, drink, think each day your own as you live it and leave the rest to fortune.
Euripides

Forty


I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty.
John Dryden

Fox-hunter


Fox-hunters who have all day long tried in vain to break their necks join at night in a second attempt on their lives by drinking.
Bernard de Mandeville

France


France though armed to the teeth is pacifist to the core.
Winston Churchill

The great in France live very magnificently, but the rest very miserably. There is no happy middle state as in England.
Samuel Johnson

The day of the ruin of France is the eve of the ruin of England.
Thomas Overbury

France always has plenty men of talent, but it is always deficient in men of action and high character.
Napoleon I

Since they whose duty it was to wield the sword of France have let it fall shattered to the ground, I have taken up the broken blade.
Charles de Gaulle

Franklin Delano Roosevelt


It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history — maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln … He had every quality that morons esteem in their heros. It will be to the interest of all his heirs and assigns to whoop him up, and they will probably succeed in swamping his critics.
H. L. Mencken

He [Roosevelt] was the first American to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor.
H. L. Mencken

Fraud


Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the particular injury to him whom he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which constitutes not only the ease but the existence of society.
Samuel Johnson

There is no condition which is not disquieted either with the care of gaining or of keeping money; and the race of man may be divided in a political estimate between those who are practising fraud, and those who are repelling it.
Samuel Johnson

I shall always fear that he, who accustoms himself to fraud in little things, wants only opportunity to practise it in greater.
Samuel Johnson

Free Government


All free governments are managed by the combined wisdom and folly of the people.
James A. Garfield

Free Market


If you destroy a free market, you create a black market.
Winston Churchill

Economists may not know much. But we know one thing very well: how to produce surpluses and shortages. Do you want a surplus? Have the government legislate a minimum price that is above the price that would otherwise prevail.… Do you want a shortage? Have the government legislate a maximum price that is below the price that would otherwise prevail.
Milton Friedman

Free Press


A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that freemen prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny.
Winston Churchill

The liberty of the press is the palladium of all the civil, political, and religious rights of an Englishman.
The Letters of Junius

Free Speech


We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech.
Dr. Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women's Studies at Bowling Green State University

The American people, I am convinced, really detest free speech. At the slightest alarm they are ready and eager to put it down.
H. L. Mencken

Sections of society who once complained of injustice, like blacks, homosexuals, and militant women, now demand not just equality but privilege, including the right to censor their critics.
Paul Johnson

Herein lies the value of free speech. It makes concealment difficult, and, in the long run, impossible. One heretic, if he is right, is as good as a host. He is bound to win in the long run. It is thus no wonder that foes of the enlightenment always begin their proceedings by trying to deny free speech to their opponents. It is dangerous to them and they know it. So they have at it by accusing these opponents of all sorts of grave crimes and misdemeanors, most of them clearly absurd — in other words, by calling them names and trying to scare them.
H. L. Mencken

Democracy and free speech are eternal enemies.
H. L. Mencken

Everybody favours free speech in the slack moments when no axes are being ground.
Heywood Broun

Everyone is in favour of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone says anything back, that is an outrage.
Winston Churchill

Free Trade


Free trade is not based on utility but on justice.
Edmund Burke

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
Lord Macaulay

Freedom


If people have to choose between freedom and sandwiches they will take sandwiches.
Lord Boyd-Orr

When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.
Edith Hamilton, paraphrased

The middle class prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to the deathly inner consuming fire.
Hermann Hesse

There can be no real freedom without the freedom to fail.
Eric Hoffer

A nation may lose its liberties in a day, and not miss them for a century.
Baron de Montesquieu

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
Thomas Jefferson

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
William Pitt

Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.
Malcolm X

I believe that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty's head will be dealt by [the United States] in the ultimate failure of its example to the earth.
Charles Dickens

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

The average man doesn't want to be free. He wants to be safe.
H. L. Mencken

It seems to me that society usually wins. There are, to be sure, free spirits in the world, but their freedom, in the last analysis, is not much greater than that of a canary in a cage. They may leap from perch to perch; they may bathe and guzzle at their will; they may flap their wings and sing. But they are still in the cage, and soon or late it conquers them.
H. L. Mencken

We hear about constitutional rights, free speech and the free press. Every time I hear those words I say to myself, "That man is a Red, that man is a Communist." You never heard a real American talk in that manner.
Frank Hague

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Eric Hoffer

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
Robert Louis Stevenson

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
Eric Hoffer

[The] vain, inconstant, rebellious disposition of the people [of Armorica], was incompatible either with freedom or servitude.
Edward Gibbon

[The] love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.
Edward Gibbon

Live free or die; death is not the worst of evils.
General John Stark

If you are not free to choose wrongly and irresponsibly, you are not free at all.
Jacob Hornberger

If [the fact that people make poor decisions] is reason enough for the government to second-guess their decisions about dangerous activities such as smoking cigarettes and riding motorcycles, why on earth should the government let people make their own choices when it comes to such consequential matters as where to live, how much education to get, whom to marry, whether to have children, which job to take, or what religion to practice?
Jacob Sullum

Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
John Stuart Mill

The thing to remember about freedom is that it's not given, it's taken.
Scott Adams

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
Thomas Jefferson

I am not a warrior, but who is? I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.
Oscar van den Boogaard

Freedom is the silence of the law.
George F. Will

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.
G. K. Chesterton

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.
Ronald Reagan

Here we are, then, once more back at the old doctrine — Laissez faire. Let us translate it into blunt English, and it will read, Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.
William Graham Sumner

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks — drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.
Mark Steyn

Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman

England's [Liberty] bell has fallen silent. Americans would do well to ensure that the crack in theirs grows no larger.
Charles C. W. Cooke

To live in freedom one must grow used to a life full of agitation, change, and danger.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.
Ronald Reagan

All of us would like to legislate against activities we deplore; all of us would like unlimited freedom to indulge in those we enjoy.
Paul Johnson

Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery. But, unfortunately, it is the kind of slavery the most easily admitted in times of civil discord; for parties are but too apt to forget their own future safety in their desire of sacrificing their enemies.
Edmund Burke

Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualifye them for Freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect Nuisance to every body else.
Edmund Burke

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.
John Milton

No man is wholly free. He is a slave to wealth, or to fortune, or the laws, or the people restrain him from acting according to his will alone.
Euripides

Who, then, is free? The wise who can command his passions, who fears not want, nor death, nor chains, firmly resisting his appetites and despising the honors of the world, who relies wholly on himself, whose angular points of character have all been rounded off and polished.
Horace

It is not good to be too free. It is not good to have everything one wants.
Blaise Pascal

Man is born free — and everywhere he is in irons.
Rousseau

Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.
James Madison

Sir, there have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men — the lovers of freedom and the devoted advocates of power.
Robert Y. Hayne

Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.
Abraham Lincoln

I intend no modification of my oft-expressed wish that all men everywhere could be free.
Abraham Lincoln

Every generation must wage a new war for freedom against new forces which seek through new devices to enslave mankind.
Platform of the Progressive party, 1924

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
Lord Macaulay

Freemason


[Freemasons are] a set of imbeciles who meet to make good cheer and perform ridiculous fooleries.
Napoleon 1

French


The French have a passion for revolution but an abhorrence of change.
Old saying

The French drink to get loosened up for an event, to celebrate an event, and even to recover from an event.
Geneviève Guérin

In Paris, they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Mark Twain

I prefer to travel on French ships because there is none of that 'women and children first' nonsense.
Noel Coward

The French are naturally more fierce and hot than dexterous and strong, and if resisted handsomely in their first charge they slacken and cool, and grow as timorous as women. They are likewise impatient of distress or incommodity, and grow so careless by degrees that it is no hard matter, finding them in disorder, to master and overcome them.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people; a lady there will spit on the floor and rub it with her foot.
Samuel Johnson

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.
Dave Barry

First of all, let's dispense with this absurd stereotype that the French are rude. The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you.
Dave Barry

French Language


If only this damned French language were not so badly fitted for music!
W. A. Mozart

French Revolution


The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures.
Edmund Burke

Frenchman


A Frenchman must be always talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content to say nothing, when he has nothing to say.
Samuel Johnson

Forty million Frenchmen can't be wrong.
Author unidentified

Freud


After eighty years' experience, his [Freud's] methods of therapy have proved, on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than cure the sick.
Paul Johnson

Friend


A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

An open Foe may prove a curse;
But a pretended friend is worse.
Author unidentified

Be slow in choosing a Friend, slower in changing.
Author unidentified

Friends, after all, are just irritating strangers we've gotten used to.
Rob Long

I have plague enough with my adversaries, therefore my brethren should not vex me.
Martin Luther

Cosmus, Duke of Florence, was wont to say of perfidious friends, that "We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends."
Francis Bacon

Some companions rejoice in the happiness of a friend, but in time of trouble they are against him.
Ecclesiasticus 37:4

Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings, because they are his own.
Samuel Johnson

True happiness
Consists not in the multitude of friends,
But in the worth and choice.
Ben Johnson

Old friends are best. King James used to call for his old shoes; they were easiest for his feet.
John Selden

When he was asked "What is a friend?" he said "One soul inhabiting two bodies."
Aristotle

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence, is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.
Samuel Johnson

Do not abandon old friends, for new ones cannot equal them. A new friend is like new wine; when it has aged, you can drink it with pleasure.
Ecclesiasticus 9:10

Have no friends not equal to yourself.
Confucius

He who throws away a friend is as bad as he who throws away his life.
Sophocles

The vulgar estimate friends by the advantage to be derived from them.
Ovid

In prosperity it is very easy to find a friend; in adversity, nothing is so difficult.
Epictetus

To find friends when we have no need of them, and to want them when we have, are both alike easy and common. In prosperity, who will not profess to love a man? In adversity, how few will show that they do indeed?
Owen Felltham

All are not friends that speak us fair.
James Clarke

A man is judged by his friends, for the wise and foolish have never agreed.
Baltasar Gracian

Choose thy friends like thy books, few but choice.
James Howell

Make not thy friend too cheap to thee, nor thyself too dear to him.
James Howell

It is good to have friends, but bad to need them.
Anonymous

If we all told what we know of one another there would not be four friends in the world.
Blaise Pascal

Real friends are our greatest joy and our greatest sorrow. It were almost to be wished that all true and faithful friends should expire on the same day.
François Fenelon

If you have one true friend you have more than your share.
Thomas Fuller

There are three faithful friends — an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.
Benjamin Franklin

There is no word in the Latin language that signifies a female friend. Amica means a mistress: and perhaps there is no friendship betwixt the sexes wholly disunited from a degree of love.
William Shenstone

One friend must in time lose the other.
Samuel Johnson

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.
Thomas Jefferson

We never know the true value of friends. While they live we are too sensitive of their faults: when we have lost them we only see their virtues.
J. C. and A. W. Hare

The best way to keep your friends is to never borrow from them and never lend them anything.
Paul de Kock

Old wine and an old friend are good provisions.
George Herbert

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana

Friends help; others pity.
Author unidentified

An untried friend is like an uncracked nut.
Russian Proverb

If you seek friends who can be trusted, go to the cemetery.
Russian Proverb

[Friends] should not only be firm in the day of distress, but gay in the hour of jollity; not only useful in exigencies, but pleasing in familiar life; their presence should give cheerfulness as well as courage, and dispel alike the gloom of fear and of melancholy.
Samuel Johnson

There's nothing worth the wear of winning,
But laughter and the love of friends.
Hilaire Belloc

Give me the avowed, erect and manly foe;
Firm I can meet, perhaps return the blow;
But of all plagues, good Heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save me, oh, save me, from the candid friend.
George Canning

I would not enter on my list of friends
(Tho' graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
William Cowper

It is said, "In prosperity men friends may find
Which in adversity be full unkind."
Everyman

How should I be merry or glad?
For fair promises men to me make,
But when I have most need they me forsake.
I am deceived. That maketh me sad.
Everyman

To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him — two.
Norman Douglas

Everybody is friends when things are bad enough.
Ernest Hemingway

Friend And Enemy


The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
French Proverb

Treat your friend as if he will one day be your enemy, and your enemy as if he will one day be your friend.
Laberius

God save me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.
English Proverb

Nature teaches us to love our friends, but religion our enemies.
Thomas Fuller

Our friends abandon us only too easily, and our enemies are implacable.
Voltaire

Speak well of your friend; of your enemy say nothing.
H. G. Bohn

Life is nothing without friendship. (Sine amicitia vitam esse nullam.)
Ascribed by Cicero to Quintus Ennius

Friendship


Of my friends I am the only one I have left.
Terence

It's important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.
Mignon McLaughlin

In life it is difficult to say who do you the most mischief, enemies with the worst intentions, or friends with the best.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Don't tell your friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend's forehead.
Chinese Proverb

Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
Elbert Hubbard

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics, and his epistemology.
H. L. Mencken

A friend in need is a friend to be avoided.
Lord Samuel

Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
Gore Vidal

George Bernard Shaw: Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend — if you have one.
Winston Churchill: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second — if there is one.
Winston Churchill and George Bernard Shaw

Misfortune tests the sincerity of friendship.
Aesop

Friendship cheers the faint and weary,
Makes the timid spirit brave,
Warns the erring, lights the dreary,
Smooths the passage to the grave.
Author unidentified

Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.
Ruth 1:16,17

If a man does not make new acquaintance as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone. A man, Sir, should keep his friendship in constant repair.
Samuel Johnson

For 'mid old friends, tried and true,
Once more we our youth renew.
But old friends, alas! may die;
New friends must their place supply.
Cherish friendship in your breast —
New is good, but old is best;
Make new friends, but keep the old;
Those are silver, these are gold.
Author unidentified

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.
Francis Bacon

We ought to flee the friendship of the wicked, and the enmity of the good.
Epictetus

When adversities flow, then love ebbs; but friendship standeth stiffly in storms.
John Lyly

Friendship is constant in all other things,
Save in the office and affairs of love.
Shakespeare

What causes the majority of women to be so little touched by friendship is that it is insipid when they have once tasted of love.
La Rochefoucauld

The friendships of the world are oft
Confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasure.
Joseph Addison

The discussing the characters and foibles of common friends is a great sweetener and cement of friendship.
William Hazlitt

Friendship often ends in love; but love, in friendship — never.
C. C. Colton

Friendships multiply joys, and divide griefs.
H. G. Bohn

We are often, by superficial accomplishments and accidental endearments, induced to love those whom we cannot esteem; we are sometimes, by great abilities, and incontestable evidences of virtue, compelled to esteem those whom we cannot love.
Samuel Johnson

Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.
Samuel Johnson

Where obligations begin, friendship ends.
Author unidentified

The cheerful sage, when solemn dictates fail,
Conceals the moral counsel in a tale.

(——Garrit aniles
Ex re fabellas.——
)

Samuel Johnson, based on Horace

Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.
Samuel Johnson

Those, therefore, whom the lot of life has conjoined, should endeavour constantly to approach towards the inclination of each other, invigorate every motion of concurrent desire, and fan every spark of kindred curiosity.
Samuel Johnson

Love comes from blindness,
Friendship from knowledge.

(L'amour vient de l'aveuglement,
L'amitié de la connaissance
.)

Comte de Bussy-Rabutin

Aristotle observes, that old men do not readily form friendships, because they are not easily susceptible of pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

What! old, and rich, and childless too,
And yet believe your friends are true?
Truth might perhaps to those belong,
To those who lov’d you poor and young;
But, trust me, for the new you have,
They’ll love you dearly — in your grave.

(Orbus es, et locuples, et Bruto consule natus,
Esse tibi veras credis amicitias?
Sunt verae: sed quas juvenis, quas pauper habebas:
Qui novus est, mortem diligit ille tuam.
)

F. Lewis, based on Martial

Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship.
Samuel Johnson

Friendship, like love, is destroyed by long absence, though it may be increased by short intermissions.
Samuel Johnson

Frugality


He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.
Horace

Frugality is so necessary to the happiness of the world, so beneficial in its various forms to every rank of men, from the highest of human potentates, to the lowest labourer or artificer; and the miseries which the neglect of it produces are so numerous and so grievous, that it ought to be recommended with every variation of address, and adapted to every class of understanding.
Samuel Johnson

Frugality may be termed the daughter of prudence, the sister of temperance, and the parent of liberty.
Samuel Johnson

For without frugality none can be rich, and with it very few would be poor.
Samuel Johnson

Frugality is misery in disguise.
Publilius Syrus

Frugality includes all the other virtues.
Cicero

Fruit


Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.
Matthew 7:20

Fun


You’ve had your share of mirth, of meat and drink;
‘Tis time to quit the scene — ’tis time to think.

(Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti:
Tempus abire tibi est.
)

Elphinston based on Horace

When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.
Ernest Hemingway

Funeral


I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.
Mark Twain, of a deceased politician

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Mark Twain

It is of no consequence to the dead what his funeral is; costly obsequies are the affectation of the living.
Euripides

The pomp of funerals feeds rather the vanity of the living than does honor to the dead.
La Rochefoucauld

Here lies one who for med'cines would not give
A little gold, and so his life he lost;
I fancy now he'd wish again to live,
Could he but guess how much his funeral cost.
H. J. Loaring

Burn me and scatter the ashes where they will, and let there be no abracadabra of ritual, is my wish about myself.
George Meredith

Every funeral may justly be considered as a summons to prepare for that state, into which it shews us that we must some time enter.
Samuel Johnson

Futility


I have spent my life laboriously doing nothing. (Vitam perdidi laboriose agendo.)
Hugo Grotius

Future


Do not boast about tomorrow,
for you do not know what a day may bring forth.
Proverbs 27:1

[The] future belongs to those who show up for it.
Mark Steyn

A week ago, I had no idea what the future would bring, which, I guess, is always true of everyone all the time.
The Simpsons

There's many a slip twixt cup and lip.
Author unidentified

I have no fear of the future. Let us go forward into its mysteries, let us tear aside the veils which hide it from our eyes and let us move onward with confidence and courage
Winston Churchill

Every man is sufficiently discontented with some circumstances of his present state, to suffer his imagination to range more or less in quest of future happiness, and to fix upon some point of time, in which, by the removal of the inconvenience which now perplexes him, or acquisition of the advantage which he at present wants, he shall find the condition of his life very much improved.
Samuel Johnson

But the truth is, that things to come, except when they approach very nearly, are equally hidden from men of all degrees of understanding.
Samuel Johnson

Evil is uncertain in the same degree as good, and for the reason that we ought not to hope too securely, we ought not to fear with too much dejection.
Samuel Johnson

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Shakespeare

We know nothing of tomorrow; our business is to be good and happy today.
Sydney Smith

It's a rare business that doesn't have a way worse future than it has a past.
Charlie Munger

We have the same problem as everyone else: It's very hard to predict the future.
Charlie Munger

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
Samuel Johnson

The future smells of Russian leather, of blood, of godlessness and of much whipping. I advise our grandchildren to come into the world with very thick skin on their backs.
Heinrich Heine

It is an exciting time to look forward to. I plan to be dead.
Dave Barry

Gallantry


I hold him but a fool that will endanger
His body for a girl that loves him not.
Shakespeare

Gallo-Grecians


The emperor was probably born in the province of Galatia, whose inhabitants, the Gallo-Grecians, were supposed to unite the vices of a savage and a corrupted people.
Edward Gibbon

Gallows


In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.
Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France

Gambler


No gambler was ever yet a happy man.
William Cobbett

Gambling


There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.
Mark Twain

[Gambling is] the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.
George Washington

A man may shuffle cards, or rattle dice, from noon to midnight, without tracing any new idea in his mind, or being able to recollect the day by any other token than his gain or loss, and a confused remembrance of agitated passions, and clamorous altercations.
Samuel Johnson

Whoever finds himself inclined to anticipate futurity, and exalt possibility to certainty, should avoid every kind of casual adventure, since his grief must be always proportionate to his hope.
Samuel Johnson, on gambling

Rouse from this lazy dream of fortuitous riches, which, if obtained, you could scarcely have enjoyed, because they could confer no consciousness of desert; return to rational and manly industry, and consider the mere gift of luck as below the care of a wise man.
Samuel Johnson

Garden


Calm soul of all things! make it mine
To feel, amid the city's jar,
That there abides a peace of thine,
Man did not make, and cannot mar.
Matthew Arnold

God Almighty first planted a garden; and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures.
Francis Bacon

The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay; while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building.
William Shenstone

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.
Bronson Alcott

Gauls


The Gauls were endowed with all the advantages of art and nature; but as they wanted courage to defend them, they were justly condemned to obey, and even to flatter, the victorious Barbarians, by whose clemency they held their precarious fortunes and their lives.
Edward Gibbon

Genealogy


Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Ambrose Bierce

General


A good general not only sees the way to victory; he also knows when victory is impossible.
Polybius

Adversity reveals the genius of a general; good fortune conceals it.
Horace

There is only one great general in a century.
Baltasar Gracian

The Creator has not thought proper to mark those in the forehead who are of stuff to make good generals. We are first, therefore, to seek them blindfold, and let them learn the trade at the expense of great losses.
Thomas Jefferson

A general who sees with the eyes of others will never be able to command an army as it should be.
Napoleon I

I do not deserve more than half credit for the battles I have won. Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.
Napoleon I

General Motors


General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a sprawling retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary.
Mark Steyn

Generalization


Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations.
Niccolò Machiavelli

To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit — general knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.
William Blake

Generosity


What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.
La Rochefoucauld

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. The fair sex, who have commonly much more tenderness than ours, have seldom so much generosity.
Adam Smith

It is easy to be generous with other people's property.
Latin Proverb

Genetics


The academic imperialism of some social scientists prevented much serious work being done on the lines Darwin's discoveries had suggested: that minds and mental attitudes evolved like bodies, and that behaviour could be studied like other organic properties, by means of comparative genealogies and evolutionary analysis.
Paul Johnson

Genius


Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead.
Robert S. Lynd

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.
James Russell Lowell

There is a thin line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
Oscar Levant

Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way that certain insects come by the name of centipede — not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people can't count above fourteen.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

I have nothing to declare except my genius.
Oscar Wilde, Remark at the New York Customs

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Thomas Edison

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
Oscar Wilde

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others.
Mark Twain

In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
Walter Bagehot

The aspiring efforts of genius, or virtue, either in active or speculative life, are measured, not so much by their real elevation, as by the height to which they ascend above the level of their age and country; and the same stature, which in a people of giants would pass unnoticed, must appear conspicuous in a race of pygmies.
Edward Gibbon

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or in the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed …. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams

A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself.
Samuel Johnson

Genius must be born, and never can be taught.
John Dryden

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Jonathan Swift

Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.
Comte de Buffon (George-Louis Leclerc)

Men of genius do not excel in any profession because they labor in it, but they labor in it because they excel.
William Hazlitt

Since when was genius found respectable?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Gentleman


I can make a lord, but only God Almighty can make a gentleman.
James I of England

A thief passes for a gentleman when stealing has made him rich.
Thomas Fuller

A gentleman is a man who can disagree without being disagreeable.
Author unidentified

A gentleman is a man who never strikes a woman without provocation.
Author unidentified

Geography


God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
Mark Twain

Geometry


Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.
Plato, inscription over the door of the Academy at Athens

Geopolitics


It is of the essence of geopolitics to be able to distinguish between different degrees of evil.
Paul Johnson

George Washington


The Great Spirit protects that man [George Washington], and guides his destinies — he will become the chief of nations, and a people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire!
Unidentified Indian, c. 1770

He [George Washington] was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the lower classes, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the republic from them. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.
H. L. Mencken

George Washington, Commander of the American armies, who, like Joshua of old, commanded the sun and the moon to stand still, and they obeyed him.
Benjamin Franklin

To the memory of the Man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.
Henry [Light-Horse Harry] Lee

German


She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of the Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Mark Twain

Christianity has somewhat softened the brutal Germanic lust of battle, but could not destroy it.
Heinrich Heine

Members of the German race look upon beer drinking as an essential element in man's social and moral nature, and think everybody a Puritan or fanatic who holds different views.
J. E. Stebbins

German Language


Life is too short to learn German.
Ascribed to Richard Porson

Germans


[The] ferocious Germans, who have so often attempted, and who will always desire, to exchange the solitude of their woods and morasses for the wealth and fertility of Gaul.
Edward Gibbon

Truly, we Germans are jolly fellows; we eat, and drink, and game at our ease.
Martin Luther

Tacitus wrote, that by the ancient Germans it was held no shame at all to drink and swill four and twenty hours together. A gentleman of the court asked: How long ago it was since Tacitus wrote this? He was answered, about fifteen hundred years. Whereupon the gentleman said: Forasmuch as drunkenness has been so ancient a custom, and of such a long descent, let us not abolish it.
Martin Luther

Germany


Germany would be much richer than she is, if such store of velvets and silks were not worn, nor so much spice used, or so much beer drunk.
Martin Luther

Things are so nice here [in Germany], but everything is verboten.
Unnamed Spaniard living in Germany

Ghost


There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed.
Samuel Johnson

And still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it, but all belief is for it.
Samuel Johnson

How many children, and how many men, are afraid of ghosts, who are not afraid of God!
T. B. Macaulay

Gift


Never look a gift horse in the mouth. (Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.)
Saint Jerome

A gift much expected is paid, not given.
George Herbert

Girl


Girls we love for what they are; young men for what they promise to be.
J. W. Goethe

Girth


I had no intention of giving her my vital statistics. "Let me put it this way," I said. "According to my girth, I should be a ninety-foot redwood."
Erma Bombeck

Giving


He giveth twice that giveth quickly.
Richard Taverner

Gladness


A man of gladness seldom falls into madness.
John Ray

Glory


Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
Napoleon Bonaparte

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.
Pliny The Elder

Look back, and remember yourself to be but [a] man.

(Apparent derivations: "Remember that all glory is fleeting" and "Remember that thou art mortal")

Tertullian, Apology XXXIII

Cattle die, kinsmen die,
the self must also die;
but glory never dies,
for the man who is able to achieve it.

(Deyr fé, deyja fraendr,
deyr sjalfr et sama;
en oröstirr deyr aldrigi
hveims sér góðar getr.
)

Anonymous, Old Norse

To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille

It is the brave man's part to live with glory, or with glory die.
Sophocles

Glory comes too late when it comes only to our ashes.
Martial

How quickly passes away the glory of this world. (O quam cito transit gloria mundi.)
Thomas À Kempis

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright,
But look'd too near have neither heat nor light.
John Webster

I make no haste to have my numbers read.
Seldom comes glory till a man be dead.
Robert Herrick

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Thomas Gray

Before this time tomorrow I shall have gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey.
Horatio Nelson, before the Battle of the Nile

Avoid shame, but do not seek glory — nothing so expensive as glory.
Sydney Smith

When there is no peril in the fight, there is no glory in the triumph. (A vaincre sans péril, on triomphe sans gloire.)
Pierre Corneille

Gluttony


More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
J. K. Galbraith

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are three other people.
Orson Welles

Gluttony hinders chastity.
Pope Xystus I

Gluttony slays more than the sword.
English Proverb

Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great.
Henry IV of France

One must eat to live, and not live to eat.
Molière

How hard is it to persuade the belly, that hath no ears?
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

Gluttony is not a secret vice.
Orson Welles

The meal isn't over when I'm full. The meal is over when I hate myself.
Louis CK

A lot of slimmer people can't even fathom why fat people can't eat a normal portion-size, or why people eat when they're lonely, depressed, happy, anxious, bored, or celebrating Lincoln's mother's birthday.
Stephen Furst

For many years, I would eat and feel bad and guilty about it. And then drown my sorrows by eating again. Food was a comfort to me when I was depressed. I would eat to celebrate some good news. I would eat to drown my sorrow about bad news. … and more often than not, the bad food made me feel worse, which made me depressed, which made me want to eat [more].
Stephen Furst

I had a doctor tell me once that I was committing slow suicide [from overeating and diabetes].
Stephen Furst

… and, with the usual weakness of men so diseased, eagerly snatched that temporary relief with which the table and the bottle flatter and seduce.
Samuel Johnson, of William Collins

Their god is their stomach.
Philippians 3:19 (NIV)

They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing.
Shakespeare

Do not be greedy for every delicacy, and do not eat without restraint; for overeating brings sickness, and gluttony leads to nausea.
Ecclesiasticus 37:29-30

Many have died of gluttony, but the one who guards against it prolongs his life.
Ecclesiasticus 37:31

He was a man
Of an unbounded stomach.
Shakespeare

By suppers more have been killed than Galen ever cured.
George Herbert

I told him … that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst.
Jonathan Swift

Gluttony is the sin of England.
Thomas Fuller

Formidable is the state of an intemperate man whose employment is the same with the work of the sheep or the calf, always to eat.
Jeremy Taylor

More die by food than famine.
Thomas Fuller

Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.
Benjamin Franklin

All gentlemen and ladies eat too much. I made a calculation, and found I must have consumed some wagon-loads too much in the course of my life.
Sydney Smith

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.
Peter De Vries

Goal


It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.
Arnold Toynbee

The things that haven't been done before
Are the tasks worthwhile today;
Are you one of the flock that follows, or
Are you one that shall lead the way?
Are you one of the timid souls that quail
At the jeers of doubting crew,
Or dare you, whether you with or fail,
Strike out for a goal that's new?
Edgar Guest

God


God is subtle but he is not malicious.
Albert Einstein

God And Religion


During the past ten years I have stolen 75 Bibles, perhaps the national record.
H. L. Mencken, who regularly sent Bibles to his friends in Baltimore elegantly inscribed, "With the regards of the author"

I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.
Matthew 10:16

God uses lust to impel men to marry, ambition to office, avarice to earning, and fear to faith. God led me like an old blind goat.
Martin Luther

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name at a Swiss bank.
Woody Allen

Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.
H. L. Mencken

God is really another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.
Pablo Picasso

I am prepared to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Winston Churchill

Wherever God erects a house of prayer,
The Devil always builds a chapel there,
And 'twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.
Daniel Defoe

God will forgive me, it is his business.
Heinrich Heine, last words

Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism.
Thomas Jefferson

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain

A Christian is a man who feels repentance on a Sunday for what he did on Saturday and is going to do on Monday.
Thomas R. Ybarra

There cannot be a God because, if there were one, I would not believe that I was not He.
Friedrich Nietzshe

When a pious visitor inquired sweetly, "Henry, have you made your peace with God?" [Thoreau] replied, "We have never quarreled."
Brooks Atkinson

Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who depends on flesh for his strength
and whose heart turns away from the LORD.
Jeremiah 17:5

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei

Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
Paul Tillich

There can be no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.
Niccolò Machiavelli

It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.
John Stuart Mill

The saints are the sinners who keep on going.
Robert Louis Stevenson

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found difficult and left untried.
G. K. Chesterton

Archbishop, n. A Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ.
H. L. Mencken

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
H. L. Mencken

The god I believe in isn't short of cash.
Bono

Puritanism, n. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken

Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Repentance, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with continuity of sin.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.
H. L. Mencken

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana

All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
H. L. Mencken

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.
Mark Twain

Religious insanity is very common in the United States.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer.
2 Samuel 22:2

You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love.
Nehemiah 9:17

Naked I came from my mother's womb,
and naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
may the name of the LORD be praised.
Job 1:21

The fool says in his heart, "There is no God."
Psalm 14:1

The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 19:1

The LORD is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
For His name's sake.
Psalm 23:1-3 (NASB)

The LORD is my strength and my shield.
Psalm 28:7

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.
Psalm 111:10

The stone the builders rejected has become the capstone.
Psalm 118:22

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.
Psalm 118:26

Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path.
Psalm 119:105

As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55:10,11

"There is no peace," says my God, "for the wicked."
Isaiah 57:21

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Author unidentified

But to have avoided [all religious fads] has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.
G. K. Chesterton

Samuel Johnson enjoined the preachers of his time not to inveigh against those who were absent from church on Sundays by scolding those who were not absent.
William F. Buckley

Return to the LORD your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger and abounding in love,
and he relents from sending calamity.
Joel 2:13

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
Mark Twain

Do not let your deeds belie your words, lest when you speak in church someone may say to himself, "Why do you not practice what you preach?"
Saint Jerome

Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross. It read: JESUS OF NAZARETH, THE KING OF THE JEWS. … The chief priests of the Jews protested to Pilate, "Do not write 'The King of the Jews,' but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews."

Pilate answered, "What I have written, I have written."

John 19:19,21-22

In the preceding volumes of this History, I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion.
Edward Gibbon

[The] Christian clergy … has claimed, in every age, the privilege of dispensing honors, both on earth and in heaven.
Edward Gibbon

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD.
Isaiah 55:8

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23

If God is for us, who can be against us?
Romans 8:31

Since ancient times no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.
Isaiah 64:4

It is mine to avenge; I will repay.
Deuteronomy 32:35

Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be men of courage; be strong.
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 16:13

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
St. Paul, 2 Corinthians 5:21

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
St. Paul, 2 Timothy 3:16,17

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
St. Paul, 2 Timothy 4:7

In the hands of a popular preacher, an earthquake is an engine of admirable effect.
Edward Gibbon

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast.
Ephesians 2:8,9

[Ennodius] adds weight to the narrative of Procopius, though we may doubt whether the devil actually contrived the siege of Pavia, to distress the bishop and his flock.
Edward Gibbon

Six years [after Severinus's death], his body, which scattered miracles as it passed, was transported by his disciples into Italy.
Edward Gibbon

[The Ascetics] seriously renounced the business, and the pleasures, of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness.
Edward Gibbon

A sanguinary and covetous mind is not the symptom of a sincere conversion [to Christianity]: let [Clovis, King of the Franks,] show his faith by his works.
Gundobald, King of the Bugundians

But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.
Joshua 24:15

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
John 6:68

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity.
Edward Gibbon

[The] enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship, of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labor, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!
Edward Gibbon

The Gothic arms were less fatal to the schools of Athens than the establishment of a new religion, whose ministers superseded the exercise of reason, resolved every question by an article of faith, and condemned the infidel or skeptic to eternal flames.
Edward Gibbon

[The Catholic church's] jurisdiction, wealth, and immunities, perhaps the most essential part of episcopal religion, were restored.
Edward Gibbon

If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia, [Muhammad] must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.
Edward Gibbon

[And] the ambiguous word [of God], which contains the precept of Christ [concerning divorce], is flexible to any interpretation that the wisdom of a legislator can demand.
Edward Gibbon

I know but of one religion in which the god and the victim [sacrifice] are the same.
Edward Gibbon

Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.
The Simpsons

Justinian might have learned, "that religious controversy is the offspring of arrogance and folly; that true piety is most laudably expressed by silence and submission; that man, ignorant of his own nature, should not presume to scrutinize the nature of his God; and that it is sufficient for us to know, that power and benevolence are the perfect attributes of the Deity."
Edward Gibbon, quoting Procopius

[Justinian] piously labored to establish with fire and sword the unity of the Christian faith.
Edward Gibbon

[The] province which had been ruined by the bigotry of Justinian, was the same through which the [Muslims] penetrated into the empire.
Edward Gibbon

The desire of gaining souls for God and subjects for the church, has excited in every age the diligence of the Christian priests.
Edward Gibbon

[The Armenians] have often preferred the crown of martyrdom to the white turban of [Muhammad].
Edward Gibbon

If there is no God, everything is permitted.
Dostoevsky

And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
George Washington

[The] fond alliance of the monks and females obtained a final victory over the reason and authority of man.
Edward Gibbon

[Muhammad], with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome.
Edward Gibbon

The most rational of the Arabs acknowledged [God's] power, though they neglected his worship.
Edward Gibbon

The moral attributes of Jehovah may not easily be reconciled with the standard of human virtue.
Edward Gibbon

A prophet may reveal the secrets of heaven and of futurity; but in his moral precepts he can only repeat the lessons of our own hearts.
Edward Gibbon

[Muhammad] has not specified the male companions of the female elect, lest he should either alarm the jealousy of their former husbands, or disturb their felicity, by the suspicion of an everlasting marriage.
Edward Gibbon

In the opinion of the [Saracens], the difference of religion is a reasonable ground of enmity and warfare.
Edward Gibbon

[The Arabs'] rapacious spirit was approved and animated by the precepts of the Koran.
Edward Gibbon

The successors of St. Peter appear to have followed, rather than guided, the impulse of manners and prejudice; without much foresight of the seasons, or cultivation of the soil, they gathered the ripe and spontaneous fruits of the superstition of the times.
Edward Gibbon

Utopian desires are part of the human condition, and the craving to create a heaven on earth is the inevitable consequence of a godless society.
Jonah Goldberg

Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD.
Psalms 130:1

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
C. S. Lewis

Unless I am convinced by proofs from Scriptures or by plain and clear reasons and arguments, I can and will not retract, for it is neither safe nor wise to do anything against conscience. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen.
Martin Luther

I've been pope for nearly two years, a bishop for over twenty years, but for me the most important thing is still the fact that I am a priest.
Pope John Paul II

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
Thomas Jefferson

Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands and will be consecrated to your God.
Numbers 15:38-40

Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19:18

Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: "Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it."
Haggai 1:5-6

The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

St. Paul, Galatians 5:19-23

A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.
Deuteronomy 22:5

Here is my Creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by His Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this.
Benjamin Franklin

God helps those who help themselves.
Algernon Sidney

Think of three Things, whence you came, where you are going, and to whom you must account.
Author unidentified

Many Princes sin with David, but few repent with him.
Author unidentified

Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden but it is forbidden because it's hurtful.
Author unidentified

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
Woody Allen

God is not dead but alive and working on a much less ambitious project.
Author unidentified

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.
Matthew 5:14-16

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa [Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault].
The Roman Missal, Confession of Sins

There is nothing to be feared but our own sin and sloth.
Oliver Cromwell

But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
Exodus 21:23-25

What hath God wrought!
Numbers 23:23 (KJV)

Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the duty of all mankind.
For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.
Ecclesiastes 12:13,14

If any man hopes to do a deed without God's knowledge, he errs.
Pindar

It seems curious that personages intimately connected with the Holy Family always lived in grottoes — in Nazareth, in Bethlehem, in imperial Ephesus — and yet nobody else in their day and generation thought of doing any thing of the kind.
Mark Twain

When the Virgin fled from Herod's wrath, she hid in a grotto in Bethlehem, and the same is there to this day. The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem was done in a grotto; the Saviour was born in a grotto — both are shown to pilgrims yet. It is exceedingly strange that these tremendous events all happened in grottoes — and exceedingly fortunate, likewise, because the strongest houses must crumble to ruin in time, but a grotto in the living rock will last forever.
Mark Twain

The world owes the Catholics its good will even for the happy rascality of hewing out these bogus grottoes in the rock; for it is infinitely more satisfactory to look at a grotto, where people have faithfully believed for centuries that the Virgin once lived, than to have to imagine a dwelling-place for her somewhere, any where, nowhere, loose and at large all over this town of Nazareth.
Mark Twain

History is full of this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre — full of blood that was shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace!
Mark Twain

America was founded by people who believed that God was their rock of safety. I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that God is on our side, but I think it's all right to keep asking if we're on His side.
Ronald Reagan

I thank you, living and enduring King, for you have graciously returned my soul within me. Great is your faithfulness.
Modeh Ani prayer

How few of the evils of life can justly be ascribed to God.
Samuel Johnson

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
G. K. Chesterton

The response to religion-induced evil must therefore be religion-induced goodness, not no religion. There is no exclusively secular route to a good world.
Dennis Prager

In religion, as in politics, when there is no competition, there is corruption and intolerance.
Dennis Prager

What is hateful to you, do not do to others. This is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; now go and study.
Rabbi Hillel, when asked to summarize Judaism

For a religious service is an extraordinary occasion when men and women come together for the sole purpose of honoring God, measuring themselves, not by the standards of success or failure, but by the yardstick of eternity.
Paul Johnson

If someone asks me, "Does it make sense to pray to a God in whom I do not believe?" I answer, "Yes, indeed it does." It is a matter not of intellectual theory but of simply turning in the right direction, a plea for help.
Paul Johnson

When you expel the priest, you do not inaugurate the age of reason — you get the witch doctor.
Paul Johnson

While writing Modern Times, I formed the unshakable conviction that man without God is a doomed creature. The history of the 20th century proves the view that as the vision of God fades, we first become mere clever monkeys; then we exterminate one another.
Paul Johnson

She somewhat disqualified herself for the duties of this life, by her perpetual aspirations after the next.
Samuel Johnson

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.
Hebrews 13:2

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 28:19

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
2 Corinthians 13:14

Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.
Genesis 9:6

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.
Mark 12:17

For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?
Esther 4:14

Therefore, they that are rich, must yield a strict and great account; for to whom much is given, of him much will be required.
Martin Luther

If Moses had continued to work his miracles in Egypt but two or three years, the people would have become accustomed thereto, and heedless, as we who are accustomed to the sun and moon, hold them in no esteem.
Martin Luther

We ought not to criticize, explain, or judge the Scriptures by our mere reason, but diligently, with prayer, meditate thereon, and seek their meaning.
Martin Luther

The name Absalom, signifies father of peace. Such fair and glorious colors do the ungodly ever bear in this world, while in truth and deed they are condemners, scoffers, and rebels to the Word of God.
Martin Luther

God is not an angry God; if he were so, we were all utterly lost and undone.
Martin Luther

For God judges not according to outward works or kind of life, as men do, but views the heart; he judges hypocrites whom the church can neither judge nor punish; the church judges not what is hidden and invisible.
Martin Luther

The more we have the more we want. To serve God is for every one to remain in his vocation and calling, be it ever so mean and simple.
Martin Luther

Everyone ought to worship God according to his own inclinations, and not to be constrained by force.
Flavius Josephus

Man proposes, but God disposes.
Thomas à Kempis

A mighty fortress is our God,
A bulwark never failing.
Our helper He amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing.
Martin Luther

God’s mill grinds slow, but sure.
George Herbert

Claire: How do you know you're... God?
Earl of Gurney: Simple. When I pray to Him I find I'm talking to myself.
Peter Barnes

We can know what God is not, but we cannot know what He is.
St. Augustine

My reason tells me that God exists, but it also tells me that I can never know what he is.
Voltaire

It is the fool that saith in his heart there is no God. But what shall we call the man who tells us that with this sort of a world God bids us be content?
Henry George

To search for God and to find the Devil — that is what happened to me.
August Strindberg

God is slow in paying, but He always pays.
Dutch Proverb

He who leaves God out of his reckoning does not know how to count.
Italian Proverb

There are three things that only God knows: the beginning of things, the cause of things, and the end of things.
Welsh Proverb

Though your sins are like scarlet,
they shall be as white as snow;
though they are red as crimson,
they shall be like wool.
Isaiah 1:18

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"
Isaiah 6:8

Do you not know? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
Isaiah 40:21

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30

Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.
Matthew 16:23

For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.
Matthew 18:20

The God business is really quite simple. No sane man denies that the universe presents phenomena quite beyond human understanding, and so it is a fair assumption that they are directed by some understanding that is superhuman. But that is as far as sound thought can go. All religions pretend to go further. That is, they pretend to explain the unknowable …. Anyone who pretends to say what God wants or doesn’t want, and what the whole show is about, is simply an ass.
H. L. Mencken

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.
Jonathan Edwards

And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."

But God said to him, "You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?"

Luke 12:19-20

For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.
Luke 14:11

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.
2 Corinthians 12:9

It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
Hebrews 10:31

Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.
James 1:19-20

'He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
Revelation 21:4

And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.
Matthew 10:30

From all evil and mischief; from sin, from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from thy wrath, and from everlasting damnation, Good Lord, deliver us.
The Book of Common Prayer

For you, Lord, have delivered me from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling, that I may walk before the Lord in the land of the living.
Psalms 116:8-9

If Jesus Christ were to come to-day, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.
Thomas Carlyle

As to Jesus of Nazareth, I think His system of morals and His religion, as He left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to His divinity.
Benjamin Franklin

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite Him to history or reconcile Him with themselves.
R. W. Emerson

Between 'God exists' and 'There is no God' lies a whole enormous field which a true sage has great difficulty in crossing. But a Russian knows only one of these two extremes and the middle between them doesn't interest him, which is why he knows nothing or very little … A good man's indifference is as good as any religion.
Anton Chekhov

Take short views, hope for the best, and trust in God.
Sydney Smith

If God lived on earth, people would break his windows.
Jewish Proverb

But if we bear continually in mind our relation to the Father of Being, by whom we are placed in the world, and who has allotted us the part which we are to bear in the general system of life, we shall be easily persuaded to resign our own inclinations to Unerring Wisdom, and do the work decreed for us with cheerfulness and diligence.
Samuel Johnson

I would rather believe that God did not exist than believe that He was indifferent.
George Sand

Gods


As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
Shakespeare

We serve the gods — whatever the gods may be.
Euripides

In the history of the world there will not again be any man, never so great, whom his fellow-men will take for a god.
Thomas Carlyle

Two thousand years have come and gone — and not a single new god!
F. W. Nietzsche

There are some gods who abandon men; they are the gods who know men.
Japanese Proverb

Gold


Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you.
Acts 3:6

Gold gives to even the ugliest a certain pleasing charm.
J. B. Molière

O cursed lust of gold! when, for thy sake,
The fool throws up his interest in both worlds;
First starved in this, then damned in that to come.
Robert Blair

The lust of gold, unfeeling and remorseless!
The last corruption of degenerate man.
Samuel Johnson

Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued.
J. S. Morrill

Where gold is, there the Devil is.
German Proverb

It is observed of gold, by an old epigrammatist, that "To have it is to be in fear, and to want it is to be in sorrow."
Samuel Johnson

Golden Rule


I must always act in such a way that I can at the same time will that the maxim by which I act should become a universal law.
Immanuel Kant

Our conscience teaches us it is right, our reason teaches us it is useful, that men should live according to the Golden Rule.
W. Winwood Reade

He has observed the golden rule
Till he's become the golden fool.
William Blake

Golf


Golf is like a love affair: if you don't take it seriously, it's no fun; if you do take it seriously, it breaks your heart.
Arnold Daly

The only reason I ever played golf in the first place was so I could afford to hunt and fish.
Sam Snead

Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Mark Twain

You have to understand, I don't play golf for fun. It's my business. When the mailman starts delivering mail on his off day, that's when I'll start playing golf for the hell of it.
Lee Trevino

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
Dave Barry

Good


It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing — I used to be a good boy.
Mark Twain

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Shakespeare

The things which … are esteemed as the greatest good of all … can be reduced to these three headings: to wit, Riches, Fame, and Pleasure. With these three the mind is so engrossed that it cannot scarcely think of any other good.
John Locke

——How few
Know their own good; or, knowing it, pursue!
How void of reason are our hopes and fears!

(——Pauci dignoscere possunt
Vera bona, atque illis multum diversa, remotâ
Erroris nebula.
)

John Dryden, based on Juvenal

It is not goodness to be better than the worst.
Seneca

A good man doubles the length of his existence. To have lived so as to look back with pleasure on life is to have lived twice.
Martial

Goodness and greatness go not always together.
John Clarke

He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8

Be good, and you will be lonesome.
Mark Twain

Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.
John Wesley

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.
Galatians 6:9-10

They're only truly great who are truly good.
George Chapman

The greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident.
Charles Lamb

No people do so much harm as those who go about doing good.
Mandell Creighton

Good And Bad


None are known to be good until they have opportunity to be bad.
Benjamin Whichcote

He that is good will infallibly become better, and he that is bad will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue, and time are three things that never stand still.
C. C. Colton

The usual choice is not between the good and the bad but between the bad and the worse.
French Proverb

Good And Evil


It is a public scandal that gives offense and it is no sin to sin in secret.
Molière

The world is a dangerous place to live — not because of the people who are evil but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
Albert Einstein

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
G. K. Chesterton

No good deed ever goes unpunished.
Brooks Thomas

If I knew … that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.
Henry David Thoreau

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness unless he has the strength of character to be wicked. All other goodness is generally nothing but indolence or impotence of will.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.
George Bernard Shaw

He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars;
General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer:
For art and science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.
William Blake

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it they are wrong.
Robert Louis Stevenson

One murder makes a villain, millions a hero.
Bishop Beilby Porteus

Cruelties should be committed all at once.
Niccolò Machiavelli

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus

The wicked man flees though no one pursues,
but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
Proverbs 28:1

Of course heaven forbids certain pleasures, but one finds means of compromise.
Molière

Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we have done as fear of the ill that may happen to us in consequence.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Don't worry about avoiding temptation — as you grow older, it starts avoiding you.
The Old Farmer's Almanac

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.
Ann Frank

For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do — this I keep on doing.
Romans 7:19

Beware the fury of a patient man.
John Dryden

It is a sin to believe evil of others, but it is seldom a mistake.
H. L. Mencken

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.
Mae West

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.
Margaret Thatcher

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he is doing is good.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Some people are worried about the difference between right and wrong. I'm worried about the difference between wrong and fun.
P. J. O'Rourke

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.
Edmund Burke

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
William Shakespeare

You have a choice in life very often whether you do good or you feel good.
Dennis Prager

It is not up to you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.
Rabbi Tarfon

Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
Genesis 3:5

Every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.
Genesis 8:21

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Blaise Pascal

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.
G. K. Chesterton

Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind.
Kohelet Rabbah 7:16

And it is said of the greatest liar, that he tells more truth than falsehood; so it may be said of the worst man, that he does more good than evil.
Samuel Johnson

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
Shakespeare

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.
Shakespeare

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to the good.
Edmund Burke

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.
Isaiah 5:20

It will never be possible to get rid of evil altogether, for there must always be something opposite to good.
Plato

Whoever imitates evil always goes beyond the example; whoever imitates good always falls short.
Francesco Guicciardini

We often do good in order that we may do evil with impunity.
La Rochefoucauld

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.
S. T. Coleridge

He who does no good does evil enough.
R. C. Trench (Archbishop of Dublin)

Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself.
Ernest Hemingway

Good-Nature


Nothing is rarer than true good nature; they who are reputed to have it are generally only pliant or weak.
La Rochefoucauld

Gospel


The gospel belongs to the poor and sorrowful, and not to you princes, great persons and courtiers that live in continual joy and delight, in secureness, void of all tribulation.
Martin Luther

Gossip


The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.
German Proverb

Whoever gossips to you will gossip of you.
Spanish Proverb

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.
Louis B. Nizer

There is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde

Gossip [is] the sewer of malice and envy.
Richard Brookhiser

Hear no ill of a Friend, nor speak any of an Enemy.
Author unidentified

Gossip … trades in half-truth, exaggeration and downright falsehood, and it arouses some of our worst instincts: lack of charity and malice, Schadenfreude, a sneaking desire that calamity should strike those who are richer and more famous than us, and not least a propensity to pry into other people's private lives.
Paul Johnson

Have you heard something? Let it die with you. Be brave, it will not make you burst!
Ecclesiasticus 19:10

The wise man indulges himself not in gossip with women, not even his own wife.
The Talmud

Gossiping and lying go together.
Thomas Fuller

If what we see is doubtful, how can we believe what is spoken behind the back?
Chinese Proverb

Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.
Henry Fielding

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
George Eliot

I believe they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly.
George Farquhar

Gourmet


A gourmet is just a glutton with brains.
Phillip W. Haberman, Jr.

Gourmets dig their graves with their teeth.
French Proverb

Gout


What a very singular disease gout is! It seems as if the stomach fell down into the feet. The smallest deviation from right diet is immediately punished by limping and lameness, and the innocent ankle and blameless instep are tortured for the vices of the nobler organs.
Sydney Smith

Government


A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw

I would rather be governed by the first three hundred names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley

The point to remember is that what the government gives it must first take away.
John S. Caldwell

No man should be in public office who can't make more money in private life.
Thomas E. Dewey

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Will Rogers

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Barry Goldwater

The state, it cannot too often be repeated, does nothing, and can give nothing, which it does not take from somebody.
George Henry

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle

The supply of government exceeds the demand.
Lewis H. Lapham

Every nation has the government it deserves.
Joseph Marie de Maistre

The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.
H. L. Mencken

Society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine

In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.
Orson Welles

The federal government has three duties. Print the money, deliver the mail, and declare war.
Florence King

There is very little to admire in bureaucracy, but you have got to hand it to the Internal Revenue Service.
James L. Rogers

No class of Americans, so far as I know, has ever objected … to any amount of governmental meddling if it appeared to benefit that particular class.
Carl Becker

Any doctrine that … weakens personal responsibility for judgment and for action … helps create the attitudes that welcome and support the totalitarian state.
John Dewey

Today's rebel is tomorrow's tyrant.
Will and Ariel Durant

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.
Oscar Ameringer

Why should any country continue, forever, to be "great"?
William F. Buckley

That government is best which governs least.
Henry David Thoreau

The wrong sort of people are always in power because they would not be in power if they were not the wrong sort of people.
Jon Wynne-Tyson

Nothing is easier than spending the public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody.
Calvin Coolidge

The office of President is such a bastardized thing, half royalty and half democracy, that nobody knows whether to genuflect or spit.
Jimmy Breslin

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow

I have been told I was on the road to hell, but I had no idea it was just a mile down the road with a Dome on it.
Abraham Lincoln

In all my years of public life I have never obstructed justice … Your President is no crook!
Richard M. Nixon

In America any boy may become President and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.
Adlai Stevenson

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not.
Friedrich Hayek

Who shall guard the guardians themselves? (quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
Juvenal

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.
Niccolò Machiavelli

There is a homely adage which runs: "Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far."
Theodore Roosevelt

Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings.
Jan C. Smuts

There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you.
Will Rogers

This island is almost made of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish in Great Britain at the same time.
Aneurin Bevan

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman

I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
Will Rogers

At a banquet Caligula was suddenly seized with a fit of helpless laughter. The consuls reclining next to him asked if they might share in the imperial merriment. Caligula, wiping the tears from his eyes, managed to gasp, "You'll never guess! It suddenly occurred to me that I had only to give a single nod, and both your throats would be cut on the spot."
Suetonius

The Labour Party Marxists see the consequences of their own folly all around them and call it the collapse of capitalism.
Jon Akass

The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice.
Linda Bowles

Everybody has asked the question … "What shall we do with the Negro?" I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are wormeaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature's plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
Frederick Douglass

In all sorts of government man is made to believe himself free, and to be in chains.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

[Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.
H. L. Mencken

When a private citizen is robbed, a worthy man is deprived of the fruits of his industry and thrift; when the government is robbed, the worst that happens is that certain rogues and loafers have less money to play with than they had before.
H. L. Mencken

The natural tendency of every government is to grow steadily worse — that is, to grow more satisfactory to those who constitute it and less satisfactory to those who support it.
H. L. Mencken

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war on liberty, and that the democratic government is at least as bad as any of the other forms.
H. L. Mencken

The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.
H. L. Mencken

Government is like a baby: An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan

When the government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson

Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
Thomas Jefferson

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).
Ayn Rand

Only government can cause inflation, preserve monopoly, and punish enterprise.
William F. Buckley

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo

The most valuable function performed by the federal government is entertainment.
Dave Barry

The mystery of government is not how Washington works but how to make it stop.
P. J. O'Rourke

[Government's modus operandi:] If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
Ronald Reagan

The urgent consideration of the public safety may undoubtedly authorize the violation of every positive law. How far that, or any other, consideration may operate to dissolve the natural obligations of humanity and justice, is a doctrine of which I still desire to remain ignorant.
Edward Gibbon, regarding the duplicitous Roman massacre of unarmed Goths

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.

[We] hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.

He [is] the worst governor who [cannot] govern himself.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

Governors ought to gain nothing by their governments but honor.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

But the desire of obtaining the advantages, and of escaping the burdens, of political society, is a perpetual and inexhaustible source of discord.
Edward Gibbon

[The one in authority] does not bear the sword for nothing.
St. Paul, Romans 13:4

[The] Roman government appeared every day less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects.
Edward Gibbon

Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
Mark Twain

The whole idea of government is this: if enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.
P. J. O'Rourke

Government conspiracy? They can't even deliver our mail and it's got our address on it and everything!
P. J. O'Rourke

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.
P. J. O'Rourke

For the people in government … Washington is an early-rising, hard-working city. It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money.
P. J. O'Rourke

Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever [is] special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet: to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press.
P. J. O'Rourke

When a private entity does not produce the desired results, it [is] done away with. But a public entity gets bigger.
P. J. O'Rourke

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.
Frank Herbert

Expanded unemployment benefits … expand unemployment.
Author unidentified

[East Germans] were brought up to identify totally with the state; they may be slow to realize the extent to which they were victimized by the state.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Attributed)

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.
H. L. Mencken

Government doesn't solve problems; it subsidizes them.
Ronald Reagan

Public spending expands to absorb all available tax revenues. … Public borrowing expands to absorb all available means of finance.
Lewis E. Lehrman & John D. Mueller (variation on Parkinson's Law)

[The government is] now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s — use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.
Thomas Sowell

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.
Friedrich von Hayek

A little government and a little luck are necessary in life, but only a fool trusts either of them.
P. J. O'Rourke

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.
James Madison

We have far more to fear from swift than from torpid government.
George F. Will

Take any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order you want, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we could do without.
Milton Friedman (Attributed)

The history of the human race is one long story of attempts by certain persons and classes to obtain control of the power of the State, so as to win earthly gratifications at the expense of others.
William Graham Sumner

[The] State cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.
William Graham Sumner

The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities. In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.
Abraham Lincoln

Big government makes small citizens.
Mark Steyn

The societies of antiquity were frequently destroyed by the growth of the state and its parasites. The process continues to our own day, changing only its outward form. It is one of the central themes of Smith's The Wealth of Nations that private individuals create wealth, and governments consume it. The more the government consumes, the less the private sector has to invest; so wealth accumulates more slowly, or not at all, or even declines.
Paul Johnson

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.
Mark Twain

A man's admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.
Alexis de Tocqueville

With all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow-citizens — a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.
Thomas Jefferson

[Food activists] like to talk about market failures but are apparently blind to the abundance of government failures. If the process is so corruptible by corporate interests and mega farms, as they claim it is, then Uncle Sam is incapable of working in our food interests, and all the preaching of hope and change is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
Jayson Lusk

The great scandal of American life is that we pay for German levels of government without enjoying the related benefits.
Kevin D. Williamson

If we'd had government on [today's] scale in the 1840s, the stagecoaches would have hired lobbyists to get a bill passed that railroads could not travel faster than a horse because it would be an unfair competitive advantage.
Newt Gingrich

As a broad generalization, big businesses have no moral objections to being whores. Getting into bed with Uncle Sam is all a question of price, not principle.
Jonah Goldberg

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Everett Dirksen

When I am abroad, I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Winston Churchill

We are slipping towards a Leviathan state, in which organised force, violence or compulsion is the prime determinant of politics.
Paul Johnson

We must always remember that, as Americans, we all have a common enemy — an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.
Dave Barry

When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws, must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it.
Niccolò Machiavelli

It was observed that men had ungovernable passions, which made it necessary to guard against the violence they might offer to each other. They appointed governors over them for this reason! But a worse and more perplexing difficulty arises, how to be defended against the governors? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? In vain they change from a single person to a few. These few have the passions of the one; and they unite to strengthen themselves, and to secure the gratification of their lawless passions at the expense of the general good. In vain do we fly to the many. The case is worse; their passions are less under the government of reason, they are augmented by the contagion, and defended against all attacks by their multitude.
Edmund Burke

Kings are ambitious; the nobility haughty; and the populace tumultuous and ungovernable. … The government is, one day, arbitrary power in a single person; another, a juggling confederacy of a few to cheat the prince and enslave the people; and the third, a frantic and unmanageable democracy.
Edmund Burke

Consider the ravages committed in the bowels of all commonwealths by ambition, by avarice, envy, fraud, open injustice, and pretended friendship; vices which could draw little support from a state of nature, but which blossom and flourish in the rankness of political society.
Edmund Burke

People must be governed in a manner agreeable to their temper and disposition; and men of free character and spirit must be ruled with, at least, some condescension to this spirit and this character.
Edmund Burke

All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise and barter.
Edmund Burke

Fear is the foundation of most governments.
John Adams

[The War Office kept three sets of figures:] one to mislead the public, another to mislead the Cabinet, and the third to mislead itself.
Herbert Asquith

Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.
H. L. Mencken

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken

No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down.
H. L. Mencken

Government, like any other organism, refuses to acquiesce in its own extinction. This refusal, of course, involves the resistance to any effort to diminish its powers and prerogatives. There has been no organized effort to keep government down since Jefferson's day. Ever since then the American people have been bolstering up its powers and giving it more and more jurisdiction over their affairs. They pay for that folly in increased taxes and diminished liberties. No government as such is ever in favor of the freedom of the individual. It invariably seeks to limit that freedom, if not by overt denial, then by seeking constantly to widen its own functions.
H. L. Mencken

In a country well governed poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country, badly governed wealth is something to be ashamed of.
Confucius

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and anarchy.
Polybius

A good government produces citizens distinguished for courage, love of justice, and every other good quality; a bad government makes them cowardly, rapacious, and the slaves of every foul desire.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

In a change of government, the poor seldom change anything except the name of their master.
Phaedrus

All well-governed states and wise princes have taken care not to reduce the nobility to despair, nor the people to discontent.
Niccolò Machiavelli

I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will.
James I of England

You do not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed. (An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur.)
Bishop Axel Oxen-Stjerna (Ascribed)

The great and chief end of men, putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.
John Locke

No system of government was ever so ill devised that, under proper men, it wouldn't work well enough.
William Penn

Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
David Hume

When a government lasts a long while it deteriorates by insensible degrees.
C. L. de Montesquieu

Republics end through luxury; monarchies through poverty.
C. L. de Montesquieu

The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded.
C. L. de Montesquieu

In every government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings or tyrant laws restrain,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.
Oliver Goldsmith and Samuel Johnson

Tis a political maxim that all government tends to despotism, and like the human frame brings at its birth the latent seed which finally shall destroy the constitution. This is a melancholy truth — but such is the lot of humanity.
Josiah Quincy, Jr.

The operations of government have little influence upon the private happiness of private men.
Samuel Johnson

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
Alexander Hamilton

Government can have no more than two legitimate purposes the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community, and the common defense against external invasion.
William Godwin

Government is, abstractedly taken, an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind.
William Godwin

While all other sciences have advanced, that of government is at a standstill — little better understood, little better practised now than three or four thousand years ago.
John Adams

No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails it will be from this weakness.
Thomas Jefferson

Governments connive at many things which they ought to correct, and correct many things at which they ought to connive.
C. C. Colton

Government must be framed for man as he is, and not for man as he should be if he were free from vice.
James Kent

In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.
Voltaire

The necessity for external government to man is in an inverse ratio to the vigor of his self-government. Where the last is most complete, the first is least wanted. Hence, the more virtue the more liberty.
S. T. Coleridge

Whatever government is not a government of laws is a despotism, let it be called what it may.
Daniel Webster

The object of the state is always the same: to limit the individual, to tame him, to subordinate him, to subjugate him.
Max Stirner

The best government is that in which the law speaks instead of the lawyer.
M. L. Byrn

Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?
Abraham Lincoln

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

The firm basis of government is justice, not pity.
Woodrow Wilson

In relation to society and government it may be repeated that new ideas are rare; in regard to the latter, perhaps not more than two really large and new ideas have been developed in as many millenniums.
H. C. Lodge

The cost of government will continue to increase, I care not what party is in power.
Reed Smoot

The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evildoers, and tax those who behave: government does little for fairly respectable people except annoy them.
E. W. Howe

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
Mr. Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Today the nations of the world may be divided into two classes — the nations in which the government fears the people, and the nations in which the people fear the government.
Amos R. E. Pinchot

Fire, water and government know nothing of mercy.
Albanian Proverb

Only fools are glad when governments change.
Romanian Proverb

Governments create nothing and have nothing to give but what they have first taken away — you may put money in the pockets of one set of Englishmen, but it will be money taken from the pockets of another set of Englishmen, and the greater part will be spilled on the way. Every vote given for Protection is a vote to give Governments the right of robbing Peter to pay Paul and charging the public a handsome commission on the job.
Winston Churchill

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
Bertolt Brecht

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.
Andrew Jackson

A decent and manly examination of the acts of government should be not only tolerated, but encouraged.
William Henry Harrison

The transportation bill had over $5 billion worth of special local projects and favors attached to it, lamprey-like, by various congresspersons. But this is good, because these projects will CREATE JOBS. See, when the GOVERNMENT spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of TAXPAYERS, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.
Dave Barry

Within these limits the power vested in the American courts of justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional forms one of the most powerful barriers that have ever been devised against the tyranny of political assemblies.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Government Ownership


I do not believe in government ownership or anything which can with propriety be left in private hands, and in particular I should most strenuously object to government ownership of railroads.
Theodore Roosevelt

Grace


The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter-state of man, when dinners were precarious things, and a full meal was something more than a common blessing; when a bellyful was a windfall, and looked like a special providence.
Charles Lamb

Graduation


They're celebrating you graduating from eighth grade? We just went to your sixth-grade graduation two goddamned years ago! Jesus Christ, why don't they just throw a fucking party every time you properly wipe your ass?
Samuel Halpern

Grammar


A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
E. A. Poe

Morals and manners will rise or decline with our attention to grammar.
Jason Chamberlain

Grammarian


Saving only the doctors, there are none more stupid than the grammarians.
Heraclitus

Grammarians dispute, and the question is still undecided.
Horace

Grass


A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.
Walt Whitman

Gratitude


He who receives a benefit should never forget it; he who bestow should never remember it.
Pierre Charron

The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
Eric Hoffer

[Where] gratitude is felt, resentment can never be very far behind.
James W. Ceaser

[The] act of gratitude nowadays is probably more often neglected than overdone.
William F. Buckley

God, Parents, and Instructors, can never be requited.
Author unidentified

He is Governor that governs his Passions, and he a Servant that serves them.
Author unidentified

Lend Money to an Enemy, and thou'lt gain him, to a Friend and thou'lt lose him.
Author unidentified

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.
Samuel Johnson

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
Cicero

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.
Samuel Johnson

Next to ingratitude, the most painful thing to bear is gratitude.
H. W. Beecher

One can put some trust in the gratitude of a sovereign, and also in that of his family; under certain conditions, one can even rely upon it; but one can never expect anything from the gratitude of a nation.
Otto von Bismarck

Gratitude preserves auld friendships and begets new.
Scottish Proverb

If the means of thy support in life be measured out scantily to thee, remember that thou hast to be thankful and grateful even for the mere privilege to breathe, and that thou must look upon that suffering as a test of thy piety and a preparation for better things.
Eleazar of Worms

Grave


Up, sluggard, and waste not life; in the grave will be sleeping enough.
Benjamin Franklin

[They] were leveled in the grave.
Edward Gibbon

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
R. L. Stevenson

What a jolly life a corpse must lead
In the grave so calm and cool,
Scorning the trifles that mortals most heed
And pitying the sage and fool.
Author unidentified

… the grave continues to be filled by the victims of sorrow.
Samuel Johnson

Graveyard


I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.
Mark Twain

Gray Hair


Gray hairs are death's blossoms.
English Proverb

Gray hair is a sign of age, not of wisdom.
Greek Proverb

Greatness


A great ship asks deep water.
George Herbert

The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor the great scholars great men.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.
Robert Frost

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, 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 and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

But be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.
William Shakespeare

Those who aim at great deeds must also suffer greatly.
Crassus

He was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.
Shakespeare

Idleness, women, disorder, a foolish partiality for one's own native place, discontent and timidity are six obstructions to greatness.
The Hitopadesa

The nearer we come to great men the more clearly we see that they are only men. They rarely seem great to their valets.
Jean de la Bruyère

It is dangerous for mean minds to venture themselves within the sphere of greatness. Stupidity is soon blinded by the splendour of wealth, and cowardice is easily fettered in the shackles of dependence.
Samuel Johnson

If I am a great man, then all great men are frauds.
Andrew Bonar Law

To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Greece


Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.
Mark Twain

Greed


Then he said to them, "Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions."
Luke 12:15

Greek


I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts. (Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.)
Virgil

Grief


Grief is the agony of an instant, the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.
Benjamin Disraeli

Well, everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
William Shakespeare

Many long for the day when they will be over their grief, as if it's something we can recover from. In reality we don't recover. We grieve for the rest of our lives when we lose a loved one. In the years to come, it doesn't hurt less, just less often.
David Kessler

The business of life summons us away from useless grief …. There is no wisdom in useless and hopeless sorrow.
Samuel Johnson

I know that such a loss [death of a child] is a laceration of the mind. I know that the whole system of hopes, and designs, and expectations is swept away at once, and nothing left but bottomless vacuity.
Samuel Johnson

Cry when you have to, laugh when you can.
Author unidentified

Do not give your heart to grief; drive it away, and remember your own end. Do not forget, there is no coming back; you do the dead no good, and you injure yourself. Remember his fate, for yours is like it; yesterday it was his, and today it is yours.
Ecclesiasticus 38:20-22

The person who grieves, suffers his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it; but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
Edmund Burke

Patch griefs with proverbs.
Shakespeare

What’s gone and what’s past help
Should be past grief.
Shakespeare

While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till grief be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.
Samuel Johnson

My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak.
Psalms 31:10

Grief is a tree that has tears for its fruit.
Philemon: Fragment, c. 300 B.C.

Grief conquers the unconquered man.
Ovid

That is a light grief which can take counsel.
Seneca

Mighty griefs are dumb.
Samuel Daniel

Alas, I am nothing but a multitude
Of walking griefs.
Beaumont and Fletcher

I ran from grief; grief ran and overtook me.
Beaumont and Fletcher

No day passeth without some grief.
John Ray

The only cure for grief is action.
G. H. Lewes

The more you grieve the greater your loss.
Persian Proverb

The doctor came and gave her pills and medicines. She'd take them and become calmer, but her grief just collected under the drugs like a thrombosis.
Seamus Deane

Ah woe is me!
Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Grove


The groves were God’s first temples.
William Cullen Bryant

Growth


Growth [is] the only evidence of life.
John Henry Cardinal Newman

Guest


Unbidden guests
Are often welcomest when they are gone.
Shakespeare

No one can be so welcome a guest that he will not annoy his host after three days.
Plautus

The greater the kindness of my host, the greater my anxiety not to impose on it.
Voltaire

After three days men grow weary of a wench, a guest, and rainy weather.
Benjamin Franklin

The master of the house is the servant of the guest.
Persian Proverb

Hail, guest, we ask not what thou art;
If friend, we greet thee, hand and heart;
If stranger, such no longer be;
If foe, our love shall conquer thee.
Welsh Rhyme

Guillotine


[The] guillotine … served as it were to terminate awkward arguments in a thoroughly rationalistic manner.
Paul Johnson

My machine [the guillotine] will take off a head in a twinkling, and the victim will feel nothing but a sense of refreshing coolness. We cannot make too much haste, gentlemen, to allow the nation to enjoy this advantage.
J. I. Guillotin

Guilt


The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
William Shakespeare

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.
Jane Austen

Alas! how difficult it is not to betray guilt by our countenance!
Ovid

Nobody becomes guilty by fate.
Seneca

In former days, everyone found the assumption of innocence so easy; today we find fatally easy the assumption of guilt.
Amanda Cross

Gun


You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.
Al Capone

Gunpowder


If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

Habeas Corpus


The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
Constitution of the United States, Art. 1

Habit


The nature of men is always the same; it is their habits that separate them.
Confucius

Nothing is more powerful than habit.
Ovid

Habit makes the custom.
Ovid

Ill habits gather by unseen degrees, —
As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.
John Dryden, Tr. of Ovid

Habit with him was all the test of truth; "It must be right: I've done it from my youth."
George Crabbe

For the ordinary business of life an ounce of habit is worth a pound of intellect.
Thomas B. Reed

Man is an animal of habit. (Der Mensch ist ein Gewohnheitstier.)
German Proverb

Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.
Spanish Proverb

Half


Half the truth is often a great lie.
Benjamin Franklin

Hanging


Hanging and wiving go by destiny.
Anonymous

There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life.
Michel de Montaigne

I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.
Samuel Pepys

This will surely be a lesson to me.
Speech of a Tennessee Negro on the gallows

Hangover


Coming down with something? Please. You reek of booze and bullshit. Don't lie to a Kentuckian about drinking or horses, son.
Samuel Halpern

I tried to lift my head and winced. It was full of whiskey and regret.
Dan Dunn

Happiness


Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.
Bertrand Russell

We are never so happy nor so unhappy as we imagine.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus

My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?
Charles M. Schulz

Happiness? That's nothing more than health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
Agnes Repplier

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.
Anne Frank

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

The conviction of the rich that the poor are happy is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.
Laurence J. Peter

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
H. L. Mencken

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
George Bernard Shaw

When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power would bring me happiness … I was right.
Gahan Wilson

Hollywood is where, if you don't have happiness, you send out for it.
Rex Reed

Boethius might have been styled happy, if that precarious epithet could be safely applied before the last term of the life of man.
Edward Gibbon

There is no device whatever to be invented for securing happiness without industry, economy, and virtue.
William Graham Sumner

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.
Bertrand Russell

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy — I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Bertrand Russell

The only happy people I know are people I don't know well.
Helen Telushkin

Happiness is a serious problem.
Dennis Prager, title of his book on happiness

But man is not born for happiness.
Samuel Johnson

I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.
Martha Washington

Very little is needed to make a happy life.
Marcus Aurelius

But, O! how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
Shakespeare

We are in danger from whatever can get possession of our thoughts; all that can excite in us either pain or pleasure, has a tendency to obstruct the way that leads to happiness, and either to turn us aside, or retard our progress.
Samuel Johnson

You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, traveling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abscesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say "yes."
Terry Pratchett

Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day.
Benjamin Franklin

Who save the gods can be happy all life long?
Aeschylus

No man is happy unless he believes he is.
Publilius Syrus

I have now reigned about fifty years in victory or peace, beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call, nor does any earthly blessing appear to have been wanting to my felicity. In this situation I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: they amount to fourteen.
Ascribed to Abd al-Rahman III of Spain

We never enjoy perfect happiness; our most fortunate successes are mingled with sadness; some anxieties always perplex the reality of our satisfaction.
Pierre Corneille

He that talks much of his happiness summons grief.
George Herbert

The happiness or unhappiness of men depends no less upon their dispositions than on their fortunes.
La Rochefoucauld

The past and present are only our means; the future is always our end. Thus we never really live, but only hope to live. Always looking forward to being happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Blaise Pascal

Unbroken happiness is a bore: it should have ups and downs.
J. B. Molière

Happy the man who, unknown to the world, lives content with himself in some retired nook, whom the love of this nothing called fame has never intoxicated with its vain smoke; who makes all his pleasure dependent on his liberty of action, and gives an account of his leisure to no one but himself.
Nicolas Boileau

Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from the time to come. In youth we have nothing past to entertain us, and in age we derive little from retrospect but hope- less sorrow.
Samuel Johnson

I firmly believe, notwithstanding all our complaints, that almost every person upon earth tastes upon the totality more happiness than misery.
Horace Walpole

It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness.
Thomas Jefferson

Mark Antony sought for happiness in love; Brutus in glory; Caesar in dominion: the first found disgrace, the second disgust, the last ingratitude, and each destruction.
C. C. Colton

Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
H. D. Thoreau

Mankind are always happy for having been happy; so that, if you make them happy now, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.
Sydney Smith

Man is never happy, but spends his whole life. in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind.
J. S. Mill

What right have we to happiness?
Henrik Ibsen

Much happiness is overlooked because it doesn't cost anything.
Author unidentified

Once in every man's life happiness passes him by.
German Proverb

Looking for happiness is like clutching the shadow or chasing the wind.
Japanese Proverb

There are three sureties of happiness: good habits, amiability, and forbearance.
Welsh Proverb

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a human heart. One must imagine that Sisyphus is happy. (La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d'homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.)
Albert Camus

But to hope happiness and immortality is equally vain. Our state may indeed be more or less embittered as our duration may be more or less contracted; yet the utmost felicity which we can ever attain will be little better than alleviation of misery, and we shall always feel more pain from our wants than pleasure from our enjoyments.
Samuel Johnson

It is not possible to secure instant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification.
Samuel Johnson

But how many things are necessary to happiness which money cannot obtain!
Samuel Johnson

The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions — the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of pleasurable and genial feeling.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from the time to come.
Samuel Johnson

There is no greater pain than to remember a happy time when one is in misery.

(… Nessun maggior dolore,
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria
.)

Dante Alighieri

The two foes of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer

There are few things which can much conduce to happiness, and, therefore, few things to be ardently desired.
Samuel Johnson

For all the happiness mankind can gain
Is not in pleasure, but in rest from pain.
John Dryden

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. He had never found happiness dull.
Ernest Hemingway

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.
John Stuart Mill

Hard


Is anything too hard for the Lord?
Genesis 18:14

Things hard to come by are much esteemed. (Quae rarissima carissima.)
Latin Proverb

Harlot


The harlot knows not how to love but only to ensnare; her kiss hath poison, and her mouth a pernicious drug.
St. John Chrysostom

Samson with his strong body had a weak head, or he would not have laid it in a harlot's lap.
Benjamin Franklin

Harm


The number of people who can do us good is very small; but almost anyone can do us harm.
Baltasar Gracian

Harmony


I take pleasure in three things, and they are beautiful in the sight of God and of mortals: agreement among brothers and sisters, friendship among neighbors, and a wife and a husband who live in harmony.
Ecclesiasticus 25:1

Harvest


The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.
Matthew 9:37

Haste


Haste is of the Devil; God works slowly.
Persian Proverb

If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
John Wooden

Haste makes waste.
Author unidentified

Make haste slowly. (Festina lente.)
Latin Proverb, borrowed from the Greek

What is done hastily cannot be done prudently.
Publilius Syrus

Marry in haste and repent at leisure.
John Ray

Fraud and deceit are always in haste.
H. G. Bohn

Haste and anger hide gude counsel.
Scottish Proverb

Hat


A hat should be taken off when you greet a lady and left off for the rest of your life. Nothing looks more stupid than a hat.
P. J. O'Rourke

Hatred


Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.
Eric Hoffer

We have to stop demonizing people and realize the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right.
Don Lemon

Take care that no one hate you justly.
Publilius Syrus

Let them hate, so long as they fear. (Oderint dum metuant.)
Caligula (Ascribed)

All men naturally hate each other.
Blaise Pascal

What so great misery as to be hated, and to know that we deserve to be hated?
Adam Smith

Men hate more steadily than they love.
Samuel Johnson

Hatred is by far the longest pleasure;
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
Byron

We must hate — hatred is the basis of Communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not Communists.
Nikolai Lenin

I hate nobody except Hitler — and that is professional.
Winston Churchill

Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head; and neither feeling is quite within our control.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Headmaster


Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.
Winston Churchill

Health


Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians.
Proverb

If a man thinks about his physical or moral state, he nearly always discovers that he is ill.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world.
Paul Dudley White

What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease.
George Dennison Prentice

I'm not sick, but I'm not well.
Harvey Danger

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; and do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw

Nearly all men die of their medicines, and not of their illnesses.
Molière

Sugar and alcohol are sweet poisons.
Author unidentified

"Good health" is merely the slowest rate at which one can die.
Author unidentified

Leave the table hungry.
Leave the bed sleepy.
Leave the table thirsty.
Irish Recipe for Longevity, Author unidentified

Be not slow to visit the sick.
Ecclesiasticus 7:39

Preserving health by too severe a rule is a worrisome malady.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Health is not simply the absence of sickness.
Hannah Green

It's no longer a question of staying healthy. It's a question of finding a sickness you like.
Jackie Mason

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain

Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Redd Foxx

Quit worrying about your health. It'll go away.
Robert Orben

People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are treated by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
Wendell Berry

In the face of such overwhelming statistical possibilities, hypochondria has always seemed to me to be the only rational position to take on life.
John Diamond

If you don't make time for your wellness, you'll be forced to make time for your illness.
Author unidentified

Health … [dispensed] her gifts to those only who shared their lives in just proportions between Rest and Labour.
Samuel Johnson

Among the innumerable follies, by which we lay up in our youth repentance and remorse for the succeeding part of our lives, there is scarce any against which warnings are of less efficacy, than the neglect of health.
Samuel Johnson

Such is the power of health, that without its co-operation every other comfort is torpid and lifeless as the powers of vegetation without the sun.
Samuel Johnson

It requires no great abilities to prove, that he loses pleasure who loses health.
Samuel Johnson

Health is certainly more valuable than money, because it is by health that money is procured.
Samuel Johnson

A sound mind in a sound body, is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.
John Locke

There is a limit to the best of health: disease is always a near neighbor.
Aeschylus

To lose one's health renders science null, art inglorious, strength unavailing, wealth useless, and eloquence powerless.
Herophilus

A man in good health is always full of advice to the sick.
Menander

Life is not merely being alive, but being well.
Martial

Look to your health, and if you have it, praise God, and value it next to a good conscience.
Izaak Walton

It is a boresome disease to try to keep health by following a too strict regimen.
La Rochefoucauld

The poorest man would not part with health for money, but the richest would gladly part with all their money for health.
C. C. Colton

What have I gained by health? Intolerable dullness. What by early hours and moderate meals? A total blank.
Charles Lamb

I still need more healthy rest in order to work at my best. My health is the main capital I have and I want to administer it intelligently.
Ernest Hemingway

Hearing


Hear much; speak little.
Robert Burton

Heart


There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.
Theodore Roosevelt

The head never rules the heart, but just becomes its partner in crime.
Mignon McLaughlin

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.
H. L. Mencken

Each heart knows its own bitterness,
and no one else can share its joy.
Proverbs 14:10

Even in laughter the heart may ache,
and joy may end in grief.
Proverbs 14:13

Let not your heart be troubled.
John 14:1 (KJV)

I prithee send me back my heart,
Since I cannot have thine;
For if from yours you will not part,
Why then shouldst thou have mine?
Sir John Suckling

The mind is always the dupe of the heart.
La Rochefoucauld

A honey tongue, a heart of gall.
Walter Raleigh

The heart, like the eye, is never satisfied.
West African Proverb

Maid of Athens, ere we part,
Give, oh give me back my heart!
Lord Byron

Heaven


Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Mark Twain

May you get to Heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you're dead.
Irish Proverb

In like manner I am persuaded also of all those of whom the Scripture says: "And he slept with his fathers," that they are all in heaven. For this word, slept, shows some good in the Scriptures.
Martin Luther

Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.
Sir Thomas Browne

Heaven were not Heaven if we knew what it were.
John Suckling

Heaven is a cheap purchase, whatever it cost.
Thomas Fuller

No man was ever scared into Heaven.
Thomas Fuller

The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel up hill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.
Jonathan Edwards

If God were not willing to forgive sin Heaven would be empty.
German Proverb

Heaven And Hell


Heaven for climate, hell for company.
James M. Barrie

Everyone who has ever built anywhere a "new heaven" first found the power thereto in his own hell.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.
John Milton

It is Hell, of course, that makes priests powerful, not Heaven, for after thousands of years of so-called civilization fear remains the one common denominator of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

Who finds heaven on earth will end in hell.
Daniel Mark Epstein

I have friends in both places [Heaven and Hell].
Mark Twain

The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
Shakespeare

I desire to go to Hell, not to Heaven. In Hell I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, but in Heaven are only beggars, monks, hermits and apostles.
Niccolò Machiavelli, on his deathbed

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hebrew Language


The words of the Hebrew tongue have a peculiar energy. It is impossible to convey so much so briefly in any other language.
Martin Luther

Hegel


It is astonishing that Hegel's reputation survived his absurd declaration that history had ended with Bonaparte's victory over Prussia at Jena in 1806. Yet Hegel went on to hold what was then the most enviable academic post in Germany, the chair of philosophy in Berlin, and to write much more clever and influential nonsense.
Paul Johnson

Heifer


If you had not plowed with my heifer, you would not have solved my riddle.
Samson, Judges 14:18

Hell


What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Mark 8:36

According to the faith and mercy of his Christian enemies, [Chosroes] sunk without hope into a still deeper abyss [Hell]; and it will not be denied, that tyrants of every age and sect are the best entitled to such infernal abodes.
Edward Gibbon

I always say, as you know, that if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It's my job.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

How do you know that the earth isn’t some other planet’s hell?
Aldous Huxley

I hold the gnashing of teeth of the damned to be an external pain following upon an evil conscience, that is, despair, when men see themselves abandoned by God.
Martin Luther

What hell is, we know not; only this we know, that there is such a sure and certain place, as is written of the rich glutton, when Abraham said unto him: "There is a great space between you and us."
Martin Luther

This miserable state is borne by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.
Dante Alighieri

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way.

(Facilis descensus Averni,
Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis.
)

Virgil, translation by Dryden

Long is the way
And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.
John Milton

If there is no Hell, a good many preachers are obtaining money under false pretenses.
William A. Sunday

Through me is the way to the sorrowful city.
Through me is the way to eternal suffering.
Through me is the way to join the lost people …
Abandon all hope, you who enter!

(Per me si va nella città dolente,
Per me si va nell' eterno dolore,
Per me si va tra la perduta gente …
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate
!)

Dante Alighieri, inscription at the entrance to Hell

Hell is a city much like London —
A populous and smoky city.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Henry III


Like Jesus Christ himself, Henry [III] was as wise on the day of his birth as he would ever be.
Author unidentified

Hereafter


When I lay sucking at my mother's breast, I had no notion how I should afterwards eat, drink, or live. Even so we on earth have no idea what the life to come will be.
Martin Luther

Heredity


Helvétius maintains that men are born with approximately the same talents. This is contradicted by experience. The character of men is fixed indelibly at birth.
Frederick the Great

There is something frightful in the way in which not only characteristic qualities, but particular manifestations of them, are repeated from generation to generation.
O. W. Holmes

Heresy


Heresies perish not with their authors, but, like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another.
Thomas Browne

From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism, Good Lord, deliver us.
The Book of Common Prayer

Among theologians heretics are those who are not backed with a sufficient array of battalions to render them orthodox.
Voltaire

Hero


We can't all be heroes because someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
Will Rogers (Attributed)

But heroes are not reckless or foolhardy. … A sensible hero fights bravely when he needs to do so; but first he fights prudently in order to avoid fighting bravely.
John O'Sullivan

No man's a hero to himself.
Ray Bradbury

There are heroes of evil as well as of good.
La Rochefoucauld

No man is a hero to his valet.
Ascribed to Madame Cornuel

Whoe'er excels in what we prize,
Appears a hero in our eyes.
Jonathan Swift

A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of the same man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning would have proved a coward.
Lord Chesterfield

Everyone is the chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own wedding, and his own funeral.
O. W. Holmes

No man is a hero to his own wife; no woman is a wife to her own hero.
Author unidentified

Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!
Galileo: No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes.
Bertolt Brecht

Heroism


Times of heroism are generally times of terror.
R. W. Emerson

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh: that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death.
H. F. Amiel

Hindsight


Even a fool may be wise after the event.
Homer

Their hindsight was better than their foresight.
Ascribed to H. W. Beecher

Historian


The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.
Edward Gibbon

History does not have sides, although historians do.
Jay Nordlinger

How many fine actions of the old time have remained unknown, for want of an historian to record them.
Martin Luther

It is natural for a good man to love his country and his friends, and to hate the enemies of both. But when he writes history he must abandon such feelings, and be prepared to praise enemies who deserve it and to censure the dearest and most intimate friends.
Polybius

The first law is that the historian shall never dare to set down what is false; the second, that he shall never dare to conceal the truth; the third, that there shall be no suspicion in his work of either favoritism or prejudice.
Cicero

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.
Pierre Bayle

The man who ventures to write contemporary history must expect to be attacked both for everything he has said and everything he has not said.
Voltaire

History


Don't brood on what's past, but never forget it either.
Thomas H. Raddall

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

History, n. An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

History … is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

History's lessons are no more enlightening than the wisdom of those who interpret them.
David Schoenbrun

History repeats itself; historians repeat one other.
Rupert Brooke

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. It is sobering, too, to find huge and frightening errors constantly repeated; lessons painfully learnt forgotten in the space of a generation; and the accumulated wisdom of the past heedlessly ignored in every society, and at all times.
Paul Johnson

Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
Oscar Wilde

One of the lessons of history is that Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. [emphasis added]
Will Durant

The voice of history [is] often little more than the organ of hatred or flattery.
Edward Gibbon

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
Winston Churchill

The interpretation of history is forever in flux, as much reflection of the present as window on the past.
Andrew Stuttaford

From the paths of blood (and such is the history of nations) I cannot refuse to turn aside to gather some flowers of science or virtue.
Edward Gibbon

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.
Tacitus

[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.
Edward Gibbon

History is a pack of tricks the living play upon the dead.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

There are no inevitabilities in history.
Paul Johnson

There is no logic or justice in history. It is all a matter of chronology.
Paul Johnson

There is no such person as History. It is human beings who decree.
Paul Johnson

Reality cannot for long be banished from history. Facts have a way of making their presence felt.
Paul Johnson

What is important in history is not only the events that occur but the events that obstinately do not occur.
Paul Johnson

The historian of the modern world is sometimes tempted to reach the depressing conclusion that progress is destructive of certitude. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries the Western elites were confident that men and progress were governed by reason. A prime discovery of modern times is that reason plays little part in our affairs.
Paul Johnson

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always — eventually — manages to spring back into its old familiar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.
Sir Terry Pratchett

If one but tell a thing well, it moves on with undying voice, and over the fruitful earth and across the sea goes the bright gleam of noble deeds ever unquenchable.
Pindar

Unsung, the noblest deed will die.
Pindar

[Historians] know how things turned out. The people who made the history didn't know how things would turn out, and you can't understand their thinking or actions without keeping that in mind.
Bernard Bailyn, paraphrased

The more I study history, the more convinced I am that what happens is influenced as much by the willpower of key individuals as by the underlying pressure of collective forces.
Paul Johnson

The present is continually in process of becoming the past: the frontier of history ends only with yesterday's newspaper.
Paul Johnson

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
Henry Ford

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
Francis Bacon

The aim of history is to assemble real facts and real speeches, to the end that lovers of knowledge may be instructed and persuaded.
Polybius

History is the witness of the times, the torch of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.
Cicero

History is philosophy teaching by examples.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

History, the longer it runs, contracts the more filth, and retains in it the additional ordure of every soil through which it passes.
William Warburton (Bishop of Gloucester)

History can be well written only in a free country.
Voltaire

My dear Smollett disgraces his talent by writing those stupid romances commonly called history.
Mary Wortley Montagu

On whatever side we regard the history of Europe, we shall perceive it to be a tissue of crimes, follies, and misfortunes.
Oliver Goldsmith

Happy is the nation that has no history.
C. B. Beccaria

All history, so far as it is not supported by contemporary evidence, is romance.
Samuel Johnson

That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought we can depend upon as true, but all the coloring, all the philosophy of history is conjecture.
Samuel Johnson

This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.
Samuel Johnson

The histories of mankind that we possess are histories only of the higher classes.
T. R. Malthus

I am determined to apply myself to a study that is hateful and disgusting to my very soul, but which is, above all studies, necessary for him who would be listened to as a mender of antiquated abuses. I mean that record of crimes and miseries — history.
P. B. Shelley

History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet: the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust?
Washington Irving

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.
John Quincy Adams

I should like much to tell the truth; but if I did, I should be torn to pieces, here or abroad.
The Duke of Wellington

Peoples and government have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deducible from it.
G. W. F. Hegel

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.
Thomas Carlyle

The two parties which divide the state, the party of conservatism and that of innovation, are very old, and have disputed the possession of the world ever since it was made. This quarrel is the subject of civil history.
R. W. Emerson

The only history worth reading is that written. at the time of which it treats, the history of what was done and seen, heard out of the mouths of the men who did and saw.
John Ruskin

There is no law of history any more than of a kaleidoscope.
John Ruskin

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.
Thomas Carlyle

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.
Jacques Thibault (Anatole France)

People think too historically. They are always living half in a cemetery.
Aristide Briand

Of all history the most instructive to a man is his own.
Author unidentified

The nation which produced this great historian, has the grief of seeing his genius employed upon a foreign and uninteresting subject; and that writer who might have secured perpetuity to his name, by a history of his own country, has exposed himself to the danger of oblivion, by recounting enterprises and revolutions, of which none desire to be informed.
Samuel Johnson

What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

What are all the records of history, but narratives of successive villanies, of treasons and usurpations, massacres and wars?
Samuel Johnson

Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned, — the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.
Lord Acton

History is philosophy from examples.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
George Eliot

Hitler


If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
Winston Churchill

Holiday


If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.
Shakespeare

Holocaust


Better than the rest of us, they [the Jews] sensed what was ahead for their people.
H. L. Mencken

[I]t is a horrible thing that a race of people [the Jews in Germany] should be attempted to be blotted out of the society in which they have been born, that from their earliest years little children should be segregated and that they should be exposed to scorn and odium.
Winston Churchill, 1937

Holy


Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.
Matthew 7:6 (KJV)

Holy Roman Empire


This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire is neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Home


'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
John Howard Payne

Homer


A man who has not read Homer is like a man who has not seen the ocean. There is a great object of which he has no idea.
Walter Bagehot

Homosexuality


It doesn't matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell, on homosexuality

In my father's time they hanged you for it [homosexuality]. When I was a lad they put you in prison for it. Now it's legal. I hope I die before they make it compulsory.
Author unidentified

Honesty


Every man has his fault, and honesty is his.
Shakespeare

No man is really honest; none of us is above the influence of gain.
Aristophanes

In an honest man there is always something of a child.
Martial

Honesty is but an art to seem so.
John Marston

To be honest is nothing; the reputation of it is all.
William Congreve

Honest men fear neither the light nor the dark.
Thomas Fuller

Honesty is a fine jewel, but much out of fashion.
Thomas Fuller

Our great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.
Alexander Hamilton

The natural man has a difficult time getting along in this world. Half the people think he is a scoundrel because he is not a hypocrite.
E. W. Howe

Honey


They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
Shakespeare

Honeymoon


Honeymoon: applied to those married persons that love well at first, and decline in affection afterward; it is honey now, but it will change as the moon.
Thomas Blount

Honor


After I'm dead I'd rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.
André Gide

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
Mark Twain

It was no longer esteemed infamous for a Roman to survive his honor and independence.
Edward Gibbon

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.

Honor is like an island, rugged and without a beach; once we have left it, we can never return.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.
W. H. Auden

All is lost save honor.
Francis I

He who has lost honor can lose nothing more.
Publilius Syrus

Mine honor is my life; both grow in one;
Take honor from me and my life is done.
Shakespeare

See that you come
Not to woo honor, but to wed it.
Shakespeare

If honor cannot restrain a man, virtue will not.
Baltasar Gracián

When honor's lost, 'tis a relief to die;
Death's but a sure retreat from infamy.
Samuel Garth

The honor that is lost in a moment cannot be restored in a hundred years.
Italian Proverb

Honorable


Not every thing which the law allows is honorable. (Non omne quod licet honestum est.)
Legal Maxim

Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people.
Welsh Proverb

Hope


He had that rare weird electricity about him — that extremely wild and heavy presence that you only see in a person who has abandoned all hope of ever behaving "normally."
Hunter S. Thompson, "Fear and Loathing '72"

Never deprive someone of hope; it might be all they have.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.

So farewell hope, and with hope, farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost;
Evil, be thou my good.
John Milton

But things will be better one day; they cannot always remain as now; let us have patience, and steadfastly remain by the pure doctrine, and not fall away from it, notwithstanding all this misery.
Martin Luther

As wisdom without courage is futile, even so faith without hope is nothing worth; for hope endures and overcomes misfortune and evil.
Martin Luther

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
Samuel Johnson

The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.
Shakespeare

Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, of sickness, or captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable.
Samuel Johnson

Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.
Samuel Johnson

Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.
Francis Bacon

There is no man who does not hope for something which he has not, though perhaps his wishes lie unactive, because he foresees the difficulty of attainment.
Samuel Johnson

My only hope lies in my despair.
Jean Racine

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest.
Alexander Pope

While there's life there's hope.
English Proverb, borrowed from Cicero

A ship ought not to be held by one anchor, nor life by a single hope.
Epictetus

Everything that is done in the world is done by hope. No husbandman would sow one grain of corn if he hoped not it would grow up and become seed; no bachelor would marry a wife if he hoped not to have children; no merchant or tradesman would set himself to work if he did not hope to reap benefit thereby.
Martin Luther

Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.
English Proverb

He who lives on hope will die fasting.
English Proverb

Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair.
Thomas Hobbes

He that wants hope is the poorest man alive.
Thomas Fuller

It is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded; for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.
Samuel Johnson

We should deal with ourselves as a wise physician is said to have dealt with his patients: those who were incurable lost their lives, but they never lost hope.
Ernest von Feuchtersleben

The last thing ever lost is hope.
Italian Proverb

While I breathe, I hope. (Dum spiro, spero.)
Medieval Latin Proverb

The day is always coming to the servile in which they shall be powerful, to the obscure in which they shall be eminent, and to the deformed in which they shall be beautiful.
Samuel Johnson

None would live past years again,
Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain;
And, from the dregs of life, think to receive,
What the first sprightly running could not give.
John Dryden

I essay much, I hope little, I ask nothing.
Edward Elgar

Hopeless


Is there no hope? the sick man said;
The silent doctor shook his head.
John Gay: The Sick Man and the Angel, 1727.

The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.
H. W. Longfellow

Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was hope.
Oscar Wilde

Horse


They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.
Ben Jonson

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Walter de la Mare

Hospitality


Don't set up for what is called hospitality. If your house be like an inn, nobody cares for you. A man who stays a week with another makes him a slave for a week.
Samuel Johnson

Hour


An hour may destroy what an age was building.
H. G. Bohn

Hour-glass


An hour-glass is a reminder not only of time's quick flight, but also of the dust to which we must at last return.
G. C. Lichtenberg

House


For a man's house is his castle. (et domus sua cuique tutissimum refugium.)
Sir Edward Coke

Old houses mended,
Cost little less than new before they’re ended.
Colley Cibber

I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.
Oscar Wilde

The best way to realize the pleasure of feeling rich is to live in a smaller house than your means would entitle you to have.
Edward Clarke

The owner has one house, the renter a thousand.
Persian Proverb

House of Commons


There is nowhere in the world where sleep is so deep as in the libraries of the House of Commons.
Henry ('Chips') Channon

Housewife


Here lies a poor woman, who always was tired;
She lived in a house where help was not hired,
Her last words on earth were: "Dear friends, I am going
Where washing ain't done, nor sweeping, nor sewing;
But everything there is exact to my wishes;
For where they don't eat there's no washing of dishes."
Anonymous: The Housewife's Epitaph

Housework


Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition. housewife wears herself out marking time: she makes nothing, simply perpetuates the present.
Simone de Beauvoir

Human


I am a man; and nothing human is foreign to me. (Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.)
Terence

Human Nature


Civilized ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilized circumstances.
Walter Bagehot

Humanitarianism


When any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism.
George Moore

The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D. … I call C the Forgotten Man.
William Graham Sumner

Humility


It's hard to be humble when you are as great as I am.
Muhammed Ali

Shamus, n. [Yiddish]: A shamus is a guy who takes care of handyman tasks around the temple, and makes sure everything is in working order. A shamus is at the bottom of the pecking order of synagogue functionaries, and there's a joke about that: A rabbi, to show his humility before God, cries out in the middle of a service, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The cantor, not to be bested, also cries out, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The shamus, deeply moved, follows suit and cries, "Oh, Lord, I am nobody!" The rabbi turns to the cantor and says, "Look who thinks he's nobody!"
Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.
Rick Warren

Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice; and yet everybody is content to hear.
John Selden

The higher we are placed, the more we should be humble.
Cicero

There is something in humility which strangely exalts the heart.
St. Augustine

Plenty of people want to be pious, but no one yearns to be humble.
La Rochefoucauld

Humility is often only a feigned submission, of which we make use to render others submissive. It is an artifice of pride which abases in order to exalt itself.
La Rochefoucauld

A fault which humbles a man is of more use to him than a good action which puffs him up.
Thomas Wilson

Life is a long lesson in humility.
James M. Barrie

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is that apes humility.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Humor


Everything is funny as long as it is happening to somebody else.
Will Rogers

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.
Mel Brooks

Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
E. B. White

Humour is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him.
Romain Gary

The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Mark Twain

Comedy, like sodomy, is an unnatural act.
Marty Feldman

There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.
A. P. Herbert

Funny people are usually funny for unfunny reasons.
Josh Peck

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.
Dave Barry

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
George Eliot

Humorous Quotations


Ginsberg's Theorem:
  1. You can't win.
  2. You can't break even.
  3. You can't even quit the game.
Author unidentified

You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs then you lean too far and you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.
Steven Wright

I filled out an application that said, "In Case Of Emergency Notify". I wrote "Doctor" … What's my mother going to do?
Steven Wright

Bart: How would I go about creating a half-man, half-monkey-type creature?
Teacher: I'm sorry, that would be playing God.
Bart: God, shmod, I want my monkey-man!
The Simpsons

Reverend Lovejoy: Oh, come on, Lisa, now you're here for a reason. Is your father stealing bread?
Lisa: Maybe. I don't watch him every minute.
The Simpsons

Boy, life takes a long time to live.
Steven Wright

For my birthday I got a humidifier and a de-humidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out.
Steven Wright

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.
Dave Barry

The other day I … uh, no, that wasn't me.
Steven Wright

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
Woody Allen

When I was crossing the border into Canada, they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, "Well, what do you need?"
Steven Wright

When I woke up this morning, my girlfriend asked if I had slept well. I said, "No, I made a few mistakes."
Steven Wright

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Steven Wright

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.
Woody Allen

If you don't go to people's funerals, they won't come to yours.
Author unidentified

It is illegal to make liquor privately or water publicly.
Lord Birkett

Good night to spend with family, but avoid arguments with your mate's new lover.
Author unidentified

My boyfriend and I broke up. He wanted to get married, and I didn't want him to.
Rita Rudner

I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous — everyone hasn't met me yet.
Rodney Dangerfield

Prostitution gives her an opportunity to meet people. It provides fresh air and wholesome exercise, and it keeps her out of trouble.
Joseph Heller

It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
Author unidentified

Paul's Law: You can't fall off the floor.
Author unidentified

Lowery's Law: If it jams, force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway.
Author unidentified

Chaos, panic, and disorder. My work here is done.
Author unidentified

Homer: You know, Marge, that Bart is a little miracle — his winning smile, his button nose, his fat little stomach, his face alight with wholesome mischief. He reminds me of me before the weight of the world crushed my spirit.
The Simpsons

Don't knock masturbation. It's sex with someone I love.
Woody Allen

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen

There are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots.
Author unidentified

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.
Doug Larson

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.
Rodney Dangerfield

Homer: Marge, I'm going to miss you so much. And it's not just the sex. It's also the food preparation.
The Simpsons

Homer: Trying is the first step toward failure.
The Simpsons

Grandpa: I used to be with it, but then they changed what "it" was. Now, what I'm with isn't it, and what's "it" seems weird and scary to me.
The Simpsons

Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That's how rich I want to be.
Rita Rudner

My husband gave me a necklace. It's fake. I requested fake. Maybe I'm paranoid, but in this day and age, I don't want something around my neck that's worth more than my head.
Rita Rudner

Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care.
William Safire

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin

When I have a kid, I wanna put him in one of those strollers for twins, then run around the mall looking frantic.
Steven Wright

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, "Where have I gone wrong?" Then a voice says to me, "This is going to take more than one night."
Charles M. Schulz

I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol.
Steven Wright

After handing him a report card filled with F's, the boy asked his father, "Do you think the problem is my heredity or my upbringing?"
Author unidentified

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Sir Terry Pratchett

If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive.
Samuel Goldwyn

Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.
Fran Lebowitz

When I was a little kid, we had a quicksand box. I was an only child … eventually.
Steven Wright

A friend is someone who will help you move. A real friend is someone who will help you move a body.
Author unidentified

My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.
Mike Myers

They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days.
Garrison Keillor

I ask for so little. And boy do I get it.
Dilbert (Scott Adams)

I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?
Ronnie Shakes

Marge: Growing up means giving up everything that makes you happy.
The Simpsons

Lisa: I still stand by my beliefs. But I can't defend what I did …
Homer: I understand, honey. I used to believe in things when I was a kid.
The Simpsons

As a matter of principle, I never attend the first annual anything.
George Carlin

The very existence of flamethrowers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to [himself], "You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done."
George Carlin

Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster is a maniac?
George Carlin

Lenny: Date night, it's the embalming fluid that keeps the mummy of a marriage fresh after the heart and brain have been pulled out through the nose.
Carl: I never should have given you that Egyptology book.
The Simpsons

Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
Author unidentified

Homer: Sometimes, Marge, you just have to go with your gut.
Marge: You always go with your gut. How about for once you listen to your brain?
The Simpsons

Homer: Son, when a woman says nothing's wrong, it means everything's wrong. When a woman says everything's wrong, it means everything's wrong. And when a woman says that something isn't funny, you'd better not laugh your ass off!
The Simpsons

Homer: Kids, just because I don't care doesn't mean I'm not listening.
The Simpsons

Homer: I don't know how you put up with all these kids, Toohey [the daycare director]. If I were you, there'd be a lot of strangled babies.
The Simpsons

Mindy: Homer, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.
Homer: Well, maybe I want to [have sex]. Then I think about Marge and the kids … well, not the boy. He drives me nuts. Sometimes I'd just like to [makes strangling motion] …
The Simpsons

Homer: That's a problem for future Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy.
The Simpsons

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.
Dave Barry

You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
Dave Barry

Stress is caused by suppressing the urge to beat the crap out of someone who desperately needs it.
Author unidentified

Homer: Girls are easy. Girls love daddy. Girls make birthday cards with glitter on them. Girls can marry a hockey player and get me seats to hockey games. Girls don't steal my knives. And I don't have to tell girls how their bodies work 'cause I don't know.
Bart: You never told me how my body works.
Homer: Point and shoot.
The Simpsons

Bart: You don't look like a mom. You look happy.
The Simpsons

Bode: What's up. I'm Bode. Do you surf?
Milhouse: No. My parents took me to Hawaii once, but I was intimidated by the physiques of the local kids. So I just stayed in the hotel room.
Bode: That's cool.
Milhouse: No … it's not cool.
The Simpsons

He's a 17-year-old boy … He doesn't have any innermost thoughts, and if he did, you wouldn't want to know what they [are] and neither would I.
Andrew Ferguson

Everything's perfect about the past except how it led to the present.
The Simpsons

Lisa: Dad, no! We're trying to conserve energy.
Homer: Lisa, if we start conserving, the environmentalists win.
The Simpsons

I drove [to the airport] like an old man drives through a farmer's market, ignoring all laws of man, nature, and God.
Adam Carolla

[Somehow] free food at the workplace turns everyone into a bear at Yellowstone Park.
Adam Carolla

Life is just the time between crapping yourself.
Adam Carolla

Possum played chicken
with a car
Not playing dead now.
Jack Kerouac

For dads, a family vacation is a 24-hour a day baby sitting job.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

Breaking news from the Middle East: Bearded men throwing rocks, yelling.
Author unidentified

You've learned a very valuable life lesson, boy, which is that love doesn't exist except briefly between a man and a woman before marriage. After that it's hanging out with someone who kinda hates you, but you can't get it together to leave.
Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything's dying.
George Carlin

Penny: Okay, that's fine, but let's try and get you out of your comfort zone.
Sheldon: Why would we want to do that? It's called the comfort zone for a reason.
The Big Bang Theory

[The] majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems.
Justin Halpern

Sheldon: I had to leave. They were having fun wrong.
Big Bang Theory

Nut tightening stages: Loose, tight, tighter, very tight, over tight, loose.
Author unidentified

I don't understand why Cupid was chosen to represent Valentine's Day. When I think about romance, the last thing on my mind is a short, chubby toddler coming at me with a weapon.
Author unidentified

Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes that reason is you're stupid and make bad choices.
Author unidentified

Lisa: (explaining to Homer) Oedipus killed his father and married his mother!
Homer: God! Who pays for that wedding?!
The Simpsons

Ralphie: Daddy, how come you're not at work?
Wiggum: I don't know. How come you're not at school?
Ralphie: My teacher says she's tired of trying.
Wiggum: Yeah, well, so am I, Ralphie, so am I.
The Simpsons

I bought a seven-dollar pen because I always lose pens and I got sick of not caring.
Mitch Hedberg

You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don't want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something.
Mitch Hedberg

When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away.
Mitch Hedberg

An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience.
Mitch Hedberg

If I had nine of my fingers missing I wouldn't type any slower.
Mitch Hedberg

Fettuccine Alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults.
Mitch Hedberg

The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.
Mitch Hedberg

Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.
Mitch Hedberg

I don't have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who'd be mad at me for saying that.
Mitch Hedberg

I wish I could play little league now. I'd be way better than before.
Mitch Hedberg

I had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn't work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality.
Mitch Hedberg

I'm gonna fix that last joke by taking out all the words and adding new ones.
Mitch Hedberg

I was at this casino minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, 'You're gonna have to move, you're blocking a fire exit.' As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.
Mitch Hedberg

I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long.
Mitch Hedberg

I intend to live forever. So far, so good.
Steven Wright

I installed a skylight in my apartment … the people who live above me are furious!
Steven Wright

Right now I'm having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.
Steven Wright

Anything worth doing has a slight risk of decapitation.
Nick Offerman (when talking about working with a dangerous saw)

Always be yourself …
Unless you can be Batman — then always be Batman.
Author unidentified

I just spent my day playing a toy, in a movie about toys who do horrible things to each other.
Orson Welles, on his role as Unicorn in "The Transformers: The Movie"

Homer: I'm feeling kind of low, Apu. Got any of that beer with candy floating in it? You know, Skittlebrau.
Apu: Such a product does not exist, sir. I think you must have dreamed it.
Homer: Oh … well, then just give me a six-pack and a couple of bags of Skittles.
The Simpsons

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise — surprise and fear … fear and surprise … our two weapons are fear and surprise — and ruthless efficiency … our three weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope … our four … no … Amongst our weapons — amongst our weaponry — are such elements as fear, surprise … I'll come in again.
Graham Chapman and John Cleese

No sex, please — we're British.
Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot

Homer: My name is Homer and I'm just here [the AA meeting] because the court made me come.
Reverend Lovejoy: Homer, with our help, you'll never touch a beer again.
Homer: [screams and jumps through the window]
The Simpsons

In 1969 I gave up women and alcohol. It was the worst 20 minutes of my life.
George Best

This is why we can't have nice things.
Author unidentified

Carl: Homer, you should see a doctor. I don't think a healthy man can make that kind of smell.
The Simpsons

Student 1: Do you think most students on campus are heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual?
Student 2: I think most students are autosexual.
Author unidentified

I used to do drugs. I still do drugs. But I used to, too.
Mitch Hedberg

I love my fed-ex guy cause he's a drug dealer and he don't even know it … and he's always on time.
Mitch Hedberg

It takes forever to cook a baked potato in a conventional oven. Sometimes I'll just throw one in there even if I don't want one. By the time it's done, Who knows?
Mitch Hedberg

[Homer is eating from a bag of flour]
Marge: Oh honey, don’t eat that. Wouldn’t you rather have your sugar bag?
Homer: No. I don’t deserve sugar.
The Simpsons

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!
Dr. Strangelove movie

Asok: Alice, do you have any valuable career advice?
Alice: Work so hard that it destroys your health and crowds out any chance of having a personal life.
Asok: Wouldn't that make me … unhappy?
Alice: You didn't ask for happiness advice.
Scott Adams

lockdown, n. Middle-class people hiding while working-class people bring them things.
Author unidentified, referring to the 2020–2022 pandemic lockdown

Ralph: The doctor said I wouldn't have so many nosebleeds if I kept my finger out of there.
The Simpsons

Why are you the way that you are?
The Office

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish, he'd stay away.
William Mearns

Plant Counselor: What you need is a good, long rest. I suggest Florida.
Homer: Florida? But that's America's wang!
Plant Counselor: They prefer the Sunshine State.
The Simpsons

Don't wait till your deathbed to tell people how you feel. Tell them to fuck off now.
Author unidentified

After twelve years of therapy my psychiatrist said something that brought tears to my eyes. He said, 'No hablo inglés.'
Ronnie Shakes

Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
Garrison Keillor

I ain't reading all that. I'm happy for you, though. Or, sorry that happened.
Author unidentified (paraphrase of popular meme)

I've never seen anyone jogging and smiling, so that's all I need to know about that.
Author unidentified

Am I working at my regular capacity? No. But am I prioritizing and taking care of the most important tasks? No. But am I at least taking care of myself and my mental health? Also no.
Popular Tweet by Elizabeth Teng

Homer: Moe, what do you recommend for severe depression?
Moe: Booze, booze, and more booze.
Lenny: Huh. Nothing like a depressant to chase the blues away.
The Simpsons

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
Dave Barry

Adam: So, how did your audition for the morning TV show go?
Jimmy: Not well. They want me to be likable to women across the country. … My wife doesn't like me.
Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel

Today is the last day of your life so far.
Author unidentified

"They can ta'k our lives but they can never ta'k our freedom!" Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker.
Terry Pratchett, referring to a statement in the movie Braveheart

I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm." At the time this was the last thing on my mind.
Terry Pratchett

"Whose side are they on?" said Brocando.
"Sides? Their own, I suppose, just like everyone else."
Terry Pratchett

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
Terry Pratchett

You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.
Homer Simpson

Homer: Please, please, kids, stop fighting. Maybe Lisa's right about America being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil's got a point about the machinery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers.
The Simpsons

Hungarian


Wherever there is a Hungarian there is a quarrel.
Polish Proverb

Hunger


A hungry man is an angry man.
James Howell

Better cross an angry man than a hungry man.
Danish Proverb

Hunger is the first course of a good dinner.
French Proverb

Hunting


It is very strange, and very melancholy, that the paucity of human pleasures should persuade us ever to call hunting one of them.
Samuel Johnson

There is no one exercise that enableth the body more for the wars than hunting, by teaching you to endure heat, cold, hunger, thirst, to rise early, watch late, lie and fare badly.
Henry Peacham

Detested sport [hunting],
That owes its pleasures to another's pain.
William Cowper

Hurry


Though I am always in haste, I am never in a hurry.
John Wesley

Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him.
Lord Chesterfield

Husband


To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you're wrong, admit it,
Whenever you're right, shut up.
Ogden Nash

He would grab me in his arms, hold me close — and tell me how wonderful he was.
Shelley Winters, of her ex-husband Vittorio Gassman

Husbands are not adults. They are people who pay for things but are still somehow burdens.
Family Guy

Being a husband is a whole-time job. That is why so many husbands fail. They cannot give their entire attention to it.
Arnold Bennett

There's no form of prayer in the Liturgy against bad husbands.
George Farquhar

I have known many single men I should have liked in my life (if it had suited them) for a husband; but very few husbands have I ever wished was mine.
Mary Lamb

Some men are husbands merely because some women disliked to be called old maids.
Author unidentified

Nay, for my part I always despised Mr Tattle of all things; nothing but his being my husband could have made me like him less.
William Congreve

Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-colour catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
Barbara Ehrenreich

Husband And Wife


A wife must worship her husband as if he were a god, though he may be without virtue or other good qualities, and seek pleasure with other women.
The Code of Manu

A good wife maketh a good husband.
John Heywood

Every married woman shall be free from bodily correction or stripes by her husband, unless it be in his own defence upon her assault.
Law of Massachusetts, 1641

When the wife drinks to the husband all is well.
John Ray

Husband! thou dull unpitied miscreant,
Wedded to noise, to misery, and want;
Sold an eternal vassal for thy life,
Oblig'd to cherish and to heat a wife:
Repeat thy loath'd embraces every night
Prompted to act by duty not delight.
Anonymous

One good husband is worth two good wives; for the scarcer things are the more they're valued.
Benjamin Franklin

Emperors are only husbands in wives' eyes.
Byron

It is most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they are alone.
Oscar Wilde

Husbandman


The industrious husbandman plants trees of which he himself will never see a berry.
Cicero

Hyperbole


The speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love.
Francis Bacon

Hyphen


The one being abhorrent to the powers above the earth and under them is the hyphenated American the German-American, the Irish-American, or the native-American. Be American, pure and simple.
Theodore Roosevelt

A hyphenated American is not an American at all. … Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.
Theodore Roosevelt

Hypocrisy


Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

I don't like hypocrisy, but I fear a world without it. As long as it continues to exist, it means that standards continue to exist. You can only have hypocrisy when you have standards.
Dennis Prager

Nothing is more unjust, however common, than to charge with hypocrisy him that expresses zeal for those virtues which he neglects to practise; since he may be sincerely convinced of the advantages of conquering his passions, without having yet obtained the victory, as a man may be confident of the advantages of a voyage, or a journey, without having courage or industry to undertake it, and may honestly recommend to others, those attempts which he neglects himself.
Samuel Johnson

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
La Rochefoucauld

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
Shakespeare

The hypocrite doth vizard all his villainy with the mask or veil of virtue.
John Taylor

Hypocrisy at the fashionable end of the town is very different from hypocrisy in the city. The modish hypocrite endeavors to appear more vicious than he really is; the other kind of hypocrite more virtuous.
Joseph Addison

Hysteria


For hysterical maidens I prescribe marriage, for they are cured by pregnancy.
Hippocrates

IRS


I'm sure that this year we'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.
Dave Barry

Idea


There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come.
Author unidentified

If you happen to be one of the fretful minority who can do creative work, never force an idea; you'll abort it if you do. Be patient and you'll give birth to it when the time is ripe. Learn to wait.
Robert Heinlein

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
Linus Pauling

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Albert Einstein

Society's course will be changed only by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.
F. A. Hayek (Attributed)

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
John Maynard Keynes

It is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
John Maynard Keynes

Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
Ken Hakuta

The communication of ideas requires a similitude of thought and language.
Edward Gibbon

Great ideas often look identical to stupid ones right up until the moment they work.
Scott Adams

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.
H. L. Mencken

Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.
Paul Johnson

Nothing is more dangerous than an idea, when you have only one idea. (Rien n'est plus dangereux qu'une idée, quand on n'a qu'une idée.)
Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier)

As there are misanthropists or haters of men, so also are there misologists or haters of ideas.
Plato

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
Walter Bagehot

There is no adequate defense, except stupidity, against the impact of a new idea.
P. W. Bridgman

Mr Kremlin himself was distinguished for ignorance, for he had only one idea, and that was wrong.
Benjamin Disraeli

Christianity is an idea, and as such is indestructible and immortal, like every idea.
Heinrich Heine

Ideal


I looked for great men, but all I found were the apes of their ideals.
F. W. Nietzsche

Idealist


The great crimes of the twentieth century were committed not by money-grubbing capitalists but by dedicated idealists. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler were contemptuous of money. The passage from the nineteenth to the twentieth century has been a passage from considerations of money to considerations of power. How naive the cliche that money is the root of evil!
Eric Hoffer

The idealist is incorrigible: if he be thrown out of his Heaven he makes an ideal of his Hell.
F. W. Nietzsche

Identity


I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.
Lily Tomlin

Idiot


Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Flaubert

There's nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.
Scott Adams

Idleness


An idle mind is the devil's workshop.
Author unidentified

[There] is no class so dangerous as the idle educated.
Anthony Daniels

But Idleness taxes many of us much more, if we reckon all that is spent in absolute Sloth, or doing of nothing, with that which is spent in idle Employments or Amusements, that amount to nothing.
Benjamin Franklin

Be always asham'd to catch thy self idle.
Author unidentified

Idleness is a dangerous breeding ground.
Winston Churchill

And in idleness there is loss and dire poverty, because idleness is the mother of famine.
Tobit 4:13

Be not solitary, be not idle.
Robert Burton

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary, be not idle.
Samuel Johnson

It is certain that any wild wish or vain imagination never takes such firm possession of the mind, as when it is found empty and unoccupied.
Samuel Johnson

Idleness is only the refuge of weak minds.
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield

There is always a strong case for doing nothing, especially for doing nothing yourself.
Winston Churchill

It is indeed easy to conceive why any fashion should become popular, by which idleness is favoured, and imbecility assisted.
Samuel Johnson

Idleness is disgrace.
Hesiod

Man (doubtless) was not created to be an idle fellow; he was not set in this universal orchard to stand still as a tree.
Thomas Dekker

Without business, debauchery,
George Herbert

An idle man is a kind of monster in the creation. All nature is busy about him; every animal he sees reproaches him.
Joseph Addison

If the Devil find a man idle he'll set him to work.
James Kelly

When we do ill the Devil tempteth us; when we do nothing, we tempt him.
Thomas Fuller

Every man is, or hopes to be, an idler.
Samuel Johnson

Absence of occupation is not rest,
A mind quite vacant is a mind distress'd.
William Cowper

Idle people have the least leisure.
English Proverb

One monster there is in the world: the idle man.
Thomas Carlyle

An idle person has the Devil for a playfellow.
Arab Proverb

Doing nothing is doing ill.
Japanese Proverb

Idleness is the cause of all the vices. (Otia omnia vitia parit.)
Latin Proverb

I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass — which is better than trying to fill them.
E. M. Cioran

Of all the enemies of idleness, want is the most formidable.
Samuel Johnson

Idler


The Idler is naturally censorious; those who attempt nothing themselves, think every thing easily performed, and consider the unsuccessful always as criminal.
Samuel Johnson

Idolatry


All men are idolaters, some of fame, others of self-interest, most of pleasure.
Baltasar Gracián

Ignorance


If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?
William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Mark Twain

You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.
Will Rogers

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said I don't know.
Mark Twain

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.
Saint Jerome

So long as the mother, Ignorance, lives, it is not safe for Science, the offspring, to divulge the hidden causes of things.
Johannes Kepler

Ignorance is preferable to error; and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing, than he who believes what is wrong.
Thomas Jefferson

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.
J. W. Goethe

Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
Robert Browning

You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not rightly understand.
Leonardo da Vinci

There is an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it; an ignorance which ( knowledge creates and begets, as she dispatches and destroys the first.
Michel de Montaigne

Many abuses are engendered into the world; or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are engendered upon this, that we are taught to fear to make profession of our I ignorance, and are bound to accept and allow all that we cannot refute.
Michel de Montaigne

Ignorance is a voluntary misfortune.
Nicholas Ling

It is often the greatest wisdom to be ignorant.
Baltasar Gracian

Ignorance of the law excuses no man: not that all men know the law, but because 'tis an excuse everyone will plead, and no man can tell how to refute him.
John Selden

Where ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise.
Thomas Gray

Ignorance is mere privation by which nothing can be produced: it is a vacuity in which the soul sits motionless and torpid for want of attraction; and, without knowing why, we always rejoice when we learn, and grieve when we forget.
Samuel Johnson

Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.
Samuel Johnson

A plowman is not an ignorant man because he does not know how to read; if he knows how to plow he is not to be called an ignorant man.
William Cobbett

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
Benjamin Disraeli

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant.
R. W. Emerson

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
Amos Bronson Alcott

Illness


The storm has gone over me and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth.
Edmund Burke

A long illness between life and death makes death a comfort both to those who die and to those who remain.
Jean de la Bruyère

Physical ills are the taxes laid upon this wretched life; some are taxed higher, and some lower, but all pay something.
Lord Chesterfield

My bedfellows are cough and cramp; we sleep three in a bed.
Charles Lamb

It is not in the storm nor in the strife
We feel benumbed, and wish to be no more,
But in the after-silence on the shore,
When all is lost, except a little life.
Lord Byron

Imagination


Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein

Imagination labors best in distant fields.
Mark Twain

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
Richard Feynman

Imagination is the eye of the soul.
Joseph Joubert

The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.
John Ruskin

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
Jane Austen

Imitation


It is by imitation, far more than by precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we acquire not only more efficiently, but more pleasantly. This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives.
Edmund Burke

A great part of art consists in imitation. For the whole conduct of life is based on this: that what we admire in others we want to do ourselves.
Quintilian

We all learn easily to imitate what is base and depraved.
Juvenal

No man ever yet became great by imitation.
Samuel Johnson

He who confines himself to the imitation of an individual, as he never proposes to surpass, so he is not likely to equal, the object of his imitation. He professes only to follow; and he that follows must necessarily be behind.
Joshua Reynolds

Imitation is the sincerest of flattery.
Charles Caleb Colton

Immigrant


My opinion with respect to immigration is that, except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions, there is no need of encouragement, while the policy or advantage of its taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for, by so doing, they retain the language, habits and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them.
George Washington

We heartily approve all legitimate efforts to prevent the United States from being used as the dumping ground for the known criminals and professional paupers of Europe.
Democratic National Platform, 1892

Immigration


I think it [immigration] is the most important subject facing this country, but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice.
Winston Churchill

Immodesty


Immodest words admit of no defence,
For want of decency is want of sense.
Wentworth Dillon (Earl of Roscommon)

Immortality


I don't want to achieve immortality through my work … I want to achieve it through not dying.
Woody Allen

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Susan Ertz

As all people feel they must die, each seeks immortality here on earth, that he may be had in everlasting remembrance.
Martin Luther

I believe that the evidence for immortality is no better than the evidence of witches, and deserves no more respect.
H. L. Mencken

Let us not lament too much the passing of our friends. They are not dead, but simply gone before us along the road which all must travel.
Antiphanes

If I err in my belief that the souls of men are immortal, I err gladly, and I do not wish to lose so delightful an error.
Cicero

Without the hope of immortality no one would ever face death for his country.
Cicero

As shipwrecked mariners desire
With eager grasp to reach the shore,
As hirelings long to obtain their hire,
And veterans wish their warfare o'er,
I languish from this earth to flee,
And gasp for immortality.
Charles Wesley

The belief of immortality is impressed upon all men, and all men act under an impression of it, however they may talk, and though, perhaps, they may be scarcely sensible of it.
Samuel Johnson

I cannot conceive that [God] could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God.
John Adams

The thought of life that ne'er shall cease
Has something in it like despair.
H. W. Longfellow

Ah, Christ, that it were possible
For one short hour to see
The souls we loved, that they might tell us
What and where they be!
Alfred Tennyson

I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.
T. H. Huxley

The desire for immortality seems never to have had a very strong hold upon mankind, and the belief is less widely held than is usually stated.
William Osler

The voice of Nature loudly cries,
And many a message from the skies,
That something in us never dies.
Robert Burns

Impartiality


I decline utterly to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.
Winston Churchill

Impatience


In all evils which admit a remedy, impatience is to be avoided, because it wastes that time and attention in complaints, that, if properly applied, might remove the cause.
Samuel Johnson

The cat always catches the impatient mouse.
Moroccan Proverb

Impatience is incurable.
Welsh Proverb

Imperialism


[It] is impossible to reduce, or, at least, to hold a distant country against the wishes and efforts of its inhabitants.
Edward Gibbon

Take up the White Man's burden —
The savage wars of peace —
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden —
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard —
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light: —
"Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"
Rudyard Kipling

There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest.
Edward Gibbon

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.
Edmund Burke

The great nations, like lions roused from their lairs, are roaring and springing upon the prey, and the little nations, like packs of hungry wolves, are standing by, licking their jaws, and waiting for their share of the spoils.
H. W. Beecher

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
Joseph Conrad

Impermanence


All your better deeds
Shall be in water writ
Beaumont and Fletcher

Imponderable


In politics the influence of imponderables is often greater than that of either military power or money.
Otto von Bismarck

Importance


I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

It was, perhaps, ordained by Providence, to hinder us from tyrannizing over one another, that no individual should be of such importance, as to cause, by his retirement or death, any chasm in the world.
Samuel Johnson

Impossible


The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them …
Terry Pratchett

God does not ask the impossible.
Decrees of the Council of Trent

Impossibilities are all equal, and admit no degrees.
Robert Howard

It is not a lucky word, this impossible; no good comes of those that have it often in their mouth.
Thomas Carlyle

By asking for the impossible we obtain the best possible.
Italian Proverb

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke

Impotence


Anxiety, n. The first time you can't do it a second time.

Panic, n. The second time you can't do it the first time.

Author unidentified

"Hasn't it ever occurred to you that in your promiscuous pursuit of women you are merely trying to assuage your subconscious fears of sexual impotence?"

"Yes, sir, it has."

"Then why do you do it?"

"To assuage my fears of sexual impotence."

Joseph Heller

Improvement


To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.
Winston Churchill

Improvidence


[The Goths'] poverty was incurable; since the most liberal donatives were soon dissipated in wasteful luxury, and the most fertile estates became barren in their hands.
Edward Gibbon

Impulse


A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies, but a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed.
H. L. Mencken

Impulse manages everything badly.
Statius

Impunity


Impunity encourages worse offences. (Impunitas semper ad deteriora invitat.)
Legal Maxim

Inclination


You should know, O man, that the greatest enemy you have in the world is your inclination.
Bahya ibn Paquda

Income


There are few sorrows, however poignant, in which a good income is of no avail.
Logan Pearsall Smith

This only grant me, that my means may lie
Too low for envy, for contempt too high.
Abraham Cowley

Incompetence


[Laurence J. Peter] has devoted his life to discovering remedies for incompetence.
Back Cover of "Peter's Quotations"

Inconvenience


An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
G. K. Chesterton

Incurable


Past cure, past care.
Michel Drayton

Incuriosity


There are, indeed, beings in the form of men, who appear satisfied with their intellectual possessions, and seem to live without desire of enlarging their conceptions; before whom the world passes without notice, and who are equally unmoved by nature or by art.
Samuel Johnson

Indecision


I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Mark Twain

Anyone can see what the position is. The Government simply cannot make up their mind, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.
Winston Churchill

Independence


I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. … If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
H. D. Thoreau

To be independent is the business of a few only; it is the privilege of the strong.
F. W. Nietzsche

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.
Albert Einstein

Index


If you don't find it in the Index, look very carefully through the entire catalogue.
Sears, Roebuck and Co., Consumer Guide (1897)

India


India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.
Winston Churchill

Indian


I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.
Winston Churchill

Ask a Northern Indian what is beauty, and he will answer: a broad, flat face; small eyes, high cheek-bones, three or four broad black lines across each cheek; a low forehead, a large, broad chin; a clumsy hook nose, a tawny hide, and breasts hanging down to the belt.
Samuel Hearne

Indictment


I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
Edmund Burke

Indifference


I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Nothing is so fatal to Religion as indifference which is, at least, half Infidelity.
Edmund Burke

At length the morn and cold indifference came.
Nicholas Rowe

Individual


The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
Rudyard Kipling

Individualism


The real antithesis to National Socialism was individualism, a society where private arrangements took priority over public, where the family was the favoured social unit and where the voluntary principle was paramount. A society in which the family, as opposed to the political party and the ideological programme, was the starting-point for reconstruction, was the answer to totalitarian evil.
Paul Johnson

Nature never rhymes her children, nor makes two men alike.
R. W. Emerson

When the war closed … we were challenged with a peacetime choice between the American system of rugged individualism and a European philosophy of … paternalism and State Socialism.
Herbert Hoover

Any power must be the enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by terror and force, whether it arises under a Fascist or Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual.
Albert Einstein

Individuality


Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.
John Stuart Mill

Indolence


Indolence is sweet, and its consequences bitter.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Of all our faults, that which we most readily admit is indolence. We persuade ourselves that it cherishes all the peaceful virtues; and that, without entirely destroying the others, it merely suspends their functions.
La Rochefoucauld

The greater part of human misery is caused by indolence.
G. C. Lichtenberg

The love of indolence is universal, or next to it.
S. T. Coleridge

Indolence is therefore one of the vices from which those whom it once infects are seldom reformed. Every other species of luxury operates upon some appetite that is quickly satiated, and requires some concurrence of art or accident which every place will not supply; but the desire of ease acts equally at all hours, and the longer it is indulged is the more increased.
Samuel Johnson

To do nothing is in every man's power; we can never want an opportunity of omitting duties. The lapse to indolence is soft and imperceptible, because it is only a mere cessation of activity; but the return to diligence is difficult, because it implies a change from rest to motion, from privation to reality.
Samuel Johnson

Industry


It is the fate of industry to be equally endangered by miscarriage and success, by confidence and despondency.
Samuel Johnson

Industry is fortune's right hand, and frugality her left.
John Ray

Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.
Benjamin Franklin

Know the true value of time; snatch, seize, and enjoy every moment of it. No idleness, no laziness, or procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
Lord Chesterfield

If have great talents industry will improve them; if you have but moderate abilities industry will supply their deficiency.
Joshua Reynolds

Each morning sees some task begun,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.
H. W, Longfellow

In the ordinary business of life industry can do anything which genius can do, and very many things which it cannot.
H. W. Beecher

The most unskilful hand and unenlightened mind have sufficient incitements to industry; for he that is resolutely busy, can scarcely be in want.
Samuel Johnson

Inequality


The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Aristotle

Sir, your levelers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?
Samuel Johnson

It is the nature of things to be unequal. One is worth twice, or five times, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand times as much as another. To think of them as equal is to upset the whole scheme of things. Who would make shoes if big ones were of the same price as small ones?
Mencius

Though all men were made of one metal, yet they were not cast all in the same mold.
Thomas Fuller

Inevitable


What will be, will be. (Che sarà, sarà.)
Italian Proverb

Infamy


He that could withstand conscience is frighted at infamy, and shame prevails when reason is defeated.
Samuel Johnson

Infatuation


Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.
Samuel Johnson

Infelicity


Infelicity is involved in corporeal nature, and interwoven with our being; all attempts therefore to decline it wholly are useless and vain: the armies of pain send their arrows against us on every side, the choice is only between those which are more or less sharp, or tinged with poison of greater or less malignity; and the strongest armour which reason can supply, will only blunt their points, but cannot repel them.
Samuel Johnson

Infidel


There may be salvation for a virtuous infidel.
Joseph Addison

He is an infidel as a dog is an infidel; that is to say, he has never thought upon the subject.
Samuel Johnson

Infidelity


Infidelity has emanated chiefly from the learned.
Emanuel Swedenborg

Infinite


If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake

Infinity


Whatsoever we imagine is finite. Therefore, there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, infinite force, or infinite power. When we say anything is infinite, we signify only that we are not able to conceive the ends and bounds of the thing named; having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability.
Thomas Hobbes

Infirmity


I have struggled through this year with so much infirmity of body and such strong impressions of the fragility of life, that death, wherever it appears, fills me with melancholy.
Samuel Johnson

To be sick, and to see nothing but sickness and death is but a gloomy state.
Samuel Johnson

Wherever I turn the dead or the dying meet my notice, and force my attention upon misery and mortality.
Samuel Johnson

Inflation


Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman

Influence


Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
H. W. Longfellow

I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I know not where
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
H. W. Longfellow

Ingratitude


Most People return small Favors, acknowledge middling ones, and repay great ones with Ingratitude.
Author unidentified

I hate ingratitude more in a man
Than lying, vainness, babbling drunkenness,
Or any taint of vice whose strong corruption
Inhabits our frail blood.
Shakespeare

No depravity of the mind has been more frequently or justly censured than ingratitude. There is indeed sufficient reason for looking on those that can return evil for good, and repay kindness and assistance with hatred or neglect, as corrupted beyond the common degrees of wickedness.
Samuel Johnson

The earth produces nothing worse than an ingrate.
Ausonius

This was the most unkindest cut of all;
For when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
Ingratitude, more strong than traitor's arms,
Quite vanquish'd him; then burst his mighty heart.
Shakespeare

We seldom find people ungrateful as long as we are in a condition to render them further services.
La Rochefoucauld

We set ourselves to bite the hand that feeds us.
Edmund Burke

Do no good — and you will suffer no ingratitude.
Arab Proverb

Do a man a good turn, and he'll never forgie you.
Scottish Proverb

Inheritance


I'll leave enough [money] for my kids to do anything but not enough to do nothing.
Dave Fishwick, paraphrased

We must recognise that we have a great treasure to guard; that the inheritance in our possession represents the prolonged achievement of the centuries.
Winston Churchill

Say not you know another entirely, till you have divided an inheritance with him.
Johann Kaspar Lavater

A son can bear with equanimity the loss of his father, but the loss of his inheritance may drive him to despair.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Iniquity


For while we lived and committed iniquity we did not consider what we should suffer after death.
2 Esdras 7:126

Injunction


We object to government by injunction as a new and highly dangerous form of oppression by which Federal judges, in contempt of the laws of the states and rights of citizens, become at once legislators, judges, and executioners.
Democratic National Platform, 1896

Injury


The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales.
Aesop

It is better to suffer an injury than to do one.
Aesop

He who injured you was either stronger or weaker. If he was weaker, spare him; if he was stronger, spare yourself.
Seneca

If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.
Niccolò Machiavelli

An injury engraves itself on metal; a benefit is written on the waves.
Jean Bertaut

Injustice


People without much difficulty admit the entrance of that injustice of which they are not to be the immediate victims.
Edmund Burke

The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.
Alexander Pope

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit injustices.
Voltaire

Whoever does injustice does injustice to himself, for to that extent he makes himself bad.
Marcus Aurelius

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.
Charles Dickens

Inn


If die I must, let me die drinking in an inn.
Walter Map

Innovation


Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.
Thomas Jefferson

Inquiry


It is impossible to determine the limits of inquiry, or to foresee what consequences a new discovery may produce. He who suffers not his faculties to lie torpid, has a chance, whatever be his employment, of doing good to his fellow creatures.
Samuel Johnson

Insanity


There is not a sight in nature so mortifying as that of a distracted person, when his imagination is troubled, and his whole soul disordered and confused. Babylon in ruins is not so melancholy a spectacle.
Joseph Addison

In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.
F. W. Nietzsche

Inscription


In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
Samuel Johnson

Insincerity


No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Insomnia


O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Shakespeare

He that thinks in his bed has a day without a night.
Scottish Proverb

Inspiration


Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.
Stevie Smith

At Canterbury I hope the remembrance of Chaucer will set me forward like a billiard ball.
John Keats

Instigator


The instigator is more guilty than the doer. (Plus peccat auctor quam actor.)
Legal Maxim

Instinct


Let him make use of instinct who cannot make use of reason.
John Ray

As the intelligence improves, the instincts decay.
Instinct is intelligence incapable of self-consciousness.
J. O. de la Mettrie

All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
R. W. Emerson

Institution


A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to His genius, that He is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, Monachism, of the Hermit Antony; the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson.
R. W. Emerson

Instruction


A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.
Cicero

Insufficiency


The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused with ill.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Insult


Thou hast added insult to injury.
Phaedrus

An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.
Lord Chesterfield

Insurrection


Insurrection, n. an unsuccessful revolution.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Men who take up arms against the State must expect at any moment to be fired upon. Men who take up arms unlawfully cannot expect that the troops will wait until they are quite ready to begin the conflict.
Winston Churchill

Integrity


Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
Samuel Johnson

Integrity is praised, and starves.
Juvenal

Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets, and can be lost in a heartbeat.
Charlie Munger

Intellectual


Now it is a characteristic of such intellectuals that they see no incongruity in moving from their own discipline, where they are acknowledged masters, to public affairs, where they might be supposed to have no more right to a hearing than anyone else.
Paul Johnson

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent "the people." Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth.
Paul Johnson

We mustn't forget how quickly the visions of genius become the canned goods of intellectuals.
Saul Bellow

It is further evidence of the curious paradox that intellectuals, who ought to teach men and women to trust their reason, usually encourage them to follow their emotions; and, instead of urging debate and reconciliation on humanity, all too often spur it towards the arbitration of force.
Paul Johnson

Taken as a group, they [intellectuals] are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.
Paul Johnson

Our [English] difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?
Winston Churchill

Intelligence


Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think.
Scott Adams

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[S]uch is the delight of mental superiority, that none on whom nature or study have conferred it, would purchase the gifts of fortune by its loss.
Samuel Johnson

Intemperance


It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
Edmund Burke

Intention


To mean well is nothing without to do well.
Plautus

Interest


Intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you're really going to excel in it.
Charlie Munger

Interface


The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
Bruce Ediger

Internationalism


The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.
Theodore Roosevelt

Internationalism is a luxury which only the upper classes can afford; the common people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.
Benito Mussolini

Internet


If the Library of Alexandria was the emblem of our ambition of omniscience, the Web is the emblem of our ambition of omnipresence; the library that contained everything has become the library that contains anything.
Alberto Manguel

[On the Internet,] if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
Author unidentified

Interruption


Don't interrupt me when I'm interrupting!
Winston Churchill

For sleep, health and wealth to be truly enjoyed, they must be interrupted.
Jean Paul Richter

Intolerance


The study of history suggests that the sum total of intolerance in society does not vary much. What changes is the object against which it is directed. Those who shape the conventional wisdom at the top are always anxious to censor unorthodoxy, thus demonstrating their power and consolidating their grip.
Paul Johnson

Undoubtedly a certain amount of truth, and hence a certain utility, lies at the bottom of religious intolerance. Our philosophers talk of it as if it could be reasoned away, but that it assuredly cannot be.
G. C. Lichtenberg

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise, and their conscience that it is wrong.
Walter Bagehot

Intoxication


It has been asked: Is an offence, committed in a moment of intoxication, therefore excusable? Most assuredly not; on the contrary, drunkenness aggravates the fault.
Martin Luther

Hidden sins unveil themselves when a man's self-possession goes from him; that which the sober man keeps in his breast, the drunken man lets out at the lips.
Martin Luther

Invention


The inventions dictated by necessity are older than those suggested by pleasure.
Cicero

Investment


Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
Warren Buffett

Let every man divide his money into three parts, and invest a third in land, a third in business, and a third let him keep by him in reserve.
Hebrew Proverb

Ireland


In Ireland no man visits where he cannot drink.
Samuel Johnson

No reptiles are found there [in Ireland], and no snake can live there; for, though often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship comes near the shore, and the scent of the air reaches them, they die.
Bede

Think — what I have got for Ireland? Something which she has wanted these past seven hundred years. Will anyone be satisfied at the bargain? Will anyone? I tell you this — early this morning I signed my death warrant. I thought at the time how odd, how ridiculous — a bullet may just as well have done the job five years ago.
Michael Collins, on signing the treaty establishing the Irish Free State

And then I prayed I yet might see
Our fetters rent in twain,
And Ireland, long a province, be
A Nation once again.
Thomas Davis

Irish


The Irish people do not gladly suffer common sense.
Oliver St. John Gogarty

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
Oscar Wilde

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
Brendan Behan

This savage manner of incivility amongst the Irish is bred in the bone; they have it by nature, and so I think of their inhuman cruelty, that are so apt to run into rebellion, and so ready to attempt any other kind of mischief.
Barnabe Rich

The Irish are a fair people; they never speak well of one another.
Samuel Johnson

The Irish are irascible, prone to debt, and to fight, and very impatient of the restraints of law.
Sydney Smith

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
G. K. Chesterton

Irresolution


[William Strunk Jr.] scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong.
E. B. White

Islam


The Koran divides the world into two parts: the House of Islam (the part of the world controlled by Muslims) and the House of War (that part not yet controlled by Muslims).
Mario Loyola

Ye Christian dogs, you know your option; the Koran, the tribute, or the sword. We are a people whose delight is in war, rather than in peace; and we despise your pitiful alms, since we shall be speedily masters of your wealth, your families, and your persons.
Caled

Taken literally, Islamophobia means 'fear of Islam.' OK, well, there are many Muslims who have gone to great lengths to convince us to fear it. So what if I finally oblige them?
Matt Walsh

Mosques are plenty [in Istanbul], churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral.
Mark Twain

The kingdom of Mohammed is a kingdom of revenge, of wrath, and desolation.
Martin Luther

That religion [Islam], which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword — the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men — stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.
Winston Churchill

But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance. It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness.
Winston Churchill

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! … Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
Winston Churchill

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Winston Churchill

[On the possibility of an Arab victory at Poitiers:] Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.
Edward Gibbon

Isolation


I yield so easily, not because I am not intensely interested, but because I long since came to the conclusion that it is wholly impossible for one human being to understand another's point of view. Each of us is eternally isolated.
H. L. Mencken

Israel


Deliver Israel, O God, from all their troubles!
Psalms 25:22

Jacobin


A steady patriot of the world alone,
The friend of every country but his own.
George Canning, on the Jacobin

Jacobite


It was well said of them they were Jacobites when drunk and Tories when sober.
Winston Churchill

Jailer


Old thieves make good jailers.
German Proverb

James Boswell


I have heard you [James Boswell] mentioned as a man whom everybody likes. I think life has little more to give.
Samuel Johnson

Jealousy


Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
H. G. Wells

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
William Shakespeare

[Jealousy] arouses a husband's fury, and he will show no mercy when he takes revenge.
Proverbs 6:34

The venom clamors of a jealous woman
Poison more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.
Shakespeare

Jealousy and anger shorten life, and anxiety brings on premature old age.
Ecclesiasticus

Though jealousy be produced by love, as ashes. are by fire, yet jealousy extinguishes love as ashes smother the flame.
Margaret of Navarre

Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.
Shakespeare

Jealousy lives upon doubt, and comes to an end or becomes a fury as soon as it passes from doubt to certainty.
La Rochefoucauld

No man is greatly jealous who is not in some measure guilty.
Benjamin Whichcote

The woman's natural jealousy is not at a man's loving another, but at his forsaking her.
James Hinton

Jeopardy


Nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.
Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Jerome


Jerome should not be numbered among the teachers of the church, for he was a heretic; yet I believe that he is saved through faith in Christ.
Martin Luther

Jest


A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.
Shakespeare

Of all the griefs that harass the distrest,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest.
Samuel Johnson

Many a true word is spoken in jest.
English Proverb

Too late the forward youth shall find
That jokes are sometimes paid in kind;
Or if they canker in the breast,
He makes a foe who makes a jest.
John Gay

If you give a jest you must take a jest.
Jonathan Swift

Never jest with God, death, or the Devil.
Arab Proverb

Many a friend has been lost by a jest, but none has ever been got by one.
Czech Proverb

Jesting


Leave jesting while it pleaseth, lest it turne to earnest.
George Herbert

Jesuit


I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits. If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum.
John Adams

Jew


In America, they [American Jews] may feel they are Jews. But in Israel, they feel they are Americans.
Ernest van den Haag

To the Greeks, the beautiful was holy, and to the Jews the holy was beautiful.
Author unidentified

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? … If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
Shakespeare

They are an ancient people [the Jews], a famous people, an enduring people, and a people who in the end have generally attained their objects. hope Parliament may endure for ever, and sometimes I think it will; but I cannot help remembering that the Jews have outlived Assyrian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Roman Caesars, and Arabian Caliphs.
Benjamin Disraeli

It is to the Jewish nation that humanity owes the deepest debt of gratitude, and it is on that nation that humanity has inflicted the deepest wrongs.
F. W. Farrar

These three are the marks of a Jew. — a tender. heart, self-respect, and charity.
Hebrew Proverb

A nation that persecutes Jews cannot last long.
Yiddish Proverb

No more vicious anti-Semite than a Jewish anti-Semite.
Yiddish Proverb

John Keats


Such writing is a sort of mental masturbation — he is always f—gg—g his imagination. — I don't mean that he is indecent but viciously soliciting his own ideas into a state which is neither poetry nor any thing else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium.
Lord Byron, of Keats

This grave contains all that was mortal of a young English poet, who, on his deathbed, in the bitterness of his heart at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be graven on his tombstone, "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
Epitaph of Keats on his tombstone at Rome

John Milton


Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters.
William Wordsworth

Joke


A joke never gains over an enemy, but often loses a friend.
Thomas Fuller

A joke's a very serious thing.
Charles Churchill

Someone is generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke. What is sport to one is death to another.
William Hazlitt

Jonah


Jonah went too far; he presumed to command God Almighty, and became a great man-slayer and a murderer, for he desired that a great city and many people should be utterly destroyed, though God chose to spare them. This was a strange saint.
Martin Luther

Journalism


Rock journalism is people who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't read.
Frank Zappa

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G. K. Chesterton

Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art, for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde

Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy.
G. K. Chesterton

Great is journalism. Is not every able editor a ruler of the world, being the persuader of it?
Thomas Carlyle

In our country I am inclined to think that almost, if not quite, the most important profession is that of the newspaper man, including the man of the magazines, especially the cheap magazines, and the weeklies.
Theodore Roosevelt

Journalist


There is no such thing as an independent press. You know it, and I know it. I [as a journalist] am paid $150 a week for keeping honest opinions out of the paper. We are intellectual prostitutes, and our time and our talents are the property of other men.
An unidentified New York editor, 1917

Journalists assume that freedom of the press is a popular cause. They are mistaken.
Paul Johnson

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.
Arnold Bennett

How does so much [false news] get into the American newspapers, even the good ones? Is it because journalists, as a class, are habitual liars, and prefer what is not true to what is true? I don't think it is. Rather, it is because journalists are, in the main, extremely stupid, sentimental and credulous fellows — because nothing is easier than to fool them — because the majority of them lack the sharp intelligence that the proper discharge of their duties demands.
H. L. Mencken

I would say that the war correspondent gets more drinks, more girls, better pay and greater freedom than the soldier, but that at this stage of the game having the freedom to choose his spot and being allowed to be a coward and not be executed for it, is his torture. The war correspondent has his stake — his life — in his hands, and he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute.
Robert Capa

A newswriter is a man without virtue, who writes lies at home for his own profit. To these compositions is required neither genius nor knowledge, neither industry nor sprightliness; but contempt of shame and indifference to truth are absolutely necessary.
Samuel Johnson

They [journalists] are a sort of assassins who sit with loaded blunderbusses at the corner of streets and fire them off for hire or for sport at any passenger they select.
John Quincy Adams

Journey


A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao-tzu

Joy


Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Mark Twain

The man from whom the joys of life have departed is living no more, but should be counted with the dead.
Sophocles

Great joys, like griefs, are silent.
Shakerley Marmion

Shared joy is a double joy; shared sorrow is half a sorrow.
Proverb

They shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Isaiah 35:10 (KJV)

The latter end of joy is woe. (For evere the latter ende of joye is wo — )
Chaucer

All seek joy, but it is not found on earth.
St. John Chrysostom

A joy that's shared is a joy made double.
John Ray

O God, may I live to have one day of unsullied joy!
Ludwig van Beethoven

I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.
P. B. Shelley

Joy And Sorrow


God send you joy, for sorrow will come fast enough.
John Clarke

They that sow in tears Shall reap in joy.
Psalm 126:5 KJV

Judaism


All the great conceptual discoveries of the human intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they had been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both Divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of human person; of the individual conscience and so a personal redemption; of collective conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items that constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without Jews, it [the world] might have been a much emptier place.
Paul Johnson

Judge


There must always be a goodly number of judges, for few will always do the will of the few.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare — to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law.
Francis Bacon

The judge is condemned when the guilty is acquitted.
Publilius Syrus

The law is relaxed when the judge shows pity.
Publilius Syrus

A good and faithful judge prefers what is right to what is expedient.
Horace

No one is ever innocent when his opponent is the judge.
Lucan

When a judge departs from the letter of the law he becomes a lawbreaker.
Francis Bacon

As anger does not become a judge, so neither doth pity; for one is the mark of a foolish woman, as the other is of a passionate man.
Mr. Justice Scroggs

Fill the seats of justice
With good men, not so absolute in goodness
As to forget what human frailty is.
T. N. Talfourd

We must remember that we have to make judges out of men, and that by being made judges their prejudices are not diminished and their intelligence is not increased.
R. G. Ingersoll

The best law leaves the least discretion to the judge.
Latin Proverb

It is for a judge to declare, not to make the law. (Judicis est jus dicere non dare.)
Legal Maxim

The thing to fear is not the law but the judge.
Legal Maxim

Judgment


We are all inclined to judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their acts.
Harold Nicholson

State a moral case to a plowman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.
Thomas Jefferson

Many complain of their Memory, few of their Judgment.
Author unidentified

Horse sense is the good judgement which keeps people from betting on horses.
W. C. Fields

Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.
La Rochefoucauld

The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.
Richard Sheridan

To youth, therefore, it should be carefully inculcated, that, to enter the road of life without caution or reserve, in expectation of general fidelity and justice, is to launch on the wide ocean without the instruments of steerage, and to hope that every wind will be prosperous, and that every coast will afford a harbour.
Samuel Johnson

Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
Daniel 5:27 KJV

All men judge the acts of others by what they would have done themselves.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

O mortal men, be wary how ye judge.
Dante

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Shakespeare

Tis with our judgments as our watches: none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Alexander Pope

Judgment should follow the laws, not the precedents. (Judicandum est legibus non exemplis.)
Legal Maxim

And differing judgements serve but to declare
That truth lies somewhere, if we knew but where
William Cowper

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.
Arthur Conan Doyle

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Judiciary


There is no liberty if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.
C. L. de Montesquieu

This member of the government was at first considered as the most harmless and helpless of all its organs. But it has proved that the power of declaring what the law is, ad libitum, by sapping and mining, slyly, and without alarm, the foundations of the Constitution, can do what open force would not dare to attempt.
Thomas Jefferson

There is virtually no political question in the United States that does not sooner or later resolve itself into a judicial question.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Julius Caesar


Caesar was a failure. Otherwise he would not have been assassinated.
Napoleon I

Jury


The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.
Mark Twain

Just


What is against truth cannot be just.
St. Augustine

The sweet remembrance of the just
Shall flourish when he sleeps in dust.
Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady

Justice


Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
H. L. Mencken

Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.
George W. Bush

I like my wine French, my beer German, my vodka Russian, and my judicial system American.
Chief Justice John Roberts

Do not follow the crowd in doing wrong. When you give testimony in a lawsuit, do not pervert justice by siding with the crowd, and do not show favoritism to a poor person in a lawsuit.
Exodus 23:2-3

Pardoning the Bad, is injuring the Good.
Author unidentified

Use every man after his desert, and who should ’scape whipping?
Shakespeare

Justice is itself the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.
Edmund Burke

The scales of justice are vain without her sword.
Winston Churchill

The sword of justice has no scabbard.
Joseph de Maistre

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
Alexander Hamilton

For Justice, though she's painted blind,
Is to the weaker side inclined.
Samuel Butler

There is a point beyond which even justice becomes unjust.
Sophocles

In a really just cause the weak conquer the strong.
Sophocles

Though justice moves slowly, it seldom fails to overtake the wicked.
Horace

I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die an exile.
Pope Gregory VII

Let justice be done, though the world perish. (Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus.)
Motto of Ferdinand I

Love of justice in the generality of men is only, the fear of suffering from injustice.
La Rochefoucauld

To withdraw ourselves from the law of the strong, we have found ourselves obliged to submit to justice. Justice or might, we must choose between these two masters: so little are we made to be free.
Luc de Vauvenargues

There are men whom a happy disposition, a strong desire of glory and esteem, inspire with the same love for justice and virtue which men in general have for riches and honors. … But the number of these men is so small that I only mention them in honor of humanity.
C. A. Helvétius

The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes.
Thomas Jefferson

I believe that justice is instinct and innate, that the moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.
Thomas Jefferson

One man's justice is another's injustice.
R. W. Emerson

Justice is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.
Daniel Webster

Truth is justice's handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion, safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train.
Ascribed to Sydney Smith

Justice is a faculty that may be developed. This development is what constitutes the education of the human race.
P. J. Proudhon

To heal the breach between the rich and the poor, it is necessary to distinguish between justice and charity. There can be no claim for redress except where justice is violated.
Pope Pius X

There is no such thing as justice — in or out of court.
Clarence Darrow

But, surely, the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows, against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been boasted, is held up in vain: we do not always suffer by our crimes; we are not always protected by our innocence.
Samuel Johnson

Justice And Mercy


He injures the good who spares the bad.
Publilius Syrus

Sparing justice feeds iniquity.
Shakespeare

He that's merciful unto the bad is cruel to the good.
Thomas Randolph

Kansas


What is the matter with Kansas?
W. A. White

Keynes, John Maynard


It is important to get clear that Keynes was never a socialist … At heart he believed in liberal capitalism not only because he thought it more likely to produce the goods than any other imaginable system, but for moral reasons: he thought the destruction of economic freedom must, in practice, lead to a progressive diminution of political freedom.
Paul Johnson

Keynes was an empiricist and an original who had no attachment to theory — hated theory in fact. His method was to look at new facts squarely, and then seek to explain them, and devise methods to cope with them. The only trouble with Keynesianism in the later 1970s was that Keynes was dead, and so unable to bring his uniquely creative mind to bear on its problems.
Paul Johnson

Killing


If a man comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first.
The Talmud

Kill them all; God will recognize his own.
Arnald-Amaury

Kin


A little more than kin, and less than kind.
Shakespeare

Kindness


I expect to pass through this world but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing that I can do to any fellow human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I will not pass this way again.
Anonymous

One kind word can warm three winter months.
Japanese saying

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.
Sir Arthur Helps

That best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love.
William Wordsworth

Kindness begets kindness.
Sophocles

Wherever there is a human being there is a chance for a kindness.
Seneca

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks,
Shall win my love.
Shakespeare

Kind hearts are soonest wronged.
Nicholas Breton

A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.
Joseph Joubert

Little deeds of kindness, little words of love,
Help to make earth happy like the Heaven above.
Julia A. F. Carney

King


It is not a sign of arrogance for the king to rule. That is what he is there for.
William F. Buckley

This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
1 Samuel 8:11-18

Better a poor but wise youth than an old but foolish king who no longer knows how to heed a warning.
Ecclesiastes 4:13

It is the lot of a king to do well and be ill spoken of.
Marcus Aurelius

The king is dead, long live the king! (Le roi est mort, vive le roi!)
Form of proclamation on the death of a French king, first used on the death of Charles VII, 1461.

It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do; good Christians content themselves with His will revealed in His Word; so it is presumption and contempt to dispute what a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that.
James I

The king reigns, but does not govern. (Rex regnat, sed non gubernat.)
Jan Zamojski

Alas, what are we kings?
Why do you gods place us above the rest,
To be serv'd, flatter'd, and ador'd, till we
Believe we hold within our hands your thunder?
And when we come to try the power we have,
There's not a leaf shakes at our threat'nings.
Beaumont and Fletcher

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear, and yet that commonly is the case of kings.
Francis Bacon

In a monarchy the king must by necessity be above the laws.
Robert Filmer

The more happy I am, the more I pity kings.
Voltaire

If any of our countrymen wish for a king, give them Aesop's fable of the frogs who asked a king; if this does not cure them, send them to Europe. They will come back good republicans.
Thomas Jefferson

That which is called firmness in a king is called obstinacy in a donkey.
Ascribed to Thomas Erskine

A king should die standing.
Louis XVIII of France

Kings are like stars — they rise and set, they have
The worship of the world, but no repose.
P. B. Shelley

An honest king's the noblest work of God.
Edmund Blunden

A king gets blamed before he does any wrong. and is praised before he does any good.
Finnish Proverb

The king never dies. (Rex nunquam moritur.)
Legal Maxim

When you strike at a king, you must kill him.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

King Arthur


And many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus [Here lies Arthur, the once and future king].
Sir Thomas Mallory

Kiss


These poor half-kisses kill me quite.
Michael Drayton

Free of her lips, free of her hips.
John Ray

He is a fool that kisseth the maid when he may kiss the mistress.
James Howell

You must not kiss and tell.
William Congreve

Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
Jonathan Swift

What lies lurk in kisses!
Heinrich Heine

Our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips.
Alfred Tennyson

Some women blush when they are kissed; some call for the police; some swear; some bite. But the worst are those who laugh.
Author unidentified

Knave


When Knaves betray each other, one can scarce be blamed, or the other pitied.
Author unidentified

The honest Man takes Pains, and then enjoys Pleasures; the Knave takes Pleasure, and then suffers Pains.
Author unidentified

He who says there is no such thing as an honest man, you may be sure is himself a knave.
George Berkeley

Knowledge


Try to know everything of something, and something of everything.
Henry Peter, Lord Brougham

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.
Lao Tsu

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird … So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman

I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Pablo Picasso

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.
Franklin P. Adams

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall.
Francis Bacon

A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing defined.
Edmund Burke

[For] that observation which is called knowledge of the world, will be found much more frequently to make men cunning than good.
Samuel Johnson

Other things may be seized by might, or purchased with money, but knowledge is to be gained only by study, and study to be prosecuted only in retirement.
Samuel Johnson

[Since] they cannot but know, that every human acquisition is valuable in proportion to the difficulty employed in its attainment.
Samuel Johnson

[A] man may excel in learning, without being either more wise or more virtuous than those whose ignorance he pities or despises.
Samuel Johnson

A desire for knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all he has to get knowledge.
Samuel Johnson

He [Thomas Hobbes] was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men.
John Aubrey

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.
Samuel Johnson

The circle of knowledge is too wide for the most active and diligent intellect, and while science is pursued, other accomplishments are neglected; as a small garrison must leave one part of an extensive fortress naked, when an alarm calls them to another.
Samuel Johnson

What you don’t know would make a great book.
Sydney Smith

Knowledge is the food of the soul.
Plato

"Know thyself" is a good saying, but not in all situations. In many it is better to say "Know others."
Menander

No one can know everything. (Nec scire fas est omnia.)
Horace

Grace is given of God, but knowledge is bought in the market.
Arthur Hugh Clough

It is better to have useless knowledge than to know nothing.
Seneca

All wish to know, but none want to pay the price.
Juvenal

It is much better to know something about everything than to know everything about one thing.
Blaise Pascal

Of all kinds of knowledge that we can ever obtain, the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves are the most important.
Jonathan Edwards

Knowledge always desires increase; it is like fire, which must first be kindled by some external agent, but which will afterwards propagate itself.
Samuel Johnson

All that men really understand is confined to a very small compass; to their daily affairs and experience, to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture.
William Hazlitt

In science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.
T. H. Huxley

Mediocre men often have the most acquired knowledge.
Claude Bernard

It is better to know nothing than to know what ain't so.
H. W. Shaw (Josh Billings)

Banish me from Eden when you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
R. G. Ingersoll

Strange how much you've got to know
Before you know how little you know.
Author unidentified

The happiest life is to know nothing. (Nihil scire est vita jucundissima.)
Latin Proverb

Many know many things, no one everything. (Multi multa, nemo omnia novit.)
Legal Maxim

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,
The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.
Lord Byron

… and so true is it, that a man may know what he cannot teach.
Samuel Johnson

Knowledge And Ignorance


Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The first step to knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.
Lord David Cecil

Tain't what a man don't know that hurts him; it's what he knows that just ain't so!
Frank McKinney Hubbard ("Kin Hubbard")

As soon as any man says of the affairs of state, What does it matter to me? the state may be given up as lost.
Jean Jacques Rousseau

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.
Elbert Hubbard

Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.
Cicero

Learned foolishness, is more egregiously foolish than the folly of ignorance. It is wayward, positive, and imperious; too conceited and indocile to be informed, and too obstinate to forsake error.
Ezra Sampson

And it's a necessity [for journalists] to pretend to be competent on every subject, some of which they really do not understand. They are under that necessity, I regret; I'm sorry for them. But to pretend to understand all the things you write about, and habitually to write about things you do not understand, is a very corrupting thing.
Friedrich von Hayek

Those who know don't talk.
Those who talk don't know.
Lao Tzu

He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.
Thomas Jefferson

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
Harold Pinter

Do not be arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned.
Ptahhotpe

What you have learned is a mere handful;
What you haven't learned is the size of the world.
Avvaiyar

A seeming ignorance is often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge.
Lord Chesterfield

Knowledge And Wisdom


We live and learn, but not the wiser grow.
John Pomfret

Knowledge is proud that he has learn’d so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.
William Cowper

There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.
Francis Bacon

Knowledge without wisdom is double folly.
Baltasar Gracián

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.
O. W. Holmes

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.
Martin H. Fischer

Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
William Cowper

Koran


The Alcoran of the Turks (I speak without prejudice) is an ill-composed piece containing in it vain and ridiculous errors in philosophy, impossibilities, fictions, and vanities beyond laughter, maintained by evident and open sophisms, the policy of ignorance, deposition of universities, and banishment of learning.
Thomas Browne

[The Koran is] a wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement; most crude, incondite; — insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran.
Thomas Carlyle

Krishna


I [Krishna] am all-powerful Time which destroys all things, and I have come here to slay these men. Even if thou does not fight, all the warriors facing thee shall die.
Bhagavadgita

Labor


In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours.
Edmund Burke

The labor we delight in physics (alleviates) pain.
Shakespeare

Labor is no disgrace.
Hesiod

What is there illustrious that is not attended by labor?
Cicero

Life gives nothing to man without labor.
Horace

Labor is a powerful medicine.
St. John Chrysostom

God sells us all things at the price of labor.
Leonardo da Vinci

Labor, as well as fasting, serves to mortify and subdue the flesh. Provided the labor you undertake contributes to the glory of God and your own welfare, I would prefer that you should suffer the pain of labor rather than that of fasting.
St. Francis de Sales

To labor is the lot of man below;
And when Jove gave us life, he gave us woe.
Alexander Pope, Tr. of Homer

Nature recompenses men for their sufferings; it renders them laborious, because to the greatest toils it attaches the greatest rewards. But if arbitrary power take away the rewards of nature, man resumes his disgust for labor, and inactivity appears to be the only good.
C. L. de Montesquieu

When I go into my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such an exhilaration and health that I discover that I have been defrauding myself all this time in letting others do for me what I should have done with my own hands.
R. W. Emerson

A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.
Grover Cleveland

There is no boon in nature. All the blessings we enjoy are the fruits of labor, toil, self-denial, and study.
W. G. Sumner

Labor, even the most humble and the most obscure, if it is well done, tends to beautify and embellish the world.
Gabrielle D'Annunzio

No form of labor is a disgrace. Labor is, on the contrary, the highest degree of nobility for anyone who faithfully coöperates through it and with it in constructing the life of the community and in preserving the nation.
Adolf Hitler

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."
Aaron Copland

No man, unless his body or mind be totally disabled, has need to suffer the mortification of seeing himself useless or burthensome to the community: he that will diligently labour, in whatever occupation, will deserve the sustenance which he obtains, and the protection which he enjoys; and may lie down every night with the pleasing consciousness of having contributed something to the happiness of life.
Samuel Johnson

Labor Union


The bad workmen, who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry, are decidedly of opinion that bad workmen ought to receive the same wages as good.
J. S. Mill

The methods by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.
Henry George

Trade unions are the only means by which workmen can protect themselves from the tyranny of those who employ them. But the moment that trade unions become tyrants in their turn they are engines for evil: they have no right to prevent people from working on any terms that they choose.
Mr. Justice Lindley

Facts show that politically independent trade unions do not exist anywhere. There have never been any. Experience and theory say that there never will be any.
Leon Trotsky

There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.
Calvin Coolidge

Lady


Ladies set no value on the moral character of men who pay their addresses to them: the greatest profligate will be as well received as the man of the greatest virtue, and this by a very good woman, by a woman who says her prayers three times a day.
Samuel Johnson

Laissez-faire


Liberty of action and liberty of movement. (Laissez faire et laissez passer.)
Ascribed to J. C. M. V. de Gournay

Land


Still, it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in.
Winston Churchill

If a man own land, the land owns him.
R. W. Emerson

The possession of land involves and carries with it the duty of cultivating that land.
Charles Bradlauch

He is not a full man who does not own a piece of land.
Hebrew Proverb

Language


But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.
Samuel Johnson

Language [is] the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

[Greek is] doubtless the most perfect [language] that has been contrived by the art of man.
Edward Gibbon

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
Mark Twain

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
George Orwell

[Greek is] a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.
Edward Gibbon

He [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
Edward R. Murrow

Don't swear, boy. It shows a lack of vocabulary.
Alan Bennett

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs respectably married, then Ms means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Angela Carter

They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
Mark Twain

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien

When I survey the Plan [of a Dictionary of the English Language] which I have laid before you, I cannot, my Lord, but confess, that I am frightened at its extent, and, like the soldiers of Caesar, look on Britain as a new world, which it is almost madness to invade. But I hope, that though I should not complete the conquest, I shall at least discover the coast, civilize part of the inhabitants, and make it easy for some other adventurer to proceed farther, to reduce them wholly to subjection, and settle them under laws.
Samuel Johnson

For language is the framework of reason; unless it is ordered and related to truth, reason cannot express itself.
Paul Johnson

A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones.
Paul Johnson

We are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.
Terry Pratchett

To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse — German.
Charles V

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Galen

Man has great power of speech, but the greater part thereof is empty and deceitful. The animals have little, but that little is useful and true; and better is a small and certain thing than a great falsehood.
Leonardo da Vinci

The Italian is pleasant, but without sinews, as a still reflecting water; the French delicate, but even nice as a woman, scarce daring to open her lips for fear of marring her countenance; the Spanish majestical but fulsome, running too much on the o, and terrible like the Devil in a play; the Dutch manlike, but withal very harsh, as one ready at every word to pick a quarrel.
Richard Carew

Every living language, like the perspiring bodies of living creatures, is in perpetual motion and lateration; some words go off, and become obsolete; others are taken in, and by degrees grow into common use; or the same word is inverted to a new sense and notion, which in tract of time makes as observable a change in the air and features of a language as age makes in the lines and mien of a face.
Richard Bentley

It is with language as with manners: they are both established by the usage of people of fashion; it must be imitated, it must be com plied with.
Lord Chesterfield

No grammatical rules have sufficient authority to control the firm and established usage of language. Established custom, in speaking and writing, is the standard to which we must at last resort for determining every controverted point in language and style.
Hugh Blair

The tedious time we moderns employ in acquiring the language of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which cost them nothing, is the principal reason why we cannot arrive at that grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge that was in them.
C. C. Colton

Language, as well as the faculty of speech, was the immediate gift of God.
Noah Webster

Language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius.
R. W. Emerson

The phraseology of every nation has a taint of drollery about it to the ears of every nation speaking a different tongue.
E. A. Poe

Language is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.
A. H. Sayce

Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. Such men have the quaint habit of discovering things fifty years after all the world knows about them — because they read only their own language.
Martin H. Fischer

Spanish is the language for lovers, Italian for singers, French for diplomats, German for horses, and English for geese.
Spanish Proverb

In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned.
Richard Duppa

Las Vegas


What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority

Last Words


Let us cross over the river and sit under the shade of the trees.
T. J. "Stonewall" Jackson, last words, 1863.

Late


Good that comes too late is good as nothing.
H. G. Bohn

A little too late is much too late.
German Proverb

Five minutes! Zounds! I have been five minutes too late all my life-time!
Hannah Cowley

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Laughter


But let me laugh awhile, I've mickle time to grieve.
John Keats

Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard Shaw

I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilised music in the world.
Peter Ustinov

If we may believe our logicians, man is distinguished from all other creatures by the faculty of laughter.
Joseph Addison

In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred, as audible laughter.
Lord Chesterfield

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.
Quintilian

Laughter does not seem to be a sin, but it leads to sin.
St. John Chrysostom

He who laughs at everything is as big a fool as he who weeps at everything.
Baltasar Gracián

In laughter there is always a kind of joyousness that is incompatible with contempt or indignation.
Voltaire

I am neither of a melancholy nor a cynical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; but I am sure that, since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.
Lord Chesterfield

He who laugheth too much hath the nature of a fool; he that laugheth not at all hath the nature of an old cat.
Thomas Fuller

That frolic which shakes one man with laughter will convulse another with indignation.
Samuel Johnson

No one is sadder than the man who laughs too much.
Jean Paul Richter

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.
F. W. Nietzsche

He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
Rafael Sabatini

One who is always laughing is a fool; and one who never laughs a knave.
Spanish Proverb

Laughter And Tears


I laugh at everything, for fear of being obliged to weep.
Caron de Beaumarchais

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has troubles enough of its own.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.
Luke 6:25

Law


When I came back to Dublin I was court-martialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in by absence.
Brendan Behan

Justice delayed is justice denied.
William Ewart Gladstone

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Courtroom, n. A place where Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot would be equals, with betting odds in favor of Judas.
H. L. Mencken

The people can change Congress but only God can change the Supreme Court.
George W. Norris

A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.
Robert Frost

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.
Adam Smith

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judiciary to say what the law is, not what the law should be.
Author unidentified

[Whenever] the offense inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigor of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.
Edward Gibbon

[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Edward Gibbon

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Alexis de Tocqueville

But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.
Edward Gibbon

Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made.
Otto von Bismarck

[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
Edward Gibbon

A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
Edward Gibbon

A jurisdiction thus vague and arbitrary was exposed to the most dangerous abuse: the substance, as well as the form, of justice were often sacrificed to the prejudices of virtue, the bias of laudable affection, and the grosser seductions of interest or resentment.
Edward Gibbon

With the utmost deference for these excellent civilians, I cannot but consider this confusion of the judicial and legislative authority as a very perilous constitutional precedent.
Rev. H. H. Milman

The science of the laws is the slow growth of time and experience.
Edward Gibbon

The books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none: their value was connected with present use, and they sunk forever as soon as that use was superseded by the innovations of fashion, superior merit, or public authority.
Edward Gibbon

Whatever is secret must be doubtful, and our natural horror of vice may be abused as an engine of tyranny.
Attributed by Gibbon to Montesquieu

A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt [of the defendant] was presumed by the judges [due to the nature of the charge], and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.
Edward Gibbon

The discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny.
Edward Gibbon

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times.
Edward Gibbon

[A] thousand quarrels must arise under a law, and among men, whose sole umpire [is] the sword.
Edward Gibbon

Government can easily exist without laws, but law cannot exist without government.
Bertrand Russell

The law functions as formal embodiment of a moral code, not as free-standing substitute for it.
Mark Steyn

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Others are hardened, obstinate, stiff-necked, rebel-hearted; these must be affrighted by the law, by examples of God's wrath: as the fires of Elijah, the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the downfall of Jerusalem.
Martin Luther

People crushed by law, have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose, will always be dangerous.
Edmund Burke

In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
Abigail Adams

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.
Shakespeare

It is the function of a judge not to make but to declare the law, according to the golden mete-wand of the law and not by the crooked cord of discretion.
Edmund Burke

Written laws are like spiders' webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.
Anacharsis

Wherever Law ends,
Tyranny begins.
John Locke

The strange American ardor for passing laws, the insane belief in regulation and punishment, plays into the hands of the reformers, most of them quacks themselves. Their efforts, even when honest, seldom accomplish any appreciable good.
H. L. Mencken

One of the main purposes of laws in a democratic society is to put burdens upon intelligence and reduce it to impotence. Ostensibly, their aim is to penalize anti-social acts; actually their aim is to penalize heretical opinions.
H. L. Mencken

Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.
Jonathan Swift

Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner.
H. L. Mencken

Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.
Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Oliver Goldsmith

There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity — the law of nature, and of nations.
Edmund Burke

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.
Edmund Burke

Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.
Johann [Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller

How long soever it hath continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law.
Edward Coke

The more mandates and laws are enacted, the more there will be thieves and robbers.
Lao-Tsze

It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or a bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.
Aristotle

Good law means good order.
Aristotle

It is best that laws should be so constructed as to leave as little as possible to the decision of those who judge.
Aristotle

The law follows custom.
Plautus

Law is nothing else but right reason, calling us imperiously to our duty, and prohibiting every violation of it.
Cicero

No law perfectly suits the convenience of every member of the community; the only consideration is, whether upon the whole it be profitable to the greater part.
Livy

What a slight foundation for virtue it is to be good only from fear of the law!
Seneca

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Tacitus

Good men need no laws, and bad men are not made better by them.
Ascribed to Demonax of Cyprus

Lawmakers ought not to be law-breakers.
English Proverb

There is nothing more difficult to undertake, more uncertain to succeed, and more dangerous to manage, than to prescribe new laws. Because he who innovates in that manner has for his enemies all those who made any advantage by the old laws; and those who expect to benefit by the new will be but cool and lukewarm in his defence.
Niccolò Machiavelli

No man is so exquisitely honest or upright but he brings his actions and thoughts within compass and danger of the laws, and that ten times in his life might not lawfully be hanged.
Michel de Montaigne

That law may be set down as good which is certain in meaning, just in precept, convenient in execution, agreeable to the form of government, and productive of virtue in those that live under it.
Francis Bacon

Here the great art lies, to discern in which the and in what things persuasion only is to work.
John Milton

A good law is that which is needful for the good of the people, and withal perspicuous.
Thomas Hobbes

Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
Thomas Hobbes

The law, being made, is but words and paper swords of men.
James Harrington

Too many matters have been regulated by laws, which nature, long custom and general consent ought only to have governed.
William Petty

No written laws can be so plain, so pure,
But wit may gloss and malice may obscure.
John Dryden

Law cannot persuade where it cannot punish.
Thomas Fuller

Much law, but little justice.
Thomas Fuller

The more laws, the more offenders.
Thomas Fuller

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.
Benjamin Franklin

The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket.
Charles Macklin

Just to the windward of the law.
Charles Churchill

Laws should be made by legislators, not by judges.
C. B. Beccaria

Laws are generally nets of such a texture as the little creep through, the great break through, and the middle-sized alone are entangled in.
William Shenstone

Let all the laws be clear, uniform and precise: to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.
Voltaire

The law is to us precisely what I am in my barnyard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy from oppressing the timid and weak.
St. John de Crèvecoeur

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.
Samuel Johnson

Ignorance of the law is no excuse in any country. If it were, the laws would lose their effect, because it can be always pretended.
Thomas Jefferson

It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.
Alexander Hamilton

When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces upon me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.
Sydney Smith

Laws are made for men of ordinary understanding, and should therefore be construed by the ordinary rules of common sense. Their meaning is not to be sought for in metaphysical subtleties, which may make anything mean everything or nothing, at pleasure.
Thomas Jefferson

Good men must not obey the laws too well.
R. W. Emerson

The law is for the protection of the weak more than the strong.
Mr. Justice Erle

We bury men when they are dead, but we try to embalm the dead body of laws, keeping the corpse in sight long after the vitality has gone. It usually takes a hundred years to make a law; and then, after it has done its work, it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.
H. W. Beecher

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
Samuel Smiles

Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws.
J. S. Mill

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution.
U. S. Grant

We know how laws are made — we who have been behind the scenes. They are the products of selfishness, deception and party prejudice. True justice is not in them, and cannot be in them.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
Theodore Roosevelt

While there still is doubt, while opposite convictions still keep a battlefront against each other, the time for law has not come.
O. W. Holmes II

The more laws the less justice.
German Proverb

Law And Order


Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls.
Camille Paglia

Law-Abiding


Fear God, and offend not the prince nor his laws,
And keep thyself out of the magistrate's claws.
Thomas Tusser

The observance of the law is the greatest solvent of public ills.
Calvin Coolidge

It is the duty of a citizen not only to observe the law but to let it be known that he is opposed to its violation.
Calvin Coolidge

Lawsuit


To go to law is for two persons to kindle a fire, at their own cost, to warm others and singe themselves to cinders.
Owen Felltham

If you've a good case, try to compromise; if a bad one, take it into court.
French Proverb

Lawyer


No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.
Jean Giraudoux

I don't want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do; I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.
J. Pierpont Morgan

Every Federal Judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizen has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mahjong factory, we'd all be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by half.
H. L. Mencken

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.
Benjamin Franklin

A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.
Author unidentified

Lawyers use the law as shoemakers use leather; rubbing it, pressing it, and stretching it with their teeth, all to the end of making it fit their purposes.
Ascribed to Louis XII of France

Adversaries … in law
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.
Shakespeare

A man may as well open an oyster without a knife as a lawyer's mouth without a fee.
Barten Holyday

Your pettifoggers damn their souls,
To share with knaves in cheating fools.
Samuel Butler

A man without money needs no more fear a crowd of lawyers than a crowd of pickpockets.
William Wycherley

Of lawyers and physicians I shall say nothing, because this country [Pennsylvania in the late 17th century] is very peaceable and healthy. Long may it so continue, and never have occasion for the tongue of the one nor the pen of the other, both equally destructive of men's estates and lives.
Gabriel Thomas

God has not given laws to make out of right wrong, and out of wrong right, as the unchristianlike lawyers do, who study law only for the sake of gain and profit.
Martin Luther

Sometimes a man who deserves to be looked down upon because he is a fool is despised only because he is a lawyer.
C. L. de Montesquieu

Laws are best explained, interpreted and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.
Jonathan Swift

God works wonders now and then;
Behold! a lawyer, an honest man.
Benjamin Franklin

The fell [cruel, savage] attorney prowls for prey.
Samuel Johnson

I would be loth to speak ill of any person who I do not know deserves it, but I am afraid he is an attorney.
Samuel Johnson

Yes, Jamie, he was a bad man, but he might have been worse; he was an Irishman, but he might have been a Scotchman; he was a priest, but he might have been a lawyer.
Samuel Parr

I question not but there are many attorneys born with open and honest hearts: but I know not one that has had the least practice who is not selfish, trickish, and disingenuous.
William Shenstone

A lawyer's opinion is worth nothing unless paid for.
English Proverb

By law's dark by-ways he had stored his mind
With wicked knowledge how to cheat mankind.
George Crabbe

Who calls a lawyer rogue, may find, too late,
On one of these depends his whole estate.
George Crabbe

I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.
John Keats

He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides.
Charles Lamb

Fools and obstinate men make lawyers rich.
H. G. Bohn

I will not counsel or maintain any suit or proceeding which shall appear to me to be unjust, nor any defense except such as I believe to be honestly debatable under the law of the land.
Model oath for candidates for admission to the bar

A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge.
Samuel Johnson

Laziness


Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.
Author unidentified

A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest —
and poverty will come on you like a bandit
and scarcity like an armed man.
Proverbs 6:10,11

Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth.
Proverbs 10:4

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.
Pliny the Younger

I understand there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.
Anthony Bourdain

Laziness is often mistaken for patience.
French Proverb

It is always holiday to the lazy. (Ignavis semper feriae sunt.)
Latin Proverb

Lazy youth makes lousy age.
Scottish Proverb

Leader


All leaders strive to turn their followers into children.
Eric Hoffer

You have to learn to be a follower before you become a leader.
Charlie Munger

Leadership


It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground.
James H. Boren

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs; they expect too much of ordinary men.
Thucydides

There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
Alexandre Ledru-Rollin

He who thinks he leads, and has no one following him is only taking a walk.
Author unidentified

"Cheshire-Puss," she began, "would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't care much where —" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll

When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.
Charles de Gaulle

I must follow them. I am their leader.
Andrew Bonar Law

You have lost a useful commander, and you have made a very wretched emperor.
Saturninus, when his troops put him forward as a contender to the Roman Emperor.

For my part, I would rather be the chief man in this [poor] village than the second man in Rome.
Julius Caesar

The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.
Tony Blair

If human progress had been merely a matter of leadership we should be in Utopia today.
Thomas B. Reed

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.
Elizabeth I

Lean


Men of a lean habit of body are commonly a long time healthy, having good appetites and strong stomachs for digestion.
Tobias Venner

As the lean people are the most active, unquiet, and ambitious, they everywhere govern the world, and may certainly oppress their antagonists whenever they please.
David Hume

A goose, a woman, and a goat are bad things lean.
Portuguese Proverb

Learning


The easily embarrassed are unable to learn.
Author unidentified

Such is often the folly of men, whom nature has enabled to obtain skill and knowledge, on terms so easy, that they have no sense of the value of the acquisition; they are qualified to make such speedy progress in learning, that they think themselves at liberty to loiter in the way, and by turning aside after every new object, lose the race, like Atalanta, to slower competitors, who press diligently forward, and whose force is directed to a single point.
Samuel Johnson

What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Brooks Adams

The mind is slow to unlearn what it has been long in learning.
Seneca

Men learn while they teach. (Homines, dum docent, discunt.)
Seneca

A man without learning grows old like an ox; his flesh grows, but not his wisdom.
The Dhammapada

A man of learning is never bored.
Jean Paul Richter

Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
George Bernard Shaw

Learning without wisdom is a load of books on an ass's back.
Japanese Proverb

Much learning, much sorrow.
John Clarke

A handful of good life is better than a bushel of learning.
George Herbert

The love of learning and the love of money rarely meet.
George Herbert

Learning makes the wise wiser and the fool more foolish.
John Ray

Learning makes a good man better, and an ill man worse.
Thomas Fuller

Of learned fools I have seen ten times ten; of unlearned wise men, I have seen a hundred.
Benjamin Franklin

Much learning shows how little mortals know.
Edward Young

Learning is acquired by reading books; but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.
Lord Chesterfield

When we are young we learn much because we are universally ignorant; we observe everything because everything is new.
Samuel Johnson

Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly,
We learn so little and forget so much.
John Davies

There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring.
Ernest Hemingway

Left Wing


The left-wing movement … has pretty well killed intelligent criticism in this country. Books are judged not by their worth as works of art, but by their political content.
H. L. Mencken

Legislation


No man with a genius for legislation has appeared in America. They are rare in the history of the world.
H. D. Thoreau

One of the greatest delusions in the world is the hope that the evils in this world are to be cured by legislation.
Thomas B. Reed

Blundering experiments in legislation cannot be simply abandoned if they do not work well; even if they are set aside, they leave their effects behind; and they create vested interests which make it difficult to set them aside.
W. G. Sumner

Legislator


It has been sagaciously conjectured, that the artful legislator indulged the stubborn prejudices of his countrymen.
Edward Gibbon

Leisure


It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are commonly ruled for dollars and cents.
H. D. Thoreau

The advantage of leisure is mainly that we may have the power of choosing our own work, not certainly that it confers any privilege of idleness.
John Lubbock (Lord Avebury)

Better give a shilling than lend and lose half a crown.
Thomas Fuller

Lending


If you lend you either lose the money or gain an enemy.
Albanian Proverb

Money lent to a friend must be recovered from an enemy.
German Proverb

It is better to give one lire than to lend twenty.
Italian Proverb

Never lend a horse, a razor, or your wife.
Polish Proverb

If you have had enough of your friend, lend him some money.
Russian Proverb

Lenin


Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.
Winston Churchill

Lent


Marry in Lent, and you'll live to repent.
English Proverb

Leonardo da Vinci


The Medici created and destroyed me.
Leonardo da Vinci

Lese-Majesty


The slander of majesty shall not be punished, for if it proceed from levity it is to be despised; if from madness, to be pitied; if from malice, forgiven.
Codex Theodosianus

Letter


A short letter to a distant friend is, in my opinion, an insult like that of a slight bow or cursory salutation; — a proof of unwillingness to do much, even where there is a necessity of doing something.
Samuel Johnson

Levee


There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.
Mark Twain

Lexicographer


It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward.

Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.

Samuel Johnson

Lexicographer, n. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.
Samuel Johnson

But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer.
Samuel Johnson

Liar


The liar at any rate recognizes that recreation, not instruction, is the aim of conversation, and is a far more civilised being than the blockhead who loudly expresses his disbelief in a story which is told simply for the amusement of the company.
Oscar Wilde

A liar's way leads to disgrace, and his shame is ever with him.
Ecclesiasticus 20:26

A liar is far worse, and does greater mischief, than a murderer on the highway; for a liar and false teacher deceives people, seduces souls, and destroys them under the color of God's Word.
Martin Luther

A liar is always lavish of oaths.
Pierre Corneille

The greatest fools are the greatest liars.
Lord Chesterfield

Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
H. W. Beecher

The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society.
Oscar Wilde

The wretch that often has deceiv’d,
Though truth he speaks, is ne’er believ’d.

(Quicunque turpi fraude semel innotuit,
Etiamsi verum dicit, amittit fidem
.)

Phaedrus

The liar, and only the liar, is invariably and universally despised, abandoned, and disowned: he has no domestick consolations, which he can oppose to the censure of mankind; he can retire to no fraternity, where his crimes may stand in the place of virtues; but is given up to the hisses of the multitude, without friend and without apologist.
Samuel Johnson

Liberal


Not being a liberal, I have very little grasp of things that I know nothing about.
P. J. O'Rourke

Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
William F. Buckley, Jr.

I consider it a great homage to public opinion to find every scoundrel nowadays professing himself a liberal.
Benjamin Disraeli

Liberalism


So much of contemporary liberalism seems to be never having grown up.
Jay Nordlinger

[Liberalism] is hostile to law [and has a preference for] policy without law.
Theodore Lowi

The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.
Jonah Goldberg

You can't go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal.
Robert Downey Jr.

The tone and tendency of liberalism … is to attack the institutions of the country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress.
Benjamin Disraeli

Liberality


Liberality is not giving much but giving wisely.
Author unidentified

Libertarianism And Liberalism


[Libertarianism] is about curbing state power to let people be and do what they want. Liberalism is about using state power to make people do and be what liberals want. And that makes all the difference in the world.
Jonah Goldberg

Liberty


They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Benjamin Franklin

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.
Edmund Burke

The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.
Alexis de Tocqueville

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Thomas Jefferson, et al.

There can be no liberty unless there is economic liberty.
Margaret Thatcher

There's only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
P. J. O'Rourke

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Charles Austin Beard

It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides. Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people … Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
Thomas Jefferson

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Patrick Henry

Liberty is, to the lowest rank of every nation, little more than the choice of working or starving; and this choice is, I suppose, equally allowed in every country.
Samuel Johnson

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.
Edmund Burke

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
Edmund Burke

Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Lord Acton

But the true danger is, when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
Edmund Burke

For liberty is a good to be improved, and not an evil to be lessened.
Edmund Burke

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Edmund Burke

Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
Edmund Burke

It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.
Francis Bacon

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
Clive Bell

Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience.
Isaiah Berlin

It takes a special sort of man to understand and enjoy liberty — and he is usually an outlaw in democratic societies.
H. L. Mencken

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.
H. L. Mencken

They [classical Liberals] themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them.
H. L. Mencken

I believe in only one thing and that thing is human liberty. If ever a man is to achieve anything like dignity, it can happen only if superior men are given absolute freedom to think what they want to think and say what they want to say.
H. L. Mencken

The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and can never be restrained but by despotic governments.
George Mason

The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
John Philpot Curran

Liberty too must be limited in order to be possessed.
Edmund Burke

A love of liberty is planted by nature in the breasts of all men.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus

No favor produces less permanent gratitude than the gift of liberty, especially among people who are ready to make a bad use of it.
Livy

Only in states in which the power of the people is supreme has liberty any abode.
Cicero

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.
Shakespeare

Liberty is the power that we have over ourselves.
Hugo Grotius

Lean liberty is better than fat slavery.
John Ray

In those few places where men enjoy what they call liberty, it is continually in a tottering situation, and makes greater and greater strides to that fault of despotism which at last swallows up every species of government.
Edmund Burke

Free people, remember this maxim: we may acquire liberty, but it is never recovered if it is once lost.
J. J. Rousseau

Liberty is not a fruit that grows in all climates, and so it is not within the reach of all people.
J. J. Rousseau

They make a rout about universal liberty without considering that all that is to be valued, or indeed can be enjoyed by individuals, is private liberty. Political liberty is good only so far as it produces private liberty.
Samuel Johnson

'Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume;
And we are weeds without it.
William Cowper

But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
Edmund Burke

We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.
Thomas Jefferson

O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!
Ascribed to Mme. Roland, on her way to the guillotine

God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.
Daniel Webster

While I trust that liberty and free institutions, as we have experienced them, may ultimately spread over the globe, I am by no means sure that all people are fit for them; nor am I desirous of imposing or forcing our peculiar forms upon any other nation that does not wish to embrace them.
Daniel Webster

The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited: he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.
J. S. Mill

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.
R. W. Emerson

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Abraham Lincoln

If men use their liberty in such a way as to surrender their liberty, are they thereafter any the less slaves? If people by a plebiscite elect man despot over them, do they remain free because the despotism was of their own making?
Herbert Spencer

Mankind is tired of liberty.
Benito Mussolini

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
Mr. Justice Louis D. Brandeis

Libius Severus


History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death.
Edward Gibbon

Library


Human beings can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Saul Bellow

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.
Samuel Johnson

What a sad want I am in of libraries, of books to gather facts from! Why is there not a Majesty's library in every county town? There is a Majesty's jail and gallows in every one.
Thomas Carlyle

Burn the libraries, for all their value is in the Koran.
The Caliph Omar, on the fall of Alexandria

To desire to have many books, and never to use them, is like a child that will have a candle burning by him all the while he is asleep.
Henry Peacham

That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weight their counsels.
John Fletcher and Philip Massinger

The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle

A man's library is a sort of harem, and I observe that tender readers have a great pudency in showing their books to a stranger.
R. W. Emerson

Lie


When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.
Shakespeare

Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie.
Rudyard Kipling

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.
Elena Gorokhova

Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no fibs.
Oliver Goldsmith

One sometimes sees more clearly in the man who lies than in the man who tells the truth. Truth, like the light, blinds. Lying, on the other hand, is a beautiful twilight, which gives to each object its value.
Albert Camus (Attributed)

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord!
G. K. Chesterton

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
George Orwell

Life


A man said to the Universe, "Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the Universe, "the fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.
H. L. Mencken

Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
André Maurois

[The Forgotten Man] is the clean, quiet, virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of out of his little circle. … [He] works and votes — generally he prays — but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
Alfred Korzybski

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker is sorry.
Mark Twain

Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.
Thomas La Mance

I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.
Clarence Darrow

The game of life is not so much in holding a good hand as playing a poor hand well.
H. T. Leslie

What the meaning of human life may be I don't know; I incline to suspect that it has none.
H. L. Mencken

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
Elbert Hubbard

Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Henry David Thoreau

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

And remember, no matter where you go, there you are.
Author unidentified

What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.
Nietzsche

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.
Oscar Wilde

Never abandon life. There is a way out of everything except death.
Winston Churchill

Fancy living in one of these streets, never seeing anything beautiful, never eating anything savoury, never saying anything clever!
Winston Churchill, when touring the slums

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.
Attributed to Thomas Fuller

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others.
Eric Hoffer

Men of thought seldom work well together, whereas between men of action there is usually an easy camaraderie.
Eric Hoffer

How little can we foresee the consequences either of wise or unwise action, of virtue or of malice! Without this measureless and perpetual uncertainty the drama of human life would be destroyed.
Winston Churchill

Men work simply in order to escape the depressing agony of contemplating life — that their work, like their play, is a mumbo-jumbo that serves them by permitting them to escape from reality.
H. L. Mencken

Life may not be exactly pleasant, but it is at least not dull. Heave yourself into Hell today, and you may miss, tomorrow or next day, another Scopes trial, or another War to End War, or perchance a rich and buxom widow with all her first husband's clothes. There are always more Hardings hatching. I advocate hanging on as long as possible.
H. L. Mencken

Life is short, but death lasts forever.
Author unidentified

How little it takes to make life unbearable … A pebble in the shoe, a cockroach in the spaghetti, a woman's laugh.
H. L. Mencken

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.
Oscar Wilde

Life is a hideous thing.
H. P. Lovecraft

At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death.
Algernon Charles Swinburne

Don't believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
R. J. Burdette

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
Rose Kennedy

I value kindness to human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and old men and women warmer in the winter, and happier in the summer.
Brendan Behan

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
Søren Kierkegaard

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Douglas Adams

Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn't the mountain ahead that wears you out — it's the grain of sand in your shoe.
Robert Service

A bad habit never disappears miraculously; it's an undo-it-yourself project.
Abigail Van Buren

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana

If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Tallulah Bankhead

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost

I think you should live your life so that the maximum number of people will attend your funeral.
Scott Adams

The Europeans … are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

[All] of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon — instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie

If thou wouldst live long, live well;
For folly and wickedness shorten life.
Benjamin Franklin

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And — which is more — you'll be a Man, my son!
Rudyard Kipling

You can never begin to live
Until you dare to die.
Henry van Dyke

A stout heart, a clear conscience, and never despair.
John Quincy Adams

Life is subject to change without notice.
Author unidentified

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
Benjamin Franklin

You thought it was hard? If kindergarten is busting your ass, I got some bad news for you about the rest of life.
Samuel Halpern

No, you can't go getting mad at people because they're shitty. Life will get mad at them, don't worry.
Samuel Halpern

Just worry about living, dying is the easy part.
Samuel Halpern

Life is pain … Anyone who says differently is selling something.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

Wish not so much to live long as to live well.
Author unidentified

The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men.
Henry David Thoreau

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.
Douglas Adams

Don't be so hard on yourself; don't put pressure on yourself; life is just a chain of experiments and results … you'll be perfect when you're dead.
Dan Harmon

Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
National Lampoon's Animal House movie

Life is short. Why make it any shorter by not taking care of yourself?
Author unidentified

So large a part of human life passes in a state contrary to our natural desires that one of the principal topics of moral instruction is the art of bearing calamities. And such is the certainty of evil that it is the duty of every man to furnish his mind with those principles that may enable him to act under it with decency and propriety.
Samuel Johnson

I long ago come [sic] to the conclusion that all life is six to five against.
Damon Runyon

The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.
Rabindranath Tagore

There is a big difference between thinking … "This is a bad chapter" and "This is the last chapter" [of one's life].
Dr. Stephen Viars

Yet hope not Life from Grief or Danger free,
Nor think the Doom of Man revers’d for thee.
Samuel Johnson

Tomorrow is promised to no man.
Author unidentified

When I survey my past life, I discover nothing but a barren waste of time with some disorders of the body, and disturbances of the mind very near to madness.
Samuel Johnson

In our sad condition, our only consolation is the expectation of another life. Here below all is incomprehensible.
Martin Luther

What is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman's life, and thirty in a man's?
Plato

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.
Horace

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares;
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain;
My crop of corn is but a field of tares;
And all my good is but vain hope of gain:
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.
Chidiock Tichborne

You are, my Lord, but just entering into the world; I am going out of it. I have played long enough to be heartily tired of the drama. Whether I have acted my part in it well or ill, posterity will judge with more candour than I, or than the present age, with our present passions, can possibly pretend to. For my part, I quit it without a sigh, and submit to the sovereign order without murmuring.
Edmund Burke

The Answer to the Great Question Of … Life, the Universe and Everything … [is] Forty-two.
Douglas Adams

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Shakespeare

Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment.
Samuel Johnson

Life, in which nothing has been done or suffered to distinguish one day from another, is to him that has passed it, as if it had never been, except that he is conscious how ill he has husbanded the great deposit of his Creator.
Samuel Johnson

Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv’st
Live well; how long or short permit to Heaven.
John Milton

Life is an incurable disease.
Abraham Cowley

It is natural for every man uninstructed to murmur at his condition, because, in the general infelicity of life, he feels his own miseries, without knowing that they are common to all the rest of the species.
Samuel Johnson

There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.
Jean de La Bruyère

Do not men die fast enough without being destroyed by each other? Can any man be insensible of the brevity of life? and can he who knows it, think life too long?
François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon

Thus, not only in the slumber of sloth, but in the dissipation of ill-directed industry, is the shortness of life generally forgotten.
Samuel Johnson

Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been.
Genesis 47:9 (KJV)

Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once; but now I know it.
John Gay

Human life is basically a comedy. Even its tragedies often seem comic to the spectator.
H. L. Mencken

Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.
Psalms 90:10

To avoid illness eat less: to have a long life worry less.
Chinese Proverb

Men deal with life, as children with their play,
Who first misuse, then cast their toys away.
William Cowper

A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
Crowfoot

That's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.
Woody Allen

The trials of living and the pangs of disease make even the short span of life too long.
Herodotus

Life is long to the miserable, but short to the happy.
Publilius Syrus

Nature has given us life at interest like money, with no day fixed for repayment.
Cicero

We are always beginning to live, but we are never living.
Marcus Manilius

Life, if well used, is long enough.
Seneca

Nature has given man nothing better than the shortness of his life.
Pliny the Elder

Blessed is he that hath a short life.
St. Clement

The utmost span of a man's life is a hundred years. Half of it is spent in night, and of the rest half is lost by childhood and old age. Work, grief, longing and illness make up what remains.
Bhartrihari

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and they come to an end without hope.
Job 7:6

This life is fickle, frail and vain.
Anonymous

The world's a bubble, and the life of man
Less than a span;
In his conception wretched, from the womb
So to the tomb;
Curst from the cradle, and brought up to years
With cares and fears.
Who then to frail mortality shall trust,
But limns the water, or but writes in dust.
Francis Bacon

The longer life, the greater grief.
Randle Cotcrave

When I consider life, 'tis all a cheat;
Yet, fooled with hope, men favor the deceit.
John Dryden

Why are we so fond of a life that begins with a cry and ends with groan?
Mary, Countess of Warwick, on her deathbed

When life is miserable it is painful to endure it;
when it is happy it is horrible to lose it.
Jean de la Bruyère

Who breathes must suffer, and who thinks must mourn;
And he alone is blessed who ne'er was born.
Matthew Prior

Reflect that life, like every other blessing,
Derives its value from its use alone.
Samuel Johnson

Life is tedious.
Samuel Johnson

What is the life of man? Is it not to shift from side to side from sorrow to sorrow — to button up one cause of vexation and unbutton another?
Laurence Sterne

Philosophers there are who try to make themselves believe that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind.
Samuel Johnson

A painful passage o'er a restless flood,
A vain pursuit of fugitive false good,
A sense of fancied bliss and heartfelt care,
Closing at last in darkness and despair.
William Cowper

A useless life is an early death.
J. W. Goethe

Life to the great majority is only a constant struggle for mere existence, with the certainty of losing it at last.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Short as life is, some find it long enough to outlive their characters, their constitutions and their estates.
C. C. Colton

Between two worlds, life hovers like a star
'Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon's verge,
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be!
Byron

Do you desire to master the art of prolonging life? Rather apply yourself to the art of enduring it.
Ernst von Feuchtersleben

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti

To procure life, to obtain a mate, and to rear offspring: such is the real business of life.
W. Winwood Reade

Life is one long process of getting tired.
Samuel Butler

When a man says he has exhausted life one always knows life has exhausted him.
Oscar Wilde

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
George Bernard Shaw

Life is simply one damned thing after another.
Ascribed to Frank Ward O'Malley

Life is like a fire; it begins in smoke, and ends in ashes.
Arab Proverb

The life of man is like a long journey with a heavy load on the back.
Japanese Proverb

Life isn't hard to manage when you've nothing to lose.
Ernest Hemingway

I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me.
John Keats

He that embarks in the voyage of life, will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar; and many founder in the passage, while they lie waiting for the gale that is to waft them to their wish.
Samuel Johnson

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Into each life some rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Life And Death


Thou canst not judge the life of man until death hath ended it.
Sophocles

The child was born, and cried;
Became a man, after fell sick, and died.
Anonymous

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Shakespeare

Our lives are but our marches to the grave.
John Fletcher

Let one imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, some of whom, being beheaded every day in the sight of the others, those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows, and, regarding each other with grief, and without hope, await their turn: this is a picture of the condition of men.
Blaise Pascal

Teach me to live that I may dread
The grave as little as my bed.
Thomas Ken

Born in throes, 'tis fit that man should live in pains and die in pangs.
Herman Melville

We see all this [the uncertainty of life and unexpected death], and yet, instead of living, let year glide after year in preparations to live.
Samuel Johnson

The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully.
Thomas Carlyle

I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.
John Keats

Every day above earth is a good day.
Ernest Hemingway

Linguist


Men who can speak a number of different tongues are notorious for having little to say in any of them.
H. R. Huse

Lion


Do not pluck the beard of a dead lion.
Martial

Listening


No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you'll see why.
Mignon McLaughlin

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.
Wilson Mizner

Literature


When I read Shakespeare I am struck with wonder
That such trivial people should muse and thunder
In such a lovely language.
D. H. Lawrence

The cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.
Edmund Wilson

H. L. Mencken suffers from the hallucination that he is H. L. Mencken — there is no cure for a disease of that magnitude.
Maxwell Bodenheim

Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert Maynard Hutchins

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.
William Targ

No author is a man of genius to his publisher.
Heinrich Heine

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard Shaw

When a thing has been said and well said, have no scruple; take it and copy it.
Anatole France

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
William Faulkner

I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read.
Samuel Johnson

When told not to end a sentence with a preposition, Churchill replied, "This is nonsense up with which I will not put."
Winston Churchill

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
Oscar Wilde

Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be happy to read them.
Saul Bellow

The only reward to be expected from literature is contempt if one fails and hatred if one succeeds.
Voltaire

Thieves cannot destroy it [literature], and it is improved by time; it is the only monument that is proof against death.
Martial

It is after public passion has subsided that our most celebrated writers have produced their chef d'oeuvres; as it is after the eruption of a volcano that the land in its vicinity is the most fertile.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

When literature is the sole business of life it becomes a drudgery; when we are able to resort to it only at certain hours it is a charming relaxation.
Samuel Rogers

Literature, American


The curious have observed that the progress of humane literature (like the sun) is from the East to the West; thus has it traveled thro Asia and Europe, and now is arrived at the eastern shore of America.
Nathaniel Ames

Little


Little strokes fell great oaks. (Earlier variation by John Lyly: Many strokes overthrow the tallest oak.)
John Ray

Liverpool


Liverpool, though not very delightful as a place of residence, is a most convenient and admirable point to get away from.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Living


It matters not how long you live, but how well.
Publilius Syrus

They lived long that have lived well.
Thomas Wilson

Where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valor to dare to live.
Thomas Browne

They seldom live well who think they shall live long.
Thomas Fuller

The men who start out with the notion that the world owes them a living generally find that the world pays its debt in the penitentiary or the poorhouse.
W. G. Sumner

No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offense.
Thomas Carlyle

Lloyd George


He [Lloyd George] did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the driver's seat.
Lord Beaverbrook

Location


I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
Daniel Boone

Logic


The Greeks invented logic but were not fooled by it.
Eric Hoffer

Logic, like whiskey, loses its beneficial effect when taken in too large quantities.
Lord Dunsany

London


When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.
Samuel Johnson

The different departments of life are jumbled together. … Actuated by the demons of profligacy and licentiousness, they are seen everywhere rambling, riding, rolling, rushing, justling, mixing, bouncing, cracking, and crashing, in one vile ferment of stupidity and corruption.
Tobias Smollett, of Charing Cross in the 18th century

London is a modern Babylon.
Benjamin Disraeli

There is fiercer crowded misery
In garret-toil and London loneliness
Than in cruel islands 'mid the far-off sea.
John Forster

In London we may suffer, but no one has any excuse dull.
John Lubbock

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
Arthur Conan Doyle

London Times


If I to leave to remote some memorial of existing British civilization, I would prefer, not our docks, not our railways, not our public buildings, not even the palace in which we now hold our sittings; I would prefer a file of the Times newspaper.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton

Loneliness


"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken! — quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Edgar Allan Poe

The surest sign of age is loneliness.
A. Bronson Alcott

Long Life


"Enlarge my life with multitude of days!"
In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays:
Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know
That life protracted is protracted woe.
Samuel Johnson

Longevity


He lives long that lives till all are weary of him.
H. G. Bohn

Look


You should have seen her face then. Gratitude? Lord, what do you want with words to express that? Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.
Mark Twain

Loquacity


Loquacious people seldom have much sense.
Baltasar Gracián

Lord Byron


Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds?
P. B. Shelley

I have a thorough aversion to his [Lord Byron’s] character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way.
Charles Lamb

I never heard a single expression of fondness for him [Lord Byron] fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well.
T. B. Macaulay

Los Angeles


Los Angeles is like San Diego's older, uglier sister that has herpes.
Samuel Halpern

Love


People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.
Bob Hope

The greatest love is a mother's; then comes a dog's; then a sweetheart's.
Polish proverb

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.
Agnes Repplier

If I'm such a legend, then why am I so lonely? Let me tell you, legends are all very well if you've got somebody around who loves you.
Judy Garland

The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Many a man has fallen in love with a girl in a light so dim he would not have chosen a suit by it.
Maurice Chevalier

Let there be spaces in your Togetherness.
Kahil Gibran

I never loved another person the way I loved myself.
Mae West

As soon as you cannot keep anything from a woman, you love her.
Paul Géraldy

Those who are faithless know the pleasures of love; it is the faithful who know love's tragedies.
Oscar Wilde

Love is like war: easy to begin but very hard to stop.
H. L. Mencken

The quarrels of lovers are the renewal of love.
Terence

The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.
H. L. Mencken

The most disgusting cad in the world is the man who, on grounds of decorum and morality, avoids the game of love. He is one who puts his own ease and security above the most laudable of philanthropies.
H. L. Mencken

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness. But after that he begins to bunch them.
H. L. Mencken

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Oscar Wilde

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.
Oscar Wilde

Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.
Samuel Johnson

It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
Eric Hoffer

Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
Peter Ustinov

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.
Bertrand Russell

Then fly betimes, for only they
Conquer love that run away.
Thomas Carew

Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)

If you would be loved, love and be lovable.
Benjamin Franklin

[What] some guys mean when they say "I love you" is what I mean when I say, "I love turkey."
Rabbi Daniel Lapin

Infatuation is effortless. Love takes work.
Chana Levitan

Love is the fart Of every heart;
It pains a man when ’tis kept close,
And others doth offend when ’tis let loose.
Sir John Suckling

You've been good to me, baby,
Better than I've been to myself.
O'Kelly Isley, Rudolph Isley, and Ronald Isley

For [passionate] love is strong as death; Jealousy is cruel as the grave.
Song of Solomon 8:6 (KJV)

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.
Shakespeare

The wounds invisible
That love’s keen arrows make.
Shakespeare

Love sought is good, but giv’n unsought is better.
Shakespeare

There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.
La Rochefoucauld

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes

But say what you will, ’tis better to be left, than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old.
William Congreve

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
1 Peter 4:8

He who doesn’t see his lover's faults as virtues is not in love.
J. W. Goethe

I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
Samuel Butler

To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
Samuel Butler

Man desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.
Adam Smith

Alas! the love of women! it is known
To be a lovely and a fearful thing!
Lord Byron

If this be not love, it is madness, and then it is pardonable.
William Congreve

I hold it true, whate'er befall,
I feel it when I sorrow most;
"Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred Tennyson

It is with true love as with ghosts. Everyone talks of it, but few have ever seen it.
La Rochefoucauld

Better a small serving of vegetables with love than a fattened calf with hatred.
Proverbs 15:17

An old man in love is like a flower in Winter
Portuguese Proverb

It is easy for them who have never been loved to sneer at love.
Welsh Proverb

In their first passion women are in love with their lovers; in all others they are in love with love.
La Rochefoucauld

It is commonly a weak man who marries for love.
Samuel Johnson

Woman likes to believe that love can achieve anything. It is her peculiar superstition.
F. W. Nietzsche

Men always want to be a woman's first love — A women like to be a man's last romance.
Oscar Wilde

When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her.
Oscar Wilde

Women in love are less ashamed than men.
They have less to be ashamed of.
Ambrose Bierce

Love and eggs are best when they are fresh.
Russian Proverb

The course of true love never did run smooth.
Shakespeare

Love, like man himself, dies of overeating much oftener than of hunger.
Jean Paul Richter

A man has choice of beginning love, but not to end it.
H. G. Bohn

Love is like war: you begin when you like and leave off when you can.
Spanish Proverb

Without good eating and drinking love grows cold.
Terence

When poverty comes in at doors, love leaps out at windows.
John Clarke

Love is a delightful day's journey. At the farther end kiss your companion and say fare-well.
Ambrose Bierce

At the touch of love every one becomes a poet.
Plato

Love blinds all men alike, both the reasonable and the foolish.
Menander

Even a god, falling in love, could not be wise.
Publilius Syrus

I do love; and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy.
Shakespeare

Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to counsel,
It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
John Ford

No man, at one time, can be wise, and love.
Robert Herrick

All the passions make us commit faults, but love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones.
La Rochefoucauld

When a man is really in love he looks insufferably silly.
John Vanbrugh

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.
Anna Louise de Staël

Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not.
F. W. Nietzsche

The heart that loves is always young.
Greek Proverb

It is more useful to be loved than to be venerated.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Love is perfidious.
Plautus

Love is a fiend, a fire, a heaven, a hell,
Where pleasure, pain, and sad repentance dwell.
Richard Barnfield

Oh, what a Heaven is love! Oh, what a Hell!
Thomas Dekker

Love and honor make poor companions.
Baltasar Gracián

I look upon love as a sort of hostile transaction, very necessary to keep the world going, but by no means a sinecure to the parties concerned.
Byron

True love always involves renunciation of one's personal comfort.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

I have noticed that there are times when every second woman likes you. Is love, then, a magnetism which we sometimes possess and exercise unconsciously, and sometimes do not possess?
George Moore

Love is only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
George Santayana

We cannot permit love to run riot; we must build fences around it, as we do around pigs.
E. W. Howe

Love is like a well: a good thing to drink out of, but a bad thing to fall into.
Author unidentified

How miserable is the man who loves.
Plautus

In love, pain and pleasure are always at war.
Publilius Syrus

Though the beginning of love bring delight, the end bringeth destruction.
John Lyly

The sweets of love are mix'd with tears.
Robert Herrick

The rose is sweetest washed with morning dew,
And love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.
Walter Scott

He who falls in love has come to the end of happiness.
Japanese Proverb

Love conquers all. (Omnia vincit amor.)
Virgil

Love can do much, but money can do more.
Giovanni Torriano

Love demands all, and has a right to all.
Ludwig van Beethoven

It is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character that he should be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against smallpox.
George Eliot

I do love her just as a man holds a wolf by the ears: but, for fear of turning upon me and pulling out my throat, I would let her go to the Devil.
John Webster

Follow love and it will flee,
Flee love and it will follow thee.
John Ray

They love too much that die for love.
John Ray

Blue eyes say, "Love me or I die"; black eyes say, "Love me or I kill thee."
Spanish Proverb

Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Song of Songs 8:6

When we can't get what we love we must love what we have.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

And love's the noblest frailty of the mind.
John Dryden

All love is lost but upon God alone.
William Dunbar

You never understand anybody that loves you.
Ernest Hemingway

When love grows diseased, the best thing we can do is put it to a violent death; I cannot endure the torture of a lingering and consumptive passion.
George Etherege

Love And Hate


Love, friendship, respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.
Anton Chekhov

The more we love a woman the nearer we are to hating her.
La Rochefoucauld

Love and hatred are natural exaggerators.
Hebrew Proverb

He who loves you will make you weep, but he who hates you may make you laugh.
Spanish Proverb

Lover


"You are the greatest lover I have ever had."

"Well, I practice a lot when I'm alone."

Woody Allen

I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon

One minute is a lover high atop a tree, the next minute down among the briars is he, now up, now down, as a bucket in a well.
Geoffrey Chaucer, modern translation

It is easier to be a lover than a husband, for the same reason it is more difficult to show a ready wit all day long than to produce an occasional bon mot.
Honoré de Balzac

There was never proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said that it is impossible to love and to be wise.
Francis Bacon

Lovers complain of their hearts, but the distemper is in their heads.
Thomas Fuller

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
Balzac

A woman's little affections always fool her lover, and he goes into ecstasies over things which only make her husband shrug his shoulders.
Balzac

The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his maiden in her acceptance of him. She was Heaven whilst he pursued her as a star; she cannot be Heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.
R. W. Emerson

Loyalty


There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Luck


Of course not, but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Niels Bohr, when asked if he believed a horseshoe above the door would bring good luck

Luck sometimes visits a fool, but never sits down with him.
German Proverb

Luck is one-half of success.
Hindu Proverb

He who is lucky passes for a wise man, too.
Italian Proverb

To wait for luck is the same as waiting for death.
Japanese Proverb

Luck never gives; it only lends.
Swedish Proverb

Lukewarm


Lukewarmness I account a sin
As great in love as in religion.
Abraham Cowley

Lunatic


Every lunatic thinks all other men are crazy.
Publilius Syrus

The various admirable movements in which I have been engaged have always developed among their members a large lunatic fringe.
Theodore Roosevelt

Lust


Do not lust in your heart after her beauty or let her captivate you with her eyes.
Proverbs 6:25

Turn away your eyes from a shapely woman, and do not gaze at beauty belonging to another; many have been seduced by a woman's beauty, and by it passion is kindled like a fire.
Ecclesiasticus 9:8

She [Elizabeth I] hath abused her body, against God's laws, to the disgrace of princely majesty and the whole nation's reproach, by unspeakable and incredible variety of lust, which modesty suffereth not to be remembered.
William Cardinal Allen

I'll come no more behind your scenes, David [Garrick]; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.
Samuel Johnson

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul.
1 Peter 2:11 KJV

Lust is an appetite of the mind by which temporal goods are preferred to eternal goods.
St. Augustine

The sages figured lust in the form of a satyr; of. shape, part human, part bestial; to signify that the followers of it prostitute the reason of a man to pursue the appetites of a beast.
Richard Steele

Luxury


Faint-hearted men are the fruit of luxurious countries. The same soil never produces both delicacies and heroes.
Herodotus

People have declaimed against luxury for 2000 years, in verse and in prose, and people have always delighted in it.
Voltaire

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
H. D. Thoreau

Lying


In time and place a harmless lie is a great deal better than a hurtful truth.
Roger Ascham

Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!
Shakespeare

A man had rather have a hundred lies told of him than one truth which he does not wish should be told.
Samuel Johnson

The most common sort of lie is that by which a man deceives himself: the deception of others is a relatively rare offence.
F. W. Nietzsche

Better a lie that soothes than a truth that hurts.
Czech Proverb

Lyre


It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.
Saint Jerome

Machine


The increase of net incomes, estimated in commodities, which is always the consequence of improved machinery, will lead to new savings and accumulations. These savings are annual, and must soon create a fund much greater than the gross revenue originally lost by the discovery of the machine, when the demand for labor will be as great as before.
David Ricardo

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
Elbert Hubbard

Macintosh


I keep vaguely wondering what Macs [Macintosh computers] are like, but the ones I've seen spend too much time being friendly.
Terry Pratchett

Madness


There's a pinch of the madman in every great man.
French Proverb

I suppose it is much more comfortable to be mad and not know it, than to be sane and have one's doubts.
G. B. Burgin

[Imagination] does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad … but creative artists very seldom.
G. K. Chesterton

Oh, that way madness lies. Let me shun that.
William Shakespeare

Collins languished some years under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it. … He was for some time confined in a house of lunatics until death came to his relief.
Samuel Johnson

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
Rudyard Kipling

There is a pleasure sure
In being mad which none but madmen know.
John Dryden

We all are born mad. Some remain so.
Samuel Beckett

Avarice, ambition, lust, etc., are nothing but species of madness.
John Locke

There are said to be pleasures in madness known only to madmen.
Samuel Johnson

Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
John Dryden

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't.
Shakespeare

It is better to be mad with the rest of the world than to be wise alone.
Baltasar Gracian

His madness was not of the head, but heart.
Byron

Magnanimity


Magnanimity becomes a man of fortune.
Publilius Syrus

Majorian


[Majorian] presents the welcome discovery of a great and heroic character, such as sometimes arise, in a degenerate age, to vindicate the honor of the human species.
Edward Gibbon

Majority


Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
Mark Twain

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
J. C. F. Schiller

The majority, compose them how you will, are a herd, and not a very nice one.
William Hazlitt

A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men understand it.
H. D. Thoreau

The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
Herbert Spencer

One, with God, is always a majority, but many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.
Thomas B. Reed

Majority And Minority


When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
Eugene V. Debs

The thing we have to fear in this country, to my way of thinking, is the influence of organized minorities, because somehow or other the great majority does not seem to organize. They seem to feel that they are going to be effective because of their known strength, but they give no expression of it.
Alfred E. Smith

In all companies there are more fools than wise men, and the greater part always get the better of the wiser.
Rabelais

On a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.
James Madison

Malice


Malice drinketh up the greater part of its own poison.
Thomas Fuller

Malice will always find bad motives for good actions.
Thomas Jefferson

Malignity


That pure malignity can exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is atheism; it is the last profanation.
R. W. Emerson

Mammon


Mammon has two properties; it makes us secure, first, when it goes well with us, and then we live without fear of God at all; secondly, when it goes ill with us, then we tempt God, fly from him, and seek after another God.
Martin Luther

Man


Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers heaven.
Alphonse de Lamartine

That man is an aggressive creature will hardly be disputed. With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate habitually destroys members of its own species.
Anthony Storr

Cursed is every one who places his hope in man.
Saint Augustine

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.
Abraham Lincoln

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Mark Twain

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.
H. L. Mencken

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
Mark Twain

Every man is as God made him, ay, and often worse.
Miguel de Cervantes

Man differs from the animal only by a little; most men throw that little away.
Mencius

Mortals, born of woman,
are of few days and full of trouble.
They springs up like flowers and wither away;
like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.
Job 14:1-2

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Mark Twain

I know in my heart that man is good.
That what is right will always eventually triumph.
And there's purpose and worth to each and every life.
Ronald Reagan

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
Gene Fowler

Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
Edward Gibbon

Neither conservatives nor humorists believe man is good. But left-wingers do.
P. J. O'Rourke

In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.
Edward Gibbon

For this is the tragedy of man — circumstances change, but he does not.
Niccolò Machiavelli

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
George Bernard Shaw

[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.
Edward Gibbon

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
Bertrand Russell

I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.
William Shakespeare

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne

With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.
Pliny the Elder

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.
Blaise Pascal

What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god!
Shakespeare

Man is by nature a political animal.
Aristotle

Man was born to mourn and to be wretched; this is the condition of all below the stars, and whoever endeavours to oppose it, acts in contradiction to the will of Heaven.
Samuel Johnson, from a story in the Rambler

The state of man: inconstancy, boredom, anxiety.
Blaise Pascal

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble earthworm, depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error, the glory and the shame of the universe.
Blaise Pascal

Everything is good when it leaves the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Out of wood so crooked and perverse as that which man is made of, nothing absolutely straight can ever be wrought.
Immanuel Kant

Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
William Wordsworth

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.
Charles Caleb Colton

I believe in the theoretical benevolence, and the practical malignity of man.
William Hazlitt

Is man an ape or an angel? Now I am on the side the angels.
Benjamin Disraeli

Mankind is in general more easily disposed to censure than to admiration.
Samuel Johnson

Let him think I am more man than I am and I will be so.
Ernest Hemingway

Of all the creatures that creep and breathe on earth there is none more wretched than man.
Homer

At his best man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice, he is the worst.
Aristotle

Man is a social animal.
Seneca

Man is a reasoning animal. (Rationale animal est homo.)
Seneca

Lions do not fight with one another; serpents do not attack serpents, nor do the wild monsters of the deep rage against their like. But most of the calamities of man are caused by his fellow-man.
Pliny the Elder

Some [men] are good, some are middling, but the greater part are bad.
Martial

I say to myself in the morning: before the day is out I shall encounter the busybody, the ingrate, the bully, the traitor, the man of envy, the bad neighbor.
Marcus Aurelius

Man is nothing else than … a sack of dung, the food of worms.
St. Bernard

Speaking generally, men are ungrateful, fickle, hypocritical, fearful of danger, and covetous of gain.
Niccolò Machiavelli

We have altogether a confounded, corrupt, and poisoned nature, both in body and soul; throughout the whole of man is nothing that is good.
Martin Luther

The true science and study of man is man.
Pierre Charron

What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?
Shakespeare

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.
Cervantes

I wonder men dare trust themselves with men.
Shakespeare

Man's state implies a necessary curse;
When not himself, he's mad; when most himself, he's worse.
Francis Quarles

Man is a watch, wound up at first, but never Wound up again: once down, he's down for ever.
Robert Herrick

Man is neither an angel nor a brute, and the very attempt to raise him to the level of the former sinks him to that of the latter.
Blaise Pascal

Men are but children of a larger growth.
John Dryden

Trust not a man; we are by nature false,
Dissembling, subtle, cruel and unconstant.
Thomas Otway

The most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.
Jonathan Swift

For what are men who grasp at praise sublime,
But bubbles on the rapid stream of time,
That rise, and fall, that swell, and are no more,
Born, and forgot, ten thousand in an hour?
Edward Young

We are an inferior part of the creation of God. There are natural appearances of our being in a state of degradation.
Joseph Butler

Ah! how unjust to nature, and himself,
Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man.
Edward Young

Mankind are very odd creatures: one half censure what they practise, the other half practise what they censure; the rest always say and do as they ought.
Benjamin Franklin

Alas! we are ridiculous animals.
Horace Walpole

Man originates in muck, wades a while in muck, makes muck, and in the end returns to muck.
J. C. F. Schiller

The mass of men are neither wise nor good.
John Jay

Take mankind in general: they are vicious, their passions may be operated upon.
Alexander Hamilton

Man must make the angels laugh.
Charles Lamb

Thou knowest how great is man
Thou knowest his imbecility.
P. B. Shelley

[Man is] half dust, half deity.
Byron

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.
William Hazlitt

Man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
Alphonse de Lamartine

If a man is not rising upwards to be an angel, depend upon it, he is sinking downwards to be a devil. He cannot stop at the beast. The most savage of men are not beasts; they are worse, a great deal worse.
S. T. Coleridge

We may pause in sorrow and silence over the depths of darkness that are in man, if we rejoice in the heights of purer vision he has attained to.
Thomas Carlyle

I like man, but not men.
R. W. Emerson

Man is a burlesque of what he should be.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Man is at bottom a wild and terrible animal. We know him only as what we call civilization has tamed and trained him; hence we are alarmed by the occasional breaking out of his true nature. But whenever the locks and chains of law and order are cast off, and anarchy comes in, he shows himself for what he really is.
Arthur Schopenhauer

What creature else
Conceives the circle, and then walks the square?
Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good?
E. B. Browning

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.
J. S. Mill

We have the aspirations of creators and the propensities of quadrupeds.
W. Winwood Reade

Man is not an ox, who, when he has eaten his fill, lies down to chew the cud; he is the daughter of the horse leech, who constantly asks for more.
Henry George

Man, relatively speaking, is the most botched of all the animals and the sickliest, and he has wandered the most dangerously from his instincts.
F. W. Nietzsche

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
Mark Twain

Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Oscar Wilde

Men, my dear, are very queer animals — a mixture of horse-nervousness, ass-stubbornness and camel-malice.
T. H. Huxley

Man is the only animal that eats when he is not hungry, drinks when he is not thirsty, and makes love at all seasons.
Author unidentified

There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it ill behooves any of us
To find fault with the rest of us.
Author unidentified

Men are carried by horses, fed by cattle, clothed by sheep, defended by dogs, imitated by monkeys, and eaten by worms.
Hungarian Proverb

Man is tougher than iron, harder than stone, and more delicate than the rose.
Turkish Proverb

A man is what he is, not what he was.
Yiddish Proverb

Man, said the Mother, is the only Beast who kills that which he does not devour, and this quality makes him so much a benefactor to our species [vultures].
Samuel Johnson

I believe man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he, alone among creatures, has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner

Mankind


Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this — that you are dreadfully like other people.
James Russell Lowell

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban

Most human beings have an absolute and infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley

We should expect the best and the worst from mankind, as from the weather.
Vauvenargues

One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.
John Steinbeck

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
Mark Twain

To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The fall of man stands a lie before Beethoven, a truth before Hitler.
Gregory Corso

At very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a small package.
Harry Emerson Fosdick

[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.
Edward Gibbon

We are but dust and shadow.
Horace

Never expecting to find perfection in men, and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce with my contemporaries, I have found much human virtue.
Edmund Burke

As I know more of mankind, I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man, upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Samuel Johnson

Drinking when we are not thirsty and making love all year round, madam; that is all there is to distinguish us from other animals.

(Boire sans soif et faire l'amour en tout temps, madame, il n'y a que ça qui nous distingue des autres bêtes.)

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais

What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.
Psalms 8:4-5

Broadly speaking, human beings may be divided into three classes: those who are toiled to death, those who are worried to death, and those who are bored to death.
Winston Churchill

To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind.
Lord Byron

O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
Thomas Carlyle

Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot

Manliness


I will have only those glorious manly pleasures of being very drunk and very slovenly.
William Wycherley

Manners


Dear Miss Manners: Please list some tactful ways of removing a man's saliva from your face.
Gentle Reader: Please list some decent ways of acquiring a man's saliva on your face.
Miss Manners

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide the lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.
Robert A. Heinlein

If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.
Dave Barry

Let no one who wishes to receive agreeable impressions of American manners, commence their travels in a Mississippi steamboat.
Frances [Milton] Trollope

Manners go on deteriorating.
Plautus

Foul words corrupt good manners.
John Palsgrave

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is mockable at the court.
Shakespeare

Men's evil manners live in brass: their virtues
We write in water.
Shakespeare and John Fletcher

You must practise
The manners of the time if you intend
To have favor from it.
Philip Massinger

Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is the best bred in the company.
Jonathan Swift

Never seem wiser or more learned than the people you are with.
Lord Chesterfield

Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.
Edmund Burke

Manners are the happy ways of doing things.
R. W. Emerson

Many


Many a little makes a mickle.
William Camden

Marijuana


Marijuana is … self-punishing. It makes you acutely sensitive and in this world, what worse punishment could there be?
P. J. O'Rourke

Mark Antony


As Helen was to the Trojans, so has that man been to this republic — the cause of war, the cause of mischief, the cause of ruin.
Cicero

Market


The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
John Maynard Keynes

The markets are moved by animal spirits, and not by reason.
John Maynard Keynes (paraphrased)

Markets are too complex to manipulate beneficially.
John Stossel

Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.
Charlie Munger

A man must sell his ware after the rates of the market.
John Ray

Marriage


No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes she were not.
H. L. Mencken

Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up.
Joseph Barth

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.
Samuel Johnson

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell; it is simply purgatory.
Abraham Lincoln

When there's marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.
Benjamin Franklin

When a girl marries, she exchanges the attentions of many men for the inattention of one.
Helen Rowland

Marriage is a mistake every man should make.
George Jessel

As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.
Socrates (Attributed)

A good husband should be deaf and a good wife blind.
French Proverb

A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

By all means marry: If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.
Socrates

Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man.
Joubert

When should a man marry? A young man, not yet; an elder man, not at all.
Sir Francis Bacon

I like being single. I'm always there when I need me.
Art Leo

Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in?
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.
Benjamin Franklin

Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
Oscar Wilde

The average woman must inevitably view her actual husband with a certain disdain; he is anything but her ideal. In consequence, she cannot help feeling that her children are cruelly handicapped by the fact that he is their father.
H. L. Mencken

'Tis more blessed to give than receive; for example, wedding presents.
H. L. Mencken

We were happily married for eight months. Unfortunately, we were married for four and a half years.
Nick Faldo

What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he doesn't love her.
Oscar Wilde

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
Sacha Guitry

When I was a young man, I vowed never to marry until I found the ideal woman. Well, I found her — but alas, she was waiting for the ideal man.
Robert Schuman

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
George Bernard Shaw

I belong to Bridegrooms Anonymous. Whenever I feel like getting married, they send over a lady in a housecoat and hair curlers to burn my toast for me.
Dick Martin

The hardest task in a girl's life is to prove to a man that his intentions are serious.
Helen Rowland

It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.
George Bernard Shaw

A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted.
Helen Rowland

Men are horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably conceited when they are not.
Oscar Wilde

Marriage is the price men pay for sex, sex is the price women pay for marriage.
Author unidentified

I think of my wife, and I think of Lot,
And I think of the lucky break he got.
William Cole

We sleep in separate rooms, we have dinner apart, we take separate vacations — we're doing everything we can to keep our marriage together.
Rodney Dangerfield

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
Phyllis Diller

I never knew what real happiness was until I got married. And by then it was too late.
Max Kauffmann

When a man brings his wife flowers for no reason — there's a reason.
Molly McGee

Take my wife … please!
Henny Youngman

Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

If I ever marry, it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.
H. L. Mencken

I respect the institution of marriage. I have always thought that every woman should marry — and no man.
Benjamin Disraeli

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage.
Samuel Butler

I don't see why I have to make one man miserable when I can make so many men happy.
Ellyn Mustard

Marriage is the death of hope.
Woody Allen

Sex alleviates tension. Marriage causes it.
Woody Allen

It should be a very happy marriage; they are both so much in love with him.
Irene Thomas

There's nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about.
Oscar Wilde

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.
Oscar Wilde

I think men who have a pierced ear are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought jewelry.
Rita Rudner

I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.
Rita Rudner

When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
Oscar Wilde

Metellus Numidicus, the censor, acknowledged to the Roman people, in a public oration, that had kind nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion; and he could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty.
Edward Gibbon

But those who marry will face many troubles in this life, and I want to spare you this.
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:28

But a married man is concerned about the affairs of this world — how he can please his wife — and his interests are divided.
St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:33,34

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
Genesis 2:24

In the most rigorous [Roman] laws, a wife was condemned to support a gamester, a drunkard, or a libertine, unless he were guilty of homicide, poison, or sacrilege, in which cases the marriage, as it should seem, might have been dissolved by the hand of the executioner.
Edward Gibbon

A society in which marriage is encouraged and industry prevails soon repairs the accidental losses of pestilence and war.
Edward Gibbon

My wife doesn't care what I do when I'm away, as long as I don't have a good time.
Lee Trevino

I've traveled the world and been about everywhere you can imagine. There's not anything I'm scared of except my wife.
Lee Trevino

A man may be a fool and not know it — but not if he is married.
H. L. Mencken

What's the secret to a happy marriage? Lots of square feet [i.e. a big house] and 2 Tivos.
Adam Carolla (paraphrased)

You cannot pluck roses without fear of thorns,
Nor enjoy fair wife without danger of horns.
Author unidentified

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last few years to have breakfast together but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.
Winston Churchill

I am about to be married — and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.
Lord Byron

The desire to get married is a basic and primal instinct in women. It's followed by another basic and primal instinct: the desire to be single again.
Nora Ephron

The husband who wants a happy marriage should learn to keep his mouth shut and his cheque book open.
Groucho Marx (Attributed)

Gosh, maybe that's what true marriage is: two people who want each other to die.
Family Guy

[All] whom I have mentioned failed to obtain happiness, for want of considering that marriage is the strictest tie of perpetual friendship; that there can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity; and that he must expect to be wretched who pays to beauty, riches, or politeness that regard which only virtue and piety can claim.
Samuel Johnson

That old saying which the peasants call the bachelors' prayer: "I pray thee, good Lord, that I may not be married. But if I am to be married, that I may not be a cuckold. But if I am to be a cuckold, that I may not know. But if I am to know, that I may not mind."
Isak Dinesen

Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.
G. K. Chesterton

Marriage is fine as an institution, but bad as a habit.
Buster Keaton

The stable monogamous marriage is one of the most fundamentally creative inventions of Judeo-Christian civilization.
Paul Johnson

To destroy marriage law is a step towards destroying the rule of law itself.
Paul Johnson

Under an oak, in stormy weather,
I joined this rogue and whore together;
And none but he who rules the thunder
Can put this rogue and whore asunder.
Jonathan Swift, after marrying a couple under an oak

It [marriage] happens as with cages: the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair of getting out.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

One was never married, and that's his hell; another is, and that's his plague.
Robert Burton

There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry. Look where I will, I see that it is so; and I feel that it must be so, when I consider that it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.
Jane Austen

To be so bent on marriage, to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation, is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil; but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest.
Jane Austen

I would rather be teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.
Jane Austen

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor — which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.
Jane Austen

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.
Samuel Johnson

It is better to marry than to burn with passion.
1 Corinthians 7:9

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.
Matthew 19:6

She advised me to prosecute my victories, and time would certainly bring me a captive who might deserve the honour of being enchained for ever.
Samuel Johnson

Marriage is the grave or tomb of wit.
Margaret Cavendish

Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they can not be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them.
Sydney Smith

They took me from my wife, and to save trouble
I wed again, and made the error double.
John Clare

I soon began to find that they were spreading for me the nets of matrimony.
Samuel Johnson

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
Jane Austen

Tho' marriage makes man and wife one flesh, it leaves 'em still two fools.
William Congreve

Sharper: Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure: Married in haste, we may repent at leisure.
Setter: Some by experience find those words misplaced: At leisure married, they repent in haste.
William Congreve

I could find it in my heart to marry thee, purely to be rid of thee.
William Congreve

I would be married, but I'd have no wife,
I would be married to a single life.
Richard Crashaw

Wedlock, indeed, hath oft compared been
To public feasts where meet a public rout,
Where they that are without would fain go in
And they that are within would fain go out.
John Davies

No artist should ever marry … if ever you do have to marry, marry a girl who is more in love with your art than with you.
Frederick Delius

To marry is to halve your rights and double your duties.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children but that children produce adults.
Peter De Vries

Marriage must ceaselessly combat a monster that devours everything: habit.
Honoré de Balzac

Never shall I say that marriage brings more joy than pain.
Euripides

He who would marry is on the road to repentance.
Philemon

Marriage, to tell the truth, is an evil, but it is a necessary evil.
Menander

The first bond of society is marriage; the next, children; then the family.
Cicero

If thou wouldst marry wisely, marry thy equal.
Ovid

If you are really devoted to one woman, then bow your head and yield your neck to the yoke.
Juvenal

No man is so virtuous as to marry a wife only to have children.
Martin Luther

Amongst all the bonds of benevolence and goodwill there is none more honorable, ancient or honest than marriage.
George Pettie

He that marries for wealth sells his liberty.
George Herbert

One year of joy, another of comfort, and all the rest of content.
John Ray, a marriage wish

Of all actions of a man's life, his marriage does least concern other people; yet of all actions of our life, 'tis most meddled with by other people.
John Selden

Every man plays the fool once in his life, but to marry is playing the fool all one's life long.
William Congreve

Marry first, and love will come afterwards.
Anonymous

Martin Luther


The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius.
S. T. Coleridge

Martyrdom


The tyrant dies and his rule is over; the martyr dies and his rule begins.
Søren Kierkegaard

To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon conjecture.
Anatole France

Although always prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it should be postponed.
Winston Churchill

Marxism


Capitalism seems to have recovered its entrepreneurial vigor. Marxist socialism appears to be dying, except perhaps in that home of lost causes, the university campus.
Paul Johnson

No Marxist ever seems to have held sensible views on agriculture, perhaps because neither Marx nor Lenin was really interested in it. Marxism is an essentially urban religion.
Paul Johnson

There is, indeed, no place for mercy in determinist systems such as Marxism. Mercy, like free will, is an anti-determinist idea.
Paul Johnson

Marxism and Freudianism remain in the witch-doctor stage of myth because they dodge refutation by reformulation, osmosis and imprecision.
Paul Johnson

Marxism has tremendous appeal in the Third World for exactly the same reason it had tremendous appeal to me in college. It gives you something to believe in when what surrounds you seems unbelievable. It gives you someone to blame besides yourself. It's theoretically tidy. And, best of all, it's fully imaginary so it can never be disproved.
P. J. O'Rourke

Marxist


All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Karl Marx

Mask


Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Oscar Wilde

Masking


The world, in its best state, is nothing more than a larger assembly of beings, combining to counterfeit happiness which they do not feel, employing every art and contrivance to embellish life, and to hide their real condition from the eyes of one another.
Samuel Johnson

Mathematics


Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.
Bertrand Russell

I have discovered a most remarkable proof, but this margin is too narrow to contain it. [Variation: I have discovered a truly marvellous demonstration (of this general theorem) which this margin is too narrow to contain.]
Pierre de Fermat

If in other sciences we should arrive at certainty without doubt and truth without error, it behoves us to place the foundations of knowledge in mathematics.
Roger Bacon

Means


Man must live by his means, and neither mope nor moan.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

It is common, says Bacon, to desire the end without enduring the means.
Samuel Johnson

Media


Remember, son, many a good story has been ruined by over-verification.
James Gordon Bennett

The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing but man's failures.
Earl Warren

For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news.
Gloria Borger

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Aleister Crowley

The violence of print is often the prelude to the violence of blood.
Paul Johnson

Media power today, though growing, is essentially blind, negative, destructive, and irresponsible.
Paul Johnson

It [the press] has ceased altogether to be independent and has become docilely official.
H. L. Mencken

Medicine


The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard and rescue them from the consequences of their vices. The physician does not preach repentance; he offers absolution.
H. L. Mencken

… one of those medicines, which will destroy, if it happens not to cure.
Samuel Johnson

In medicine, sins of commission are mortal, sins of omission venial.
Theodore Tronchin

Mediocrity


Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
Joseph Heller

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
Somerset Maugham

Perseverance, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

The chief characteristic of our time is that the mediocre mind, aware of its own mediocrity, has the boldness to assert the rights of mediocrity and to impose them everywhere.
Ortega y Gasset

Among many parallels which men of imagination have drawn between the natural and moral state of the world, it has been observed that happiness, as well as virtue, consists in mediocrity; that to avoid every extreme is necessary, even to him who has no other care than to pass through the present state with ease and safety; and that the middle path is the road of security, on either side of which are not only the pitfalls of vice, but the precipices of ruin.
Samuel Johnson

Medium


There is nothing upon the face of the earth so insipid as a medium. Give me love or hate! a friend that will go to jail for me, or an enemy that will run me through the body!
Fanny Burney

Meeting


Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
J. K. Galbraith

The human race is divided into two groups: those who like to get on with it and those who like to attend meetings.
Paul Johnson

Melancholy


There is no doubt that a man may appear very gay in company who is sad at heart. His merriment is like the sound of drums and trumpets in a battle, to drown the groans of the wounded and dying.
Samuel Johnson

Merciful powers!
Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose.
Shakespeare

Melancholy, indeed, should be diverted by every means but drinking.
Samuel Johnson

Employment, sir, and hardships prevent melancholy.
Samuel Johnson

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
Sydney Smith

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Memory


God gave us memory that we might have roses in December.
James M. Barrie

I never forgive, but I always forget.
Arthur James Balfour

It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.
Mark Twain

Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

For men use, if they have an evil turn, to write it in marble: and whoso doth us a good turn we write it in dust.
Sir Thomas More

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.
Lewis Carroll

Men


Men become old, but they never become good.
Oscar Wilde

A man may be so much of everything that he is nothing of anything.
Samuel Johnson

Some men are alive only because it is illegal to kill them.
Author unidentified

Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of middle-aged men.
Kin Hubbard

Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.
Oscar Wilde

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
Frederick Douglass

MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY
Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.
Sir Ernest Shackleton

… any that pisseth against the wall.
1 Samuel 25:22, example of how the KJV refers to men

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles Mackay

Small things make base men proud.
Shakespeare

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever;
One foot in sea, and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Shakespeare

Men are but children of a larger growth;
Our appetites as apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving too, and full as vain.
John Dryden

Look round the habitable world! how few
Know their own good; or knowing it, pursue.
John Dryden, translation of Juvenal

Arthur, compelled by masculine instinct, leaned over and frowned at the contents of the case, exactly the way countless males have frowned at household appliances, plumbing, car engines, and all manner of other mechanical objects that they did not begin to understand.
Dave Barry

Men And Women


Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.
Alan McKay

I dress for women — and I undress for men.
Angie Dickinson

The average girl would rather have beauty than brains because she knows the average man can see much better than he can think.
Ladies' Home Journal

She was not a woman likely to settle for equality when sex gave her an advantage.
Anthony Delano

Men have a much better time of it than women; for one thing, they marry later; for another thing, they die earlier.
H. L. Mencken

A man is a person who will pay two dollars for a one-dollar item he wants. A woman will pay one dollar for a two-dollar item she doesn't want.
William Binger

I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

A woman wants a man who will satisfy her every want and need. A man wants every woman to satisfy his one want and need.
Author unidentified

I married beneath me — all women do.
Lady Nancy Astor

A wise woman will always let her husband have her way.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife.
Prince Philip

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
William Congreve

Disguise our bondage as we will,
'Tis woman, woman, rules us still.
Thomas Moore

'Tis strange what a man may do, and a woman yet think him an angel.
William Thackeray

A woman is a woman until the day she dies, but a man's a man only as long as he can.
Moms Mabley

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both.
Samuel Butler

Lady Nancy Astor: Winston, if you were my husband, I'd put poison in your coffee.
Winston Churchill: Nancy, if you were my wife, I'd drink it.
Lady Nancy Astor and Winston Churchill

Let thy maidservant be faithful, strong, and homely.
Benjamin Franklin

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.
Richard Roeper

Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.
Kipling

To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girl friends.
Benjamin Franklin

Women sometimes forgive a man who forces the opportunity, but never a man who misses one.
Charles De Talleyrand-Perigord

I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.
Robert Mueller

I don't mind living in a man's world as long as I can be a woman in it.
Marilyn Monroe

Whether women are better than men I cannot say — but I can say they are certainly no worse.
Golda Meir

A man's womenfolk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.
H. L. Mencken

Whatever women do, they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
Charlotte Whitton

George Moore unexpectedly pinched my behind. I felt rather honored that my behind should have drawn the attention of the great master of English prose.
Ilka Chase

She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint — the universal act of women to proclaim ownership.
O. Henry

I've been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she'll kill me.
Henny Youngman

Most women set out to try to change a man, and when they have changed him they do not like him.
Marlene Dietrich (Attributed)

On one issue at least, men and women agree: they both distrust women.
H. L. Mencken (Attributed)

Women do not like timid men. Cats do not like prudent rats.
H. L. Mencken

Misogynist, n. A man who hates women as much as women hate one another.
H. L. Mencken

The gods have sent medicines for the venom of serpents, but there is no medicine for a bad woman. She is more noxious than the viper, or than fire itself.
Euripides

Woman, like good wine, is a sweet poison.
French Proverb

Women are like death: they pursue those who flee from them, and flee from those who pursue them.
German Proverb

A thousand men can easily live together in peace, but two women, even if they be sisters, can never do so.
Hindu Proverb

A man always blames the woman who fools him. In the same way he blames the door he walks into in the dark.
H. L. Mencken

To attract men, I wear a perfume called "New Car Interior."
Rita Rudner

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.
H. L. Mencken

Women have simple tastes. They can get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H. L. Mencken

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating. To the average man, doomed to some banal drudgery all his life long, they offer the only grand hazard that he ever encounters. Take them away, and his existence would be as flat and secure as that of a moo-cow.
H. L. Mencken

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his.
Oscar Wilde

Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship.
Oscar Wilde

King Solomon loved many strange women.
1 Kings 11:1 (KJV)

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays: fear.
Dave Barry

Women in general seem to me to be appreciably more intelligent than men. A great many of them suffer in silence from the imbecilities of their husbands.
H. L. Mencken

In every age and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, of the two sexes, has usurped the powers of the state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.
Edward Gibbon

All other men govern their wives; but we command all other men, and our wives us.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

Women [in ancient Rome] were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians; a sex created to please and obey was never supposed to have attained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law.
Edward Gibbon

[Thales] thanked fortune for three things: first of all, that he had been born a man and not a beast; secondly, that he was a man and not a woman; and thirdly, that he was a Greek and not a barbarian.
Diogenes Laertius

Women don't want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think — in a deeper voice.
Bill Cosby

No one attached to the traditional image of authoritarian patriarchy could imagine the consternation men endure. They have suffered an unexpected blow to the emotional quality of their lives. Its gravity has not been calculated. They have far fewer reliable links than women to the classic currents of family life. They are alienated not only, as Marx said, from the means of production but also from the means of reproduction.
Lionel Tiger

I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.
Mark Twain

God created men and critics.
Author unidentified

Only the stupefying ignorance of young women prevents them from comprehending the stupefying emptiness of the men who cluster round them.
Richard Brookhiser

The young women who attract so much attention never change: They are all stupid. They have at best only the crudest notions of their own power, and never calculate motives or consequences. Giving a young woman a young woman's body makes as much sense as giving ten teenagers Lamborghinis and telling them to drive in figure 8s around a parking lot.
Richard Brookhiser

That is the really great thing about being an adult male, once you get married and have children the whole decision-making process is taken out of your hands, and I for one am extremely grateful.
P. J. O'Rourke

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Rudyard Kipling

My husband said he needed more space, so I locked him outside.
Rosanne Barr

Never marry a man who hates his mother, because he'll end up hating you.
Jill Bennett

I've never yet met a man who could look after me. I don't need a husband. What I need is a wife.
Joan Collins

Follow a shadow, it still flies you,
Seem to fly it, it will pursue:
So court a mistress, she denies you;
Let her alone, she will court you.
Say are not women truly, then,
Styl'd but the shadows of us men?
Ben Jonson

I finally figured out what men want. Men want a woman they can be incredibly intimate with … who will leave them alone.
Author unidentified

Man is the one who desires, woman the one who is desired. This is woman's entire but decisive advantage. Through his passion nature has given man into woman's hands, and the woman who does not know how to make him her subject, her slave, her toy, and how to betray him with a smile in the end is not wise.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from woman, and is confirmed only by other men. Feminist fantasies about the ideal “sensitive” male have failed. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all.
Camille Paglia

Men are looking for maternal solace in women, and that's the nature of heterosexuality. Now you tell me, who really has all the power?
Camille Paglia

It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong.
Camille Paglia

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.
Author unidentified

If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
Red Green

That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man,
If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.
Shakespeare

But as the faculty of writing has been chiefly a masculine endowment, the reproach of making the world miserable has been always thrown upon the women, and the grave and the merry have equally thought themselves at liberty to conclude either with declamatory complaints, or satirical censures, of female folly or fickleness, ambition or cruelty, extravagance or lust.
Samuel Johnson

Women love scallywags, but some marry them and then try to make them wear a blazer.
David Bailey

A pretty girl is like a melody
That haunts you night and day.
Irving Berlin

He that tastes woman, ruin meets.
John Gay

When lovely woman stoops to folly,
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy?
What art can wash her guilt away?
Oliver Goldsmith

Women naturally expect defence and protection from a lover or a husband.
Samuel Johnson

Men build bridges and throw railroads across deserts, and yet they contend successfully that the job of sewing on a button is beyond them. Accordingly, they don't have to sew buttons.
Heywood Broun

But no wonder if a fool finds his way into folly
and be wiped of his wits by womanly guile —
it's the way of the world. Adam fell because of a woman,
and Solomon because of several, and as for Samson,
Delilah was his downfall, and afterwards David
was bamboozled by Bathsheba and bore the grief.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The man's desire is for the woman; but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

It is not in giving life but in risking life that man is raised above the animal; that is why superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills.
Simone de Beauvoir

But I do think we need to explore the commitment problem, which has caused many women to mistakenly conclude that men, as a group, have the emotional maturity of hamsters. This is not the case. A hamster is MUCH more capable of making a lasting commitment to a woman, especially if she gives it those little food pellets. Whereas a guy, in a relationship, will consume the pellets of companionship, and he will run on the exercise wheel of lust; but as soon as he senses that the door of commitment is about to close and trap him in the wire cage of true intimacy, he'll squirm out, scamper across the kitchen floor of uncertainty and hide under the refrigerator of Non-Readiness.
Dave Barry

It is only a man here and there who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own family.
John Stuart Mill

So long as a man desires women his mind is in bondage, as a calf is in bondage to its mother.
The Dhammapada

Men are more eloquent than women made, But women are more powerful to persuade.
Thomas Randolph

O woman! lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.
Thomas Otway

What hogs men turn when they grow weary of women!
John Vanbrugh

If the heart of a man is depress'd with cares,
The mist is dispell'd when a woman appears.
John Gay

It is the man and woman united that makes the complete human being. Separate, she wants his force of body and strength of reason; he, her softness, sensibility and acute discernment. Together, they are most likely to succeed in the world.
Benjamin Franklin

Women have a perpetual envy of our vices; they are less vicious than we, not from choice, but because we restrict them.
Samuel Johnson

The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other.
Mary Wollstonecraft

The old age of women is sadder and more lonely than of men.
Jean Paul Richter

Man is the hunter; woman is his game; … We hunt them for the beauty of their skins.
Alfred Tennyson

Man has his will, — but woman has her way.
O. W. Holmes

Men are deceived about women because they forget that they and women do not speak the same language.
H. F. Amiel

Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness.
Charles Darwin

After a quarrel between a man and a woman the man suffers chiefly from the thought that he has wounded the woman; the woman suffers from the thought that she has not wounded the man enough.
F. W. Nietzsche

Man is for woman a means: the end is always the child.
F. W. Nietzsche

In revenge as in love woman is always more barbarous than man.
F. W. Nietzsche

The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one.
George Bernard Shaw

If a woman doesn't chase a man a little, she doesn't love him.
E. W. Howe

If a man has sworn to injure you, you may sleep at night; if a woman, keep awake.
Arab Proverb

The difference between a man and a woman is that a man looks forward, and a woman remembers.
Author unidentified

Therefore you must realize that women rule over you! "Do you not labor and toil, and bring everything and give it to women?"
1 Esdras 4:22

Love enters a man through his eyes; a woman, through her ears.
Polish Proverb

Outdoors for man and dog; indoors for woman and cat.
Russian Proverb

Well, the old theory was "marry an older man because they're more mature." But the new theory is "men don't mature — marry a young one."
Rita Rudner

Mencken, H. L.


He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German.
John Derbyshire

Mencken was a German nationalist, an insecure small-town petit bourgeois, a childless hypochondriac with what seems on the evidence of these pages to have been a room-temperature libido, an antihumanist as much as an atheist, a man prone to the hyperbole and sensationalism he distrusted in others and not as easy with the modern world and its many temptations and diversions as he liked it to be supposed.
Christopher Hitchens

Mercy


Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.
Henry Fielding

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
George Eliot

Merit


Where he falls short, 'tis Nature's fault alone;
Where he succeeds, the merit's all his own.
Charles Churchill, of the actor, Thomas Sheridan

Merriment


Merriment is always the effect of a sudden impression. The jest which is expected is already destroyed.
Samuel Johnson

Messiah


But waiting for a messiah is a long business and you get many fake ones.
Ernest Hemingway

Mexico


Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.
Porfirio Diaz, attributed

Middle Class


There is nothing morally unhealthy about the existence of a middle class in society. No one need feel ashamed of being bourgeois, of pursuing a bourgeois way of life, or of adhering to bourgeois cultural and moral standards. That it should be necessary to assert such a proposition is a curious commentary on our age.
Paul Johnson

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
Aristotle

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.
George Bernard Shaw

He told me … that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness.
Daniel Defoe

Military


Veni, vidi, vici.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
Julius Caesar

War hath no fury like a non-combatant.
C. E. Montague

They told me it would disrupt my life less if I got killed sooner.
Joseph Heller

In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable.
W. Churchill, on General Montgomery

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Thomas Paine

As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.
Edward Gibbon

The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers; and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.
Edward Gibbon

[A] military force was collected in Europe, formidable by their arms and numbers, if the generals had understood the science of command, and the soldiers the duty of obedience.
Edward Gibbon

[Serving in the military] is a million-dollar experience that you wouldn’t do again for a million dollars.
Walter E. Williams

Mind


I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
G. K. Chesterton

Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
G. K. Chesterton

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
John Milton

[Riemann] had the type of mind that could hold only those things it found interesting, mathematics mostly.
John Derbyshire

Sweet are the thoughts that savor of content;
The quiet mind is richer than a crown.
Robert Greene

Of all the tyrannies on human kind
The worst is that which persecutes the mind.
John Dryden

Strongest minds
Are often those of whom the noisy world
Hears least.
William Wordsworth

Miracle


Everything is miraculous. It is miraculous that one does not melt in one's bath.
Pablo Picasso

Miscellaneous


"Are you lost daddy," I asked tenderly.
"Shut up," he explained.
Ring Lardner

He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.
Ring Lardner

Mischief


He [Hampden] had a head to contrive, a tongue to persuade, and a hand to execute any mischief.
Edward Hyde

Misery


Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
Russell Baker

That life has many miseries, and that those miseries are, sometimes at least, equal to all the powers of fortitude, is now universally confessed.
Samuel Johnson

Misfortune


We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Depend upon it that if a man talks of his misfortunes there is something in them that is not disagreeable to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery there never is any recourse to the mention of it.
Samuel Johnson

What man ever blamed himself for his misfortune?
William Graham Sumner

Kings have long arms, but Misfortune longer:
Let none think themselves out of her reach.
Benjamin Franklin

The very remembrance of my former misfortune proves a new one to me.
Cervantes

Of misfortune it never can be certainly known whether, as proceeding from the hand of God, it is an act of favour or of punishment.
Samuel Johnson

Such sufferers are dejected in their misfortunes, not so much for what they feel, as for what they dread; not because they cannot support the sorrows, or endure the wants, of their present condition, but because they consider them as only the beginnings of more sharp and more lasting pains.
Samuel Johnson

Mistake


Most people are stupid. Nothing seems like a mistake until it's a mistake.
Samuel Halpern

There's no way that you can live an adequate life without making many mistakes.
Charlie Munger

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
Joseph Conrad

As she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a hundred years hence.
Charles Dickens

Moderate


In the field of controversy I always pity the moderate party, who stand on the open middle ground exposed to the fire of both sides.
Edward Gibbon

We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.
Aneurin Bevan

Moderation


I have not been afraid of excess: excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.
W. Somerset Maugham

Moderation is a fatal thing … Nothing succeeds like excess.
Oscar Wilde

Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
St. Augustine

Constantly practise abstinence and temperance, so that you may be as wakeful after eating as before.
E. L. Gruber

Never go to excess, but let moderation be your guide.
Cicero

The practice of exercise and temperance had entitled him to a healthy old age.
Edward Gibbon

To walk with circumspection and steadiness in the right path, at an equal distance between the extremes of errour, ought to be the constant endeavour of every reasonable being.
Samuel Johnson

Healthy sleep depends on moderate eating; he rises early, and feels fit. The distress of sleeplessness and of nausea and colic are with the glutton.
Ecclesiasticus 31:20

Modesty


Don't be so humble. You're not that great.
Golda Meir

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.
Mark Twain

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.
Leonardo da Vinci

Modesty is the only sure bait when you angle for praise.
G. K. Chesterton

If only I had a little humility, I would be perfect.
Ted Turner

Whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Molière


He [Molière] pleases all the world, but cannot please himself.
Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

Money


He neither drank, smoked, nor rode a bicycle. Living frugally, saving his money, he died early, surrounded by greedy relatives. It was a great lesson to me.
John Barrymore

You can't force anyone to love you or to lend you money.
Jewish proverb

Money is the most egalitarian force in society. It confers power on whoever holds it.
Roger Starr

Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.
Mark Twain

Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repairing.
Billy Rose

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
G. K. Chesterton

Money swore an oath that nobody who did not love it should ever have it.
Irish Proverb

I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike.
Emile Henry Gauvreay

The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain

When a fellow says, "It ain't the money but the principle of the thing," it's the money.
Frank McKinney Hubbard ("Kin Hubbard")

When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.
Oscar Wilde

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
P. T. Barnum

The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated.
H. L. Mencken

It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor, as long as you've got money.
Joe E. Lewis

Money frees you from doing things you dislike. Since I dislike doing nearly everything, money is handy.
Groucho Marx

The easiest way for your children to learn about money is for you not to have any.
Katharine Whitehorn

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.
John Maynard Keynes

He [Thomas Edison] considered [money] as a raw material, like metal, to be used rather than amassed, and so he kept plowing his funds into new projects. Several times he was all but bankrupt. But he refused to let dollar signs govern his actions.
Charles Edison

Gentlemen, if the man who invented compound interest had secured a patent on his idea he would have had without any doubt the greatest invention the world has ever produced.
Author unidentified

Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.
George Raft

He that wants money, means, and content, is without three good friends.
Shakespeare

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didn't have it and thought of other things if you did.
James Baldwin

Money begets money.
John Ray

Would you know what mony is, go borrow some.
George Herbert

Monk


The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.
Edward Gibbon

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.
Edward Gibbon

The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.
Edward Gibbon

I have somewhere heard or read the frank confession of a Benedictine abbot: "My vow of poverty has given me a hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince." — I forget the consequences of his vow of chastity.
Edward Gibbon

[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
Edward Gibbon

[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.
Edward Gibbon

[The monks'] minds were inaccessible to reason or mercy.
Edward Gibbon

Monkey


I confess freely to you, I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.
William Congreve

Mood


If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.
Lau Tzu

Moon


The moon like a flower
In heaven’s high bower,
With silent delight,
Sits and smiles on the night.
William Blake

Moral Imperative


When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.
Joan Didion

Morality


When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.
Richard Nixon

[It] seems as if anything I like is either illegal or immoral or fattening.
Frank Rand

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.
William F. Buckley

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.
H. L. Mencken

Moral indignation is in most cases two percent moral, forty-eight percent indignation, and fifty percent envy.
Vittorio de Sica

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
Justice Louis D. Brandeis

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
Erich Fromm

In matters of principle, stand like a rock; in matters of taste, swim with the current.
Thomas Jefferson

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.
Robert S. Lynd

[Sir Stafford Cripps] has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Winston Churchill

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
G. K. Chesterton

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
G. K. Chesterton

He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.
Horace

We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions which are unbridled by morality and true religion.
John Adams

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
John Adams

Not everything that is legal is reputable.
William F. Buckley

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
Theodore Parker

A society can survive the collapse of its economy, but not of its citizens' morality.
Dennis Prager

Our society is obsessed with personal rights, but it will survive only if we each adopt personal obligations.
Dennis Prager

People do bad things to other people because they do not have good values [not because of poverty or other societal problems].
Dennis Prager

The difference between moral people and immoral people is not that moral people don't have rage; it is that moral people control their rage, and immoral people don't.
Dennis Prager

Those who are merciful when they must be cruel, will, in the end, be cruel to those who deserve mercy.
Midrash

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?
Rabbi Hillel

[The] dreaming mind is regrettably immoral.
C. S. Lewis

The only valid source for moral life is a living God.
Paul Johnson

The notion of obeying "iron laws" or "a higher law," rather than the traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a race one.
Paul Johnson

The truth is that no political cause is worth the abandonment of elementary morality. Whether terrorism works varies with the case, but it can never serve an ideal.
Paul Johnson

We do not look in great cities for our best morality.
Jane Austen

Better suffer ill than doe ill.
George Herbert

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.
H. L. Mencken

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."
H. L. Mencken

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.
Immanuel Kant

There is … only a single categorical imperative and it is this: Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Immanuel Kant

For what are treatises of morality, but persuasives to the practice of duties, for which no arguments would be necessary, but that we are continually tempted to violate or neglect them?
Samuel Johnson

But he that suffers the slightest breach in his morality, can seldom tell what shall enter it, or how wide it shall be made; when a passage is open, the influx of corruption is every moment wearing down opposition, and by slow degrees deluges the heart.
Samuel Johnson

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
Ernest Hemingway

The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
William Empson

More


` "Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."

"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

Lewis Carroll

Moron


Nature abhors a moron.
H. L. Mencken

See the happy moron,
He doesn't give a damn,
I wish I were a moron,
My God! perhaps I am!
Anonymous

Mortality


All men think all men mortal but themselves.
Edward Young

Alive, we are like a sleek black water beetle.
Skating across still water in any direction
We choose, and soon to be swallowed
Suddenly from beneath.
Robert Bly

Do not put your trust in princes, in human beings, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.
Psalms 146:3-4

Now therefore why are you disturbed, seeing that you are to perish? Why are you moved, seeing that you are mortal?
2 Esdras 7:15 NRSV-CI

We are all mortal, and each one is for himself. (Nous sommes tous mortels, et chacun est pour soi.)
Molière

Mother


No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.
Florida Scott-Maxwell

My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Mark Twain

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
W. Somerset Maugham

I am what her savage loving has made me.
Samuel Beckett, of his mother

I have reached the age when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person she least plans to resemble: her mother.
Anita Brookner

Motivation


Whatever is universally desired, will be sought by industry and artifice, by merit and crimes, by means good and bad, rational and absurd, according to the prevalence of virtue or vice, of wisdom or folly.
Samuel Johnson

There's many a one who would be idle if hunger didn't pinch him; but the stomach sets us to work.
George Eliot

Motivational


Become the person you know you should be.
Author unidentified

You can't do anything about what you've done, but you can do something about what you're going to do.
Author unidentified

Motive


We are sometimes not ourselves conscious of the original motives of our actions, and when we know them, our first care is to hide them from the sight of others.
Samuel Johnson

Mourning


The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.
Ecclesiastes 7:4

My child, let your tears fall for the dead, and as one in great pain begin the lament. Lay out the body with due ceremony, and do not neglect the burial.
Ecclesiasticus 38:16

Nature's law,
That man was made to mourn!
Robert Burns

Man's inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!
Robert Burns

Medvedenko: Why do you wear black all the time?
Masha: I'm in mourning for my life, I'm unhappy.
Anton Chekhov

Movie


I would have been more successful if I had left movies immediately. Stayed in the theater, gone into politics, written; anything. I've wasted a greater part of my life looking for money and trying to get along. Trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box, which is a movie. And I've spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with making a movie. It's about 2 percent movie making and 98 percent hustling. That's no way to spend a life.
Orson Welles

Multitasking


He who attempts to do all, will waste his life in doing little.
Samuel Johnson

Multitude


If there be any among those common objects of hatred I do condemn and laugh at, it is that great enemy of reason, virtue and religion, the multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity, which taken asunder seem men, and the reasonable creatures of God; but confused together, make but one great beast, and a monstrosity more prodigious than Hydra.
Sir Thomas Browne

Be gone, ye blockheads, Heraclitus cries,
And leave my labours to the learn'd and wise:
By wit, by knowledge, studious to be read,
I scorn the multitude, alive and dead.

(Ἡράκλειτος ἐγώ· τί μεὦ κάτω ἕλκετ᾽ ἄμουσοι;
Οὐχ᾽ ὑμῖν ἐπόνουν, τοῖς δέ μ᾽ ἐπισταμένοις.
Εἷς ἐμοὶ ἄνθρωπος τρισμύριοι οἱ δ᾽ ἀνάριθμοι
Οὐδείς· ταῦτ᾽ αὐδῶ καὶ παρὰ Περσεφόνῃ
.)

Samuel Johnson, based on Diogenes Laertius

Murder


If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
Mark Twain

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one!
Author unidentified

English law does not permit good persons, as such, to strangle bad persons, as such.
T. H. Huxley

Who will free me from this turbulent priest [Thomas Becket]?
Attributed to Henry II

Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out.
John Webster

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbathbreaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas De Quincey

Music


The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes — ah, that is where the art resides!
Artur Schnabel

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky

She said, "I know you … you cannot sing". I said, "That's nothing, you should hear me play piano."
Morrissey

When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, "Forty-seven years — and I find I mind it less and less."
Louise Andrews Kent

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Elvis Presley (Attributed)

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach

Music is the best solace for a sad and sorrowful mind; by it the heart is refreshed and settled again in peace.
Martin Luther

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have below.
Joseph Addison

Music has charms to sooth a savage breast.
William Congreve

Myth


If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
Bertrand Russell

Naivety


They who best deserve to escape the snares of artifice, are most likely to be entangled.
Samuel Johnson

Name


What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.
Shakespeare

I hate the man who builds his name
On ruins of another’s fame.
John Gay

Nap


The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night.
Winston Churchill

Napoleon


I used to say of him [Napoleon] that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men.
Duke of Wellington

Narcissism


The common employments or pleasures of life, love or opposition, loss or gain, keep almost every mind in perpetual agitation. If any man would consider how little he dwells upon the condition of others, he would learn how little the attention of others is attracted by himself.
Samuel Johnson

Nation


Nations, like men, have their infancy.
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke

National Character


A Frenchman drinks his native wine,
A German drinks his beer;
An Englishman his 'alf and 'alf,
Because it brings good cheer.
The Scotchman drinks his whiskey straight
Because it brings on dizziness;
An American has no choice at all —
He drinks the whole damn business.
Author unidentified

An Englishman thinks it a deadly insult if you say he is no gentleman, or, still worse, a liar; a Frenchman if you call him a coward; a German if you say he is stupid.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Natural Law


Nature in man's heart her laws doth pen.
John Davies

The laws of nature, as justice, equity, modesty, mercy, and, in sum, doing to others as we would be done to, of themselves, without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our natural passions, that carry us to partiality, pride, revenge, and the like.
Thomas Hobbes

Nature


A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.
Tennessee Williams

Is dishwater dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.
G. K. Chesterton

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent.
John Hughes Holmes

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments — there are consequences.
Robert G. Ingersoll

In such condition [Nature with every man against every man], there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently … no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes

But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature.
Edward Gibbon

The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.
Edward Gibbon

I am at two with nature.
Woody Allen

Charlie Allnut: A man takes a drop too much once in a while, it's only human nature.
Rose Sayer: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
African Queen movie

Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part;
Do thou but thine.
John Milton

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.
Sir Thomas Browne

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more.
Lord Byron

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature!
Charles Darwin

Navy


Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers, and the lash.
Winston Churchill

Ne'er-do-well


My dear firstborn is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast in the whole world, and I heartily wish he was out of it.
Caroline of Ansbach, of her eldest son, Frederick, Prince of Wales

Necessary


The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
Charles de Gaulle

There is no such thing as a necessary man.
French Proverb

Very few of us are irreplaceable in our professional lives, but all of us are irreplaceable to those who love us.
Dennis Prager (paraphrased)

Make yourself necessary to someone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Necessity


[Yet] the true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention. [Often quoted as "necessity is the mother of invention"].
Plato

Necessity hath no law. Feigned necessities, imaginary necessities … are the greatest cozenage that men can put upon the Providence of God, and make pretences to break known rules by.
Oliver Cromwell

Necessity makes an honest man a knave.
Daniel Defoe

Nothing have I found stronger than Necessity.
Euripides

Neck


Would that the Roman people had but one neck! (Utinam populus Romanus unam cervicem haberet!)
Caligula

Negligence


A little neglect may breed great mischief … for the want of a nail the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost.
Benjamin Franklin, paraphrasing George Herbert

Neighbor


Have you told them it bothers you? … Are they bigger than you? … Are you afraid of getting your ass kicked? … Ah, okay, I probably should have asked that question first, woulda saved time. Yeah, you're just gonna have to deal with the noise [from the neighbor], son.
Samuel Halpern

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
G. K. Chesterton

New Orleans


Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets [of New Orleans] to it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world.
Mark Twain

New York


A car is useless in New York, essential everywhere else. The same with good manners.
Mignon McLaughlin

News


I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that you should start worrying.
Bruce Schneier

It is better to be making the news than taking it; to be an actor rather than a critic.
Winston Churchill

Ill news hath wings, and with the wind doth go,
Comfort's a cripple and comes ever slow.
Michael Drayton

Newspaper


I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.
Thomas Jefferson

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.
Author unidentified

I read the newspapers avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction.
Aneurin Bevan

Noise


Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
Mark Twain

Nonconformist


If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standards of nonconformity.
Bill Vaughan

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
Eric Hoffer

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?
James Thurber

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nosiness


"If everybody minded their own business," said the Duchess in a hoarse growl, "the world would go round a good deal faster than it does."
Lewis Carroll

Novel


A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton

Novelty


Corporal sensation is known to depend so much upon novelty, that custom takes away from many things their power of giving pleasure or pain.
Samuel Johnson

Nuclear Bomb


The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
Omar Bradley

Nuclear Holocaust


Wouldn't this nucleus of [nuclear holocaust] survivors be so grief-stricken and anguished that they'd, well, envy the dead and not want to go on living?
Dr. Strangelove movie

Nuclear Power


The fear of nuclear power is not based upon a rational calculation but on superstitious dread of ray-like emanation, akin to a diabolic force.
Paul Johnson

Nudism


The fact is that nudism is not natural, unless you are doing something such as swimming, where clothes are a nuisance. In any other situation, the nudist is a joke, and often an unfunny joke.
Paul Johnson

Number


A great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves, separately considered. The number is certainly the cause.
Edmund Burke

I never could make out what those damned dots [decimal points] meant.
Lord Randolph Churchill

Oakland


When you get there [Oakland], there isn't any there there.
Gertrude Stein

The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there it's there!
Herb Caen

Oath


The best way to keep one's word is not to give it.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Oaths are but words, and words but wind.
Samuel Butler

He that imposes an oath makes it,
Not he that for convenience takes it;
Then how can any man be said
To break an oath he never made?
Samuel Butler

Obesity


Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment.
Cyril Connolly

A fat paunch never breeds fine thoughts.
Saint Jerome

She was two yards round the waist, her voice was at once loud and squeaking, and her face brought to my mind the picture of the full moon.
Samuel Johnson

Obfuscation


Our disputants put me in mind of the cuttlefish, that when he is unable to extricate himself, blackens all the water about him till he becomes invisible.
Joseph Addison

Observing


You see, but you do not observe.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Obstacle


Nothing … will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
Samuel Johnson

Officer


A General Officer who will invariably assume the responsibility for failure, whether he deserves it or not, and invariably give the credit for success to others, whether they deserve it or not, will achieve outstanding success.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Old


I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines.
Oliver Goldsmith

Old Age


I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.
Jerome K. Jerome

Grandchildren don't make a man feel old; it's the knowledge that he's married to a grandmother.
G. Norman Collie

Who knows whether in retirement I shall be tempted to the last infirmity of mundane minds, which is to write a book.
Geoffrey Fisher

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.
H. L. Mencken

If I'd known I was going to live so long, I'd have taken better care of myself.
Eubie (centenarian)

A man is only as old as the woman he feels.
Groucho Marx

"Next year? Peter, at my age I don't even buy green bananas."
Arnold Palmer, responding to Peter Jacobsen's request to play in his golf tournament

When death comes near the old find that age is no longer burdensome.
Euripides

When our vices quit us we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who quit them.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

My only fear is that I may live too long. This would be a subject of dread to me.
Thomas Jefferson

It is not the end of joy that makes old age so sad, but the end of hope.
Jean Paul Richter

It is the common calamity of old age, to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable.
Edward Gibbon

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare

[But] age, the common enemy of mankind, has laid his hand upon you; would that it had fallen upon some other, and that you were still young.
Homer

I am able to say that while I am not ruggedly well, I am not ill enough to excite an undertaker.
Mark Twain

It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter.
Mark Twain

… at the wrong end of life …
Alice Munro

Everybody my age should be issued with a 2 lb fresh salmon. If you see someone young, beautiful and happy, you should slap them as hard as you can with it.
Richard Griffiths

Old age, by blanching the seat of reason, may cut off the fear of death even in a once imaginative mind, or it may, on the other hand, undermine fortitude, softening the will.
Winston Churchill

A person is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.
John Barrymore

Now that I have reached old age, how I hate it!
Euripides

Old people have fewer diseases than the young, but their diseases never leave them.
Hippocrates

One of his feet is already in the grave.
English saying

When thou art old there's grief enough for thee.
Robert Greene

Old age consoles itself by giving good precepts for being unable to give bad examples.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Old age makes us wiser and more foolish.
John Ray

We hope to grow old, and yet we dread old age.
Jean de La Bruyère

Life protracted is protracted woe.
Samuel Johnson

By my rambling digressions I perceive myself to be growing old.
Benjamin Franklin

One evil in old age is that, as your time is come, you think every little illness is the beginning of the end. When a man expects to be arrested, every knock at the door is an alarm.
Sydney Smith

How earthly old people become — mouldy as the grave … They remind me of earthworms.
Henry David Thoreau

A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near his camp.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Age does not increase sense; it only makes one go slower.
Finnish proverb

King Solomon and King David
Led very merry lives,
With very many concubines
And very many wives,
Until old age came creeping,
With very many qualms,
Then Solomon wrote the Proverbs
And David wrote the Psalms.
Author unidentified

My playfellows were grown old, and forced me to suspect that I was no longer young.
Samuel Johnson

Age is a very stubborn disease.
Samuel Johnson

I fear he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth.
Shakespeare

A good old man, sir; he will be talking: as they say,
When the age is in, the wit is out.
Shakespeare

If you want to be adored by your peers and have standing ovations wherever you go — live to be over ninety.
George Abbott

I am declin’d
Into the vale of years.
Shakespeare

The old are in a second childhood.
Aristophanes

There is a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects. If a young or middle-aged man, when leaving a company, does not remember where he laid his hat, it is nothing; but if the same inattention is discovered in an old man, people will shrug up their shoulders, and say, "His memory is going."
Samuel Johnson

In youth, however unhappy, we solace ourselves with the hope of better fortune, and however vicious, appease our consciences with intentions of repentance; but the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise, in which happiness can be drawn only from recollection, and virtue will be all that we can recollect with pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of old age, that age appears to be best in four things, — old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon

If men imagine that excess of debauchery can be made reverend by time, that knowledge is the consequence of long life, however idly or thoughtlessly employed, that priority of birth will supply the want of steadiness or honesty, can it raise much wonder that their hopes are disappointed, and that they see their posterity rather willing to trust their own eyes in their progress into life, than enlist themselves under guides who have lost their way?
Samuel Johnson

Few people know how to be old.
La Rochefoucauld

If you could shew them, that though they may refuse to grow wise, they must inevitably grow old; and that the proper solaces of age are not musick and compliments, but wisdom and devotion; that those who are so unwilling to quit the world will soon be driven from it; and that it is therefore their interest to retire while there yet remain a few hours for nobler employments.
Samuel Johnson

To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
Bernard Baruch

The most usual support of old age is wealth.
Samuel Johnson

It is a fact that no man improves much after the age of 60 and after 65, most suffer a really alarming decline. I could give some examples, but at the advice of my publisher will refrain from doing so.
H. L. Mencken

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.
Jonathan Swift

It is a man's own fault, it is from want of use, if his mind grows torpid in old age.
Samuel Johnson

What is called the serenity of age is only perhaps a euphemism for the fading power to feel the sudden shock of joy or sorrow.
Arthur Bliss

With full-span lives having become the norm, people may need to learn how to be aged as they once had to learn how to be adult.
Ronald Blythe

Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone.
Psalms 71:9

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Robert Browning

What is the worst of woes that wait on age?
What stamps the wrinkle deeper on the brow?
To view each loved one blotted from life's page,
And be alone on earth, as I am now.
Lord Byron

My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
Lord Byron

Old-age, a second child, by Nature cursed
With more and greater evils than the first,
Weak, sickly, full of pains; in ev'ry breath
Railing at life, and yet afraid of death.
Charles Churchill

That sign of old age, extolling the past at the expense of the present.
Sydney Smith

But years hath done this wrong,
To make me write too much, and live too long.
Samuel Daniel

Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.
Washington Irving

No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful.
Ernest Hemingway

Nature abhors the old, and old age seems the only disease; all others run into this one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

No man is ever so old but he thinks he can live another year.
Cicero

You must begin to be an old man early if you wish to be an old man long.
Cicero

An old man is twice a child.
Shakespeare

Before a man comes to be wise he is half dead with gouts and consumption, with catarrhs and aches, with sore eyes and a worn-out body.
Jeremy Taylor

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.
Samuel Johnson

A person is always startled when he hears himself seriously called an old man for the first time.
O. W. Holmes

Old And New


A man who reviews the old so as to find out the new is qualified to teach others.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

Oliver Goldsmith


It is amazing how little Goldsmith knows. He seldom comes where he is not more ignorant than any one else.
Samuel Johnson

No man was more foolish when he [Goldsmith] had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had.
Samuel Johnson

Onan


Because he spills his seed on the ground.
Dorothy Parker, on why she had named her canary 'Onan'

Opera


How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Gioacchino Rossini

No good opera plot can be sensible … People do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. Auden

I do not mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
Edward Appleton

Opinion


He who says what he likes shall hear what he does not like.
English proverb

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
Robert Peel

Too often we … enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy

You've no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself — and how little I deserve it.
W. S. Gilbert

Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Opinion is ultimately determined by the feelings, and not by the intellect.
Herbert Spencer

Opinions are the cheapest commodities in the world.
Author unidentified

We think very few people sensible, except those who are of our opinion.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain

What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" — that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization — everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.
Roger Kimball

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.
Olin Miller

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell

I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Bertrand Russell

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell

He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.
Samuel Butler

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke

Some praise at morning what they blame at night,
But always think the last opinion right.
Alexander Pope

Opium


Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh just, subtle, and mighty opium!
Thomas De Quincey

Opportunity


What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?
Logan Pearsall Smith

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison

Delay not; swift the flight of fortune's greatest favours.
Seneca

Oppression


It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power — power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.
Eric Hoffer

Optimism


[Optimism] is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.
Voltaire

For myself I am an optimist — it does not seem to be much use being anything else.
Winston Churchill

Optimism And Pessimism


The optimist proclaims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.
Eric Bentley

He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hopes for the human condition is a fool.
Albert Camus

There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify the evils, of the present times.
Edward Gibbon

What fresh hell is this?
Dorothy Parker, on hearing the doorbell or a ringing telephone

The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
George F. Will

Orator


He can best be described as one of those orators who, before they get up, do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, do not know what they have said.
Winston Churchill, of a fellow Member of Parliament

Oratory


The object of oratory is not truth but persuasion.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

They talk most who have the least to say.
Matthew Prior

The thoughtless are rarely wordless.
Howard W. Newton

Orchestra


There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
Thomas Beecham

Order


The trouble about obeying orders is, it becomes a habit. And then everything depends on who's giving the orders.
Terry Pratchett

Originality


What a good thing Adam had — when he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
Mark Twain

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.
Author unidentified

My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought.
H. L. Mencken

Orwell, George


He [George Orwell] put his faith in man but, looking at the object of his devotion too closely, lost it.
Paul Johnson

Pacifism


Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
Hilaire Belloc

These [Judeo-Christian] codes and ideals, as well as common sense, hold that at times life must be sacrificed for the sake of morality. Pacifism, however, holds the direct opposite: Morality must be sacrificed for the sake of life.
Dennis Prager

Pacifist


Pacifists would do well to study the Siegfried and Maginot Lines, remembering that these defenses were forced; that Troy fell; that the walls of Hadrian succumbed; that the Great Wall of China was futile; and that, by the same token, the mighty seas which are alleged to defend us can also be circumvented by a resolute and ingenious opponent.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Painting


Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the singing of birds? People love the night, a flower, everything that surrounds them without trying to understand them. But painting — that they must understand.
Pablo Picasso

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.
Salvador Dali

Pamphlet


It has been for a long time a very just complaint, among the learned, that a multitude of valuable productions, published in small pamphlets, or in single sheets, are in a short time, too often by accidents, or negligence, destroyed, and entirely lost; and that those authors, whose reverence for the public has hindered them from swelling their works with repetition, or encumbering them with superfluities, and who, therefore, deserve the praise and gratitude of posterity, are forgotten, for the very reason for which they might expect to be remembered.
Samuel Johnson

Panama Canal


We should keep the Panama Canal. After all we stole it fair and square.
S. I. Hayakawa

Paradise


If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found the flower in his hand when he awoke-Aye! and what then?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Paradise Lost


Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

Parents


My father was frightened by his mother. I was frightened by my father, and I'm damned well going to make sure that my children are frightened of me.
George V

A Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy, and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die.
Philip Roth

Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don't fulfill the promise of their early years.
Anthony Powell

Always obey your parents, when they are present.
Mark Twain

Maternity is a matter of fact. Paternity is a matter of opinion.
Walter Bagehot

I'm still working. I need the money. Money, I've discovered, is the one thing keeping me in touch with my children.
Gyles Brandreth

Most children threaten at times to run away from home. This is the only thing that keeps some parents going.
Phyllis Diller

The regal and parental tyrant differ only in the extent of their dominions, and the number of their slaves.
Samuel Johnson

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their griefs and fears.
Francis Bacon

To have voluntarily become to any being the occasion of its existence, produces an obligation to make that existence happy.
Samuel Johnson

Paris


If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
Ernest Hemingway

Parliament


The object of Parliament is to substitute argument for fisticuffs.
Winston Churchill

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing lately …. Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
Oliver Cromwell, to the Rump Parliament

Parting


Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
Shakespeare

Partisanship


The superior man is broadminded but not partisan; the inferior man is partisan but not broadminded.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

Party


After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party? Surely not for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
P. J. O'Rourke

The sooner every party breaks up the better.
Jane Austen

The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.
Alexander Pope

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come:
Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.
Alexander Pope

The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at least it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar judgements — success.
Edmund Burke

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk.
Lord Byron

Party-Spirit


Party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.
Alexander Pope

Passion


The Passions are like Fire and Water; good Servants, but bad Masters.
Thomas Fuller

How well I remember the aged poet Sophocles, when in answer to the question, "How does love suit with age, Sophocles — are you still the man you were?" he replied, "Peace, most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master."
Plato

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Past


This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.
Agathon

What's done cannot be undone.
William Shakespeare

While you have a future do not live too much in contemplation of your past: unless you are content to walk backward the mirror is a poor guide.
Ambrose Bierce

Let the dozing soul remember,
let the mind awake and revive by contemplating
how our life goes by so swiftly
and how our death comes near so silently;
how quickly pleasure fades,
and how when it is recalled it give us pain,
how we seem always to think
that times past must have been better than today.
Jorge Manrique

It's stupid the way people extrapolate the past. And not slightly stupid, but massively stupid.
Charlie Munger

Paternalism


The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that, while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include the support of the people.
Grover Cleveland

There is no such thing as other people's children.
Hillary Rodham Clinton

Patience


Patience, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

So long as Heaven has condemned us to suffer, patience is a virtue; but if we reject the proffered deliverance, it degenerates into blind and stupid despair.
Pharas

Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it's cowardice.
George Jackson

If what we suffer has been brought upon us by ourselves, it is observed by an ancient poet that patience is eminently our duty, since no one should be angry at feeling that which he has deserved.
Samuel Johnson

You tread upon my patience.
Shakespeare

I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient.
Shakespeare

For there was never yet philosopher
That could endure the toothache patiently.
Shakespeare

How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Shakespeare

Patriot


A patriot is he whose public conduct is regulated by one single motive, the love of his country; who, as an agent in parliament, has for himself neither hope nor fear, neither kindness nor resentment, but refers everything to the common interest.
Samuel Johnson

It ought to be deeply impressed on the minds of all who have voices in this national deliberation, that no man can deserve a seat in parliament, who is not a patriot. No other man will protect our rights: no other man can merit our confidence.
Samuel Johnson

Patriotism


Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Samuel Johnson

[A] country without a word to describe its love for what is best within it is a country ill-equipped to defend what is best within it.
Jonah Goldberg

I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country!
Nathan Hale

[There] is something fundamentally unpatriotic in the yearning to fundamentally transform your country.
Jonah Goldberg

He is no lover of his country, that unnecessarily disturbs its peace. Few errours and few faults of government, can justify an appeal to the rabble; who ought not to judge of what they cannot understand, and whose opinions are not propagated by reason, but caught by contagion.
Samuel Johnson

Patron


Is not a Patron, my Lord [Chesterfield], one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.
Samuel Johnson

If it be unhappy to have one patron, what is his misery who has many?
Samuel Johnson

Bow to no patron's insolence; rely
On no frail hopes, in freedom live and die.

(Mitte superba pati fastidia, spemque caducam
Despice; vive tibi, nam moriere tibi
.)

F. Lewis, based on Seneca

Peace


That they may have a little peace, even the best dogs are compelled to snarl occasionally.
William Feather

Peace, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

If you want peace, prepare for war. (Si vis pacem, para bellum. Alternatively, Qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.)
Vegetius

The terror of the Roman arms added weight and dignity to the moderation of the emperors. They preserved the peace by a constant preparation for war.
Edward Gibbon

The name of peace is sweet, the thing itself is most salutary.
Cicero

[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
Edward Gibbon

If we desire to secure peace, … it must be known that we are, at all times, ready for war.
Andrew Jackson

To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
George Washington (c.f. Vegetius)

I am a man of peace — God knows how I love peace. But I hope I shall never be such a coward as to mistake oppression for peace.
Lajos Kossuth

They made a wasteland and called it peace.
Tacitus

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years!
Ferdinand Foch at the signing of the Treat of Versailles

They who would make peace without a previous knowledge of the terms, make a surrender. They are conquered.
Edmund Burke

Peace with Germany and Japan on our terms will not bring much rest to you and me (if I am still responsible). As I observed last time, when the war of the giants is over, the war of the pygmies will begin.
Winston Churchill, to FDR.

Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
Max Ehrmann

Pension


In England pensions used to be given to aristocrats, because aristocrats had political influence, in order to corrupt them. Here pensions are given to the great democratic mass, because they have political power, to corrupt them.
William Graham Sumner

People


If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself.
Blaise Pascal

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
George Burns

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T. S. Eliot

It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will, he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.
George Dennison Prentice

For every credibility gap there is a gullibility fill.
Richard Clopton

The biggest gap in the world is the gap between the justice of a cause and the motives of the people pushing it.
John P. Grier

When the people applauded him wildly, [Phocion] turned to one of his friends and said, "Have I said something foolish?"
Diogenes Laertius

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I wouldn't want to join any club that would accept me as a member.
Groucho Marx

I am not a bit afraid of Siegfried Sassoon. That man can think. I am afraid only of people who cannot think.
Winston Churchill

We are all worms. But I do believe that I am a glowworm.
Winston Churchill

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
George S. Patton, Jr.

We're all just superstitious natives.
Adam Carolla

Perception


If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot

Perfection


The pursuit of perfection prevents achievement of the satisfactory.
George F. Will

The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.
Edward Gibbon

He that has abilities to conceive perfection, will not easily be content without it; and since perfection cannot be reached, will lose the opportunity of doing well in the vain hope of unattainable excellence.
Samuel Johnson

The maxim Nothing avails but perfection may be spelt shorter: 'Paralysis.'
Winston Churchill

Perfectionism


Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.
Shakespeare

Permanency


Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin

Persecution


In [Nazi] Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
And then … they came for me …
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
Martin Niemöller (Attributed)

Perseverance


One need not hope in order to undertake; nor succeed in order to persevere.
William the Silent

Fall down seven times, get up eight.
Japanese Proverb

[Let] us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
Hebrews 12:1

"Fight on, my men," says Sir Andrew Barton,
"I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I'll lay me down and bleed awhile,
And then I'll rise and fight again."
Author unidentified

Victory belongs to the most persevering.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance; yonder palace was raised by single stones, yet you see its height and spaciousness. He that shall walk with vigor three hours a day, will pass in seven years a space equal to the circumference of the globe.
Samuel Johnson

All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals.
Samuel Johnson

Every design in which the connexion is regularly traced from the first motion to the last, must be formed and executed by calm intrepidity, and requires not only courage which danger cannot turn aside, but constancy which fatigues cannot weary, and contrivance which impediments cannot exhaust.
Samuel Johnson

’Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause — and of obstinacy in a bad one.
Laurence Sterne

Persian


[The Persians] deliberate about the gravest matters when they are drunk.
Euripides

Persistence


It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
Chinese Proverb

Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
John Wooden

Her parents suffered in the bewilderment of finding that they had forgotten how to oppose her gently resolute will through the lifelong habit of yielding to it.
Rudyard Kipling

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
Author unidentified

Many strokes overthrow the tallest oaks.
John Lyly

Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
Oliver Goldsmith

Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.
Winston Churchill

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

Perspective


Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.
Bion

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
G. K. Chesterton

Persuasion


Persuasion is the resource of the feeble; and the feeble can seldom persuade.
Edward Gibbon

We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.
Blaise Pascal

Would you persuade, speak of Interest, not of Reason.
Author unidentified

Pessimism


My pessimism goes to the point of suspecting the sincerity of pessimists.
Jean Rostand

Cheer up! the worst is yet to come.
Philander Johnson

Pessimist


A pessimist is a man who looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.
Laurence J. Peter

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
Mark Twain

Philosopher


The philosopher is Nature's pilot — and there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. ( Sed nescio quo modo nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum.)
Cicero

I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don't know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.
Oliver Edwards

Philosophy


I have a simple philosophy. Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. And scratch where it itches.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the thing, however, is to change it.
Karl Marx

It is good that a philosopher should remind himself, now and then, that he is a particle pontificating on infinity.
Will and Ariel Durant

If I wished to punish a province, I would have it governed by philosophers.
Frederick the Great

Cartesian, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum — whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum—"I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;" as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.
H. L. Mencken

Feel deeply to think clearly.
Nathaniel Branden

It is best, it seems to me, to separate one's inner striving from one's trade as far as possible. It is not good when one's daily bread is tied to God's special blessing.
Albert Einstein

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Shakespeare

I think, therefore I am. (Je pense, donc je suis.)
René Descartes

Physician


He that sinneth before his Maker, let him fall into the hand of the physician.
Ecclesiasticus 38:15 (KJVAAE)

Pianist


Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
Anonymous

Picasso, Pablo


His [Pablo Picasso's] ability to overawe and exploit both men and women — some of them highly intelligent and uneasily aware of what he was doing to them — was by far the most remarkable thing about him.
Paul Johnson

Picture


If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough.
Robert Capa

Pilot


In a calm sea every man is a pilot.
John Ray

Pity


Pity costs nothin' and ain't worth nothin'.
Josh Billings

Some of you with Pilate wash your hands,
Showing an outward pity.
Shakespeare

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
William Blake

Plagiarist


Plagiarists are always suspicious of being stolen from, — as pickpockets are observed commonly to walk with their hands in their breeches’ pockets.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Plan


Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.
Mike Tyson

Strategic plans cause more dumb decisions than anything else in America.
Charlie Munger

No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main force.
Helmuth von Moltke

Planning


Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
Seneca

The plans differ; the planners are all alike.
Frédéric Bastiat

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.
Publilius Syrus

I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight Eisenhower

The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The second best time is now.
Confucius

The point I am trying to bring out is that one does not plan and then try to make circumstances fit those plans. One tries to make plans fit the circumstances.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Platitude


A platitude is simply a truth repeated until people get tired of hearing it.
Stanley Baldwin

Pleasure


Pleasure for an hour, a bottle of wine; pleasure for a year, marriage; pleasure for a lifetime, a garden.
Chinese saying

Pleasure is by no means an infallible guide, but it is the least fallible.
W. H. Auden

Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
Oscar Wilde

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white — then melts for ever.
Robert Burns

No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home.
Kingsley Amis

Intend to live in continual mortification, and never to expect or desire any worldly ease or pleasure.
Jonathan Edwards

Cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life; I have never found any occupation more important. Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine, I have always loved it and done all I could to make myself loved by it.
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt

None are so hard to please, as those whom satiety of pleasure makes weary of themselves; nor any so readily provoked as those who have been always courted with an emulation of civility.
Samuel Johnson

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler

Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure.
Lord Byron

Plebeian


The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.
H. L. Mencken

Plot


A plot is like the bones of a person, not interesting like expression or signs of experience, but the support of the whole.
Ivy Compton-Burnett and M. Jourdain

Poet


No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot

All poets are mad.
Robert Burton

Inside every man there is a poet who died young.
Stefan Kanfer

We poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.
Wordsworth

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.
Horace

You puff the poets of other days,
The living you deplore.
Spare me the accolade: your praise
Is not worth dying for.
Martial

To a poet nothing can be useless.
Samuel Johnson

Different poets … would, without any communication of opinions, lament the deceitfulness of hope, the fugacity of pleasure, the fragility of beauty, and the frequency of calamity; and for palliatives of these incurable miseries, they would concur in recommending kindness, temperance, caution, and fortitude.
Samuel Johnson

No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets’ food is love and fame.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

I think I shall be among the English Poets after my death.
John Keats

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Lord Macaulay

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry


I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg

"Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'."
G. K. Chesterton

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.
Horace

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Samuel Johnson

He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.
Samuel Johnson

Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention.
Samuel Johnson

Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Prose = words in their best order; — poetry = the best words in the best order.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A poem of any length neither can be, or ought to be, all poetry.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us — and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.
John Keats

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity — it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.
John Keats

Point Of No Return


The die has been cast. (Alea iacta est.)
Julius Caesar

Police


I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.
Brendan Behan

Political Scientist


Political scientists almost everywhere have promoted the expansion of government power. They have functioned as the clergy of oppression.
Rudolph Rummel

Politician


An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.
Simon Cameron

You do not know, you cannot know, the difficulty of the life of a politician. It means every minute of the day or night, every ounce of your energy. There is no rest, no relaxation. Enjoyment? A politician does not know the meaning of the word.
Nikita Khrushchev

90% of the politicians give the other 10% a bad reputation.
Henry Kissinger

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges, even where there are no rivers.
Nikita Khrushchev

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
Aesop

Politicians will always disappoint you.
William Rusher (Attributed)

I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals.
G. K. Chesterton

If I knew them [MPs], it might spoil the purity of my hatred.
Norman Shrapnel

If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
Harry S. Truman

The great human scourge of the twentieth century; the professional politician.
Paul Johnson

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.
Aristotle

The main thing that every political campaign in the United States demonstrates is that the politicians of all parties, despite their superficial enmities, are really members of one great brotherhood. Their principal, and indeed their sole, object is to collar public office, with all the privileges and profits that go therewith. They achieve this collaring by buying votes with other people's money. No professional politician is ever actually in favor of public economy. It is his implacable enemy, and he knows it. All professional politicians are dedicated wholeheartedly to waste and corruption. They are the enemies of every decent man.
H. L. Mencken

For my own part I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities which he excites among his opponents. I have always set myself not merely to relish but to deserve thoroughly their censure.
Winston Churchill

I submit respectfully to the House as a general principle that our responsibility in this matter is directly proportionate to our power. Where there is great power there is great responsibility, where there is less power there is less responsibility, and where there is no power there can, I think, be no responsibility.
Winston Churchill

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
Charles de Gaulle

Politics


[I feel] somewhat like the boy in Kentucky who stubbed his toe while running to see his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.
Abraham Lincoln, when asked how he felt about the Democrats winning the N.Y. State elections

An eminent American is reported to have said to friends who wished to put him forward, "Gentlemen, let there be no mistake. I should make a good president, but a very bad candidate."
James Bryce

Seriously, I do not think I am fit for the presidency.
Abraham Lincoln

The illegal we do immediately, the unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and — quite as dangerous … In war, you can only be killed once. But in politics many times.
Winston Churchill

In politics a community of hatred is almost always the foundation of friendships.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with blood.
Mao Tse-Tung

In politics, a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.
John P. Roche

The Labour Party is going about the country stirring up apathy.
William Whitelaw

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.
Henry Kissinger

Politics, and the fate of mankind, are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness.
Albert Camus

I just received the following wire from my generous Daddy. "Dear Jack: Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide."
John F. Kennedy

Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Ronald Reagan

I gave 'em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same.
Richard Nixon (1977)

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on office, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
Thomas Jefferson

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.
Mark Twain

I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
Abraham Lincoln

David Watkins: "I'm accountable for the firings. The first lady did not direct me to fire them … Did I feel pressure by the desires and wishes of others? Yes, I did."

Questioner: "Could Hillary Rodham Clinton have suggested the firings?"

David Watkins: "Yes."

David Watkins

Would that … a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honour became identical.
Margaret Fuller

In politics, if you want anything said, ask a man; if you want anything done, ask a woman.
Margaret Thatcher

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny. They have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw

All socialism involves slavery.
Herbert Spencer

Outlawing all atomic weapons could be a magnificent gesture. However, it should be remembered that Gettysburg had a local ordinance forbidding the discharge of firearms.
Homer D. King

Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men's skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.
Lyndon B. Johnson

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. [popular interpretation: Capitalism is the unequal sharing of wealth; socialism is the equal sharing of poverty.]
Winston Churchill

A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head.
Benjamin Disraeli

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.
Meg Greenfield

The average citizen expresses pride in the American Bill of Rights and then seeks to protect his real estate by restrictive covenants.
H. A. Overstreet

Appeasers believe that if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.
Heywood Broun

The only liberty an inferior man really cherishes is the liberty to quit work, stretch out in the sun, and scratch himself.
H. L. Mencken

I can remember way back when a liberal was one who was generous with his own money.
Will Rogers

Join the army, see the world, meet interesting, exciting people, and kill them.
Author unidentified

Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offense. When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.
Winston Churchill

Revolutionary movements attract the best and worst elements in a given society.
George Bernard Shaw

If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it'll be the last car he'll ever lay down in front of.
George C. Wallace

The Italians … you can't find one who is honest.
Richard M. Nixon

I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old.
Robert Frost

I do wish [Calvin Coolidge] did not look as if he had been weaned on a pickle.
Anonymous

[Calvin Coolidge] is the first president to discover that what the American people want is to be left alone.
Will Rogers

Diplomacy, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
Caskie Stinnett

There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
Russell Baker

He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism.
Joseph Heller

A year ago Gerald Ford was unknown throughout America. Now he's unknown throughout the world.
Author unidentified

When a dinner guest told him she liked neither his politics nor his mustache, Winston Churchill replied, "Madame, I see no earthly reason why you should come in contact with either."
Winston Churchill

In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, good-will.
Winston Churchill, describing the proper spirit for a great nation

[The politician] is asked to stand, he wants to sit, and he is expected to lie.
Winston Churchill

A ruling intelligentsia, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, treats the masses as raw material to be experimented on, processed, and wasted at will.
Eric Hoffer

There is hardly an enormity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed and even advocated by some noble "man of words" in the nineteenth.
Eric Hoffer

Nowhere at present is there such a measureless loathing of their country by educated people as in America.
Eric Hoffer

A constitution whose meaning changes as our notions of what it ought to mean changes is not worth a whole lot. To keep government up-to-date with modern notions of what good government ought to be, we do not need a constitution but only a ballot-box and a legislature.
Antonin Scalia

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?
Jean-Baptiste Say

Nominee, n. A modest gentleman shrinking from the distinction of private life and diligently seeking the honorable obscurity of public office.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Ultimatum, n. In diplomacy, a last demand before resorting to concessions.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when he was British Foreign Secretary, said he received the following telegram from an irate citizen: "To hell with you. Offensive letter follows."
William Safire

He knows nothing and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard Shaw

Prison is a Socialist's Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.
Elbert Hubbard

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.
H. L. Mencken

It is [a politician's] business to get and hold his job at all costs. If he can hold it by lying, he will hold it by lying; if lying peters out, he will try to hold it by embracing new truths. His ear is ever close to the ground.
H. L. Mencken

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
H. L. Mencken

I hear you have Abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois, but we shot one the other day.
Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Worcester, Mass., 1848

It is dangerous to be right when your country is wrong.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

I gave the State of the Union and they didn't have a teleprompter. I had to stand up there and fake it for 15 minutes before a hundred million people. Some people think I faked it for eight years before a hundred million people.
Bill Clinton

Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
Henry Brooks Adams

My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office [the vice-presidency] that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.
John Adams

You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
William J. H. Boetcker

An uninformed and often irrational public cannot make sound political decisions.
Author unidentified

My experience has proved that a man who is running for office, and is not willing to make his honest opinions known to the public, either has no honest opinions or is not honest about them.
William Randolph Hearst

I do not think that any man should be attacked because of his race or religion, or that he should be immune from attack because of race or religion.
William Randolph Hearst

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.
Richard Feynman

You can achieve anything in politics provided that you let someone else take the credit.
Ronald Reagan

The principle feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things … It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
P. J. O'Rourke

When a thing defies physical law, there's usually politics involved.
P. J. O'Rourke

People who are wise, good, smart, skillful, or hardworking don't need politics, they have jobs.
P. J. O'Rourke

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.
Plato

Conservatives value economic liberty and moral security, while the liberal values economic security and moral liberty.
Jonah Goldberg

Almost all Reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them.
William F. Buckley (Attributed)

Facts rarely change ideological attitudes.
Bing West

The reason so many people misunderstand so many issues is not that these issues are so complex, but that people do not want a factual or analytical explanation that leaves them emotionally unsatisfied. They want villains to hate and heroes to cheer — and they don't want explanations that do not give them that.
Thomas Sowell

All conservatives are bilingual — we have to be. We speak both liberal and conservative. But liberals are monolingual — they don't have to be anything else. They speak liberal, and are completely ignorant of the conservative tongue.
John Podhoretz

There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular — but one must take it simply because it is right.
Martin Luther King Jr.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for 50 years.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

All movements go too far.
Bertrand Russell

There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nobody believes the official spokesman … but everybody trusts an unidentified source.
Ron Nesen

The more dangerous temptation is not to pretend an opposing view does not exist, but to treat it as beneath notice in respectable deliberation by assuming it is ignorant or prejudiced or self-interested or based on insufficient contemplation of moral reality. Such an attitude embodies the idea that since truth in matters of justice, right, or policy is singular and consensus is its natural embodiment, some special explanation — some factor of deliberative pathology, such as the lingering taint of self-interest — is required to explain disagreement, which explanation can then be cited as a reason for putting the deviant view to one side.
Jeremy Waldron

In politics, absurdity is not a handicap.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Politics is the conspiracy of the unproductive but organized against the productive but unorganized.
Joe Sobran

I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.
Lyndon B. Johnson, explaining his decision to keep Hoover in his administration

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.
Milton Friedman

[I'll] have them n*ggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years.
Lyndon B. Johnson

These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days, and that's a problem for us, since they've got something now they never had before: the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this — we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.
Lyndon B. Johnson

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
Enoch Powell

Pragmatism is the disguise progressive and other ideologues do when they want to demonize competing ideologies.
Jonah Goldberg

The American values system — what I call the American Trinity — … are declared on every American coin: Liberty, "E Pluribus Unum" and "In God We Trust."
Dennis Prager

[The current governing judicial philosophy is:] If you want something passionately enough, it is guaranteed by the Constitution. No need to fiddle around gathering votes from recalcitrant citizens.
Robert Bork

[In politics,] when there is no reason to speak, there is a reason not to speak.
David Frum

Why don't you [on the Left] preach what you practice?
Dennis Prager

The education of this president [Obama] is a protracted and often amusing process … as he continues to alight upon the obvious with a sense of profound and original discovery.
George F. Will

I'm extremely moved by the loving, caring relationship the President always seems to have with his imaginary son.
Dennis Miller, of President Obama

Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part and by no means the greatest part.
Edmund Burke

[A rephrasing of the precautionary principle.] If reducing fossil fuel use has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public, in the absence of economic consensus that the reduction is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those advocating such a reduction
Dr. Roy Spencer

President Obama is a wartime president who doesn't seem to realize it.
Tom Cotton

If gun free zones save lives, why doesn't Obama just declare Iraq, Syria & Afghanistan one big gun free zone?
Wayne LaPierre

We are not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of citizens.
Mark Levin

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Brooks Adams

I once said cynically of a politician, 'He'll double-cross that bridge when he comes to it.'
Oscar Levant

He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important.
Eugene McCarthy

[The Clintons] are really sort of like tornadoes moving through people's lives. I'm just one of the people left in the wake of their passing by.
James McDougal

The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
Adlai Stevenson

The voters have spoken — the bastards!
Morris Udall

All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
Harry S. Truman

[The Vice Presidency is] a job no one campaigns for openly, no one turns down if offered, and no one emerges from unscathed.
Author unidentified

Father [Theodore Roosevelt] always had to be the center of attention. When he went to a wedding, he wanted to be the bridegroom. And when he went to a funeral, he wanted to be the corpse.
Unidentified son of Theodore Roosevelt

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
Author unidentified

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
Everett Dirksen

[Clement Attlee is] a modest man who has a good deal to be modest about.
Winston Churchill

An independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.
Adlai Stevenson

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding, because I think, well, if they attack me personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
Margaret Thatcher

I have never been hurt by anything I didn't say.
Calvin Coolidge

If you don't say anything, you won't be called upon to repeat it.
Calvin Coolidge

The Democrats are in a real bind. They won't get elected unless things get worse — and things won't get worse unless they're elected.
Ronald Reagan

A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet.
Frank Rizzo

If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.
Author unidentified

Who, whom? (кто кого?)
Lenin

For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.
Saul Bellow

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
William Butler Yeats

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.
Patrick Moynihan

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
Thomas Sowell

The "right to choose" phrase, beloved by fierce women journalists and feminists generally, is peculiarly obnoxious because it associates having children (or not) with the notion of shopping and "consumer choice"; a child in the womb is "disposable," like panty-hose or plastic cartons.
Paul Johnson

For, as an incurable social democrat, I state with absolute conviction that anything to the Left of social democracy, as a political theory, must to a greater or lesser extent be totalitarian, and therefore traffic in violence. And the victims of violence must almost invariably be innocent.
Paul Johnson

The politics of pity, based on the notion of strengthening the weak by weakening the strong, must produce impoverishment.
Paul Johnson

Disastrous consequences … flow when men use the politics of force because they are too impatient for the politics of argument.
Paul Johnson

One of the great themes of the modern age is the way in which political emotions have replaced religious ones as the main driving force of the idealistic elite.
Paul Johnson

Even in its mildest forms, total politics has produced debilitating "welfare cultures," into which unfortunate millions are born, live, breed, and die.
Paul Johnson

And the trouble with political demonology is that, like odium theologicum [theological hatred], it is very catching. Those hate-words come so easily to hand — do they not? — and so easily obliterate shades of political discussion in favour of absolute good and absolute evil.
Paul Johnson

Isn't it about time we began to treat the second world war and the Nazi epoch as history, instead of as part of current affairs?
Paul Johnson

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Shakespeare

When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.
Franlin P. Adams

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
Henry Brooks Adams

I agree with you that in politics the middle way is none at all.
John Adams

Therefore, the good of man must be the end [i.e. objective] of the science of politics.
Aristotle

In every country the extreme party is most irritated against the party which comes nearest to itself, but does not go so far.
Walter Bagehot

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken

Politics consists more in profiting from favorable circumstances than preparing them in advance.
Frederick the Great

Politics is the art of the possible.
Otto von Bismarck

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
Vera Brittain

It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke

Politics is the Art of the Possible. That is what these pages show I have tried to achieve — not more — and that is what I have called my book.
R.A. ('Rab') Butler

In politics, there is no use looking beyond the next fortnight.
Joseph Chamberlain

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.
Alan Clark

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

No man who ever held the office of President would congratulate a friend on obtaining it. He will make one man ungrateful, and a hundred men his enemies, for every office he can bestow.
John Adams

Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
Charles de Gaulle

There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.
Benjamin Disraeli

Damn your principles! Stick to your party.
Benjamin Disraeli, attributed

Never complain and never explain.
Benjamin Disraeli

Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later.
Ernest Hemingway

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway

Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots; of men, who being numbered, they know not how or why, in any of the parties that divide a state, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favour those whom they profess to follow.
Samuel Johnson

Gays want to get married, have children, and go to church. Next they'll be advocating school vouchers, boycotting HBO, and voting Republican.
P. J. O'Rourke

Pollution


[We're] told cars cause pollution. A 100 years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine?
P. J. O'Rourke

Polygamy


In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin.
John Dryden

Pope


If the pope be not Antichrist, he is in bad luck to be so like him.
Author unidentified (The gibe appears often in the Lutheran literature of the Reformation period)

Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.
Edward Gibbon

Seeing the pope is antichrist, I believe him to be a devil incarnate.
Martin Luther

Popularity


The best of us would rather be popular than right.
Mark Twain

Population


American children grow up to be valuable citizens. Bangladeshi children grow up to be part of the world population problem. … Fretting about overpopulation, is a perfect guilt-free — indeed, sanctimonious — way for "progressives" to be racists.
P. J. O'Rourke

Crowded as [Bangladesh] is, is overcrowding even its main problem? Hong Kong and Singapore both have greater population densities [than] Bangladesh, and they're called success stories. The same goes for Monaco. In fact, the whole Riviera is packed in August, and neither Malthus nor Ehrlich have complained about the topless beaches of St. Tropez.
P. J. O'Rourke

Pornography


And women aren't going to screw you in all those crazy ways, either. You got it? They don't look like that and they don't screw crazy. That's what you're taking away from this, okay?
Samuel Halpern

Portrait


One is never satisfied with a portrait of a person that one knows.
J. W. Goethe

Portuguese


The community is eminently Portuguese — that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
Mark Twain

Possession


We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin

Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.
Attributed to Collis P. Huntington

Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The more flesh, the more worms.
The more possessions, the more worry.
Hillel

Post Chaise


When a man has fairly set out in the post chaise, he is somehow flying, separated from the world and its cares, and everything appears to him in a better light than usual. There is a snugness and cheerfulness together which delight me.
Samuel Johnson

Posterity


What has posterity ever done for me?
Groucho Marks

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worth reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Benjamin Franklin

"We are always doing", says he, "something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us."
Joseph Addison

What is the use of living, if it be not to strive for noble causes and to make this muddled world a better place for those who will live in it after we are gone?
Winston Churchill

When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine

Posterity is as likely to be wrong as anybody else.
Heywood Broun

Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again
Where dead men meet, on lips of living men.
Samuel Butler

The ocean and the sun will last our time, and we may leave posterity to shift for themselves.
Samuel Johnson

Postscript


I knew one that when he wrote a letter he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a bymatter.
Francis Bacon

Potential


Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first call promising.
Cyril Connolly

God knows, I’m no the thing I should be,
Nor am I even the thing I could be.
Robert Burns

Poverty


Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is profoundly inconvenient.
Reverend Sydney Smith

The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Willem de Kooning

He who has nothing and wants something is less frustrated than he who has something and wants more.
Eric Hoffer

In comparative terms, there's no poverty in America by a long shot. Heritage Foundation political scientist Robert Rector has worked up figures showing that when the official U.S. measure of poverty was developed in 1963, a poor American family had an income twenty-nine times greater than the average per capita income in the rest of the world.
P. J. O'Rourke

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.
Adam Smith

Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
Stewart Brand

[As] for poverty, the admission of it is no disgrace to a man; not to forge one's way out of it is the real disgrace.
Thucydides

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
Benjamin Franklin

This mournful truth is ev'rywhere confessed —
Slow rises worth, by poverty depressed.
Samuel Johnson

Poverty is an evil always in our view, an evil complicated with so many circumstances of uneasiness and vexation, that every man is studious to avoid it.
Samuel Johnson

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.
Samuel Johnson

But in the prospect of poverty, there is nothing but gloom and melancholy; the mind and body suffer together; its miseries bring no alleviations; it is a state in which every virtue is obscured, and in which no conduct can avoid reproach: a state in which cheerfulness is insensibility, and dejection sullenness, of which the hardships are without honour, and the labours without reward.
Samuel Johnson

To give aid to every poor man is far beyond the reach and power of every man …. Care of the poor is incumbent on society as a whole.
John Locke

To one ineradicable prejudice I freely confess, and that is a prejudice against poverty. I never have anything to do, if it is possible, with anyone who is in financial difficulties … Such persons do not excite my compassion; they excite my aversion … The blame, so far as my experience runs, always lies within.
H. L. Mencken

The poor are Europe's blacks. (Les pauvres sont les nègres de l'Europe.)
Nicolas-Sébastien Chamfort

People don't resent having nothing nearly as much as too little.
Ivy Compton-Burnett

He [the burglar] found it inconvenient to be poor.
William Cowper

It has been remarked, that death, though often defied in the field, seldom fails to terrify when it approaches the bed of sickness in its natural horrour; so poverty may easily be endured, while associated with dignity and reputation, but will always be shunned and dreaded, when it is accompanied with ignominy and contempt.
Samuel Johnson

Power


Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.
Eric Hoffer

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.
Margaret Thatcher

All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.
William Graham Sumner

[Of his son:] The boy is the most powerful of all the Hellenes; for the Hellenes are commanded by the Athenians, the Athenians by myself, myself by the boy’s mother, and the mother by her boy.
Themistocles

God, these old men! How they pray for death! How heavy they find this life in the slow drag of days! And yet, when Death comes near them, you will not find one who will rise and walk with him, not one whose years are still a burden to him
Euripides

He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Author unidentified

[Men are driven by] a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
Thomas Hobbes

Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things almost unknown in high stations.
Edmund Burke

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
John Adams

The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
John Adams

They that govern most make the least noise.
John Selden

But no man’s power can be equal to his will.
Samuel Johnson

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks a victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
Henry Clay

The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves.
William Hazlitt

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
Lord Acton

Power is always gradually stealing away from the many to the few, because the few are more vigilant and consistent; it still contracts to a smaller number, till in time it centres in a single person.
Samuel Johnson

You shall have joy, or you shall have power, said God; you shall not have both.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Power And Riches


Power pleases the violent and proud: wealth delights the placid and the timorous. Youth therefore flies at power, and age grovels after riches.
Samuel Johnson

Practice


The more I practice, the luckier I get.
Author unidentified

Practice makes permanent.
Bobby Robson (Attributed)

There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice.
Samuel Johnson

Praise


It is a sign of a creeping inner death when we no longer can praise the living.
Eric Hoffer

If you would reap Praise you must sow the Seeds, Gentle Words and useful Deeds.
Author unidentified

Usually we praise only to be praised.
La Rochefoucauld

To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise, is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute.
Samuel Johnson

Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity. It becomes cheap as it becomes vulgar, and will no longer raise expectation, or animate enterprise.
Samuel Johnson

Prayer


Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Pray as though everything depended on the Lord and then go out and work as if it all depended on you.
Martin Luther

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.
Oscar Wilde

Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.
Hippocrates

We, ignorant of ourselves,
Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers
Deny us for our good; so find we profit
By losing of our prayers.
Shakespeare

O Lord! thou knowest how busy I must be this day: if I forget thee, do not thou forget me.
Jacob Astley

Preaching


Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.
Samuel Johnson

Precedent


A precedent embalms a principle.
Benjamin Disraeli

The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive; and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and stigmatized, before they have the sanction of antiquity conferred upon them, and become precedents of indisputable authority.
Samuel Johnson

Prejudice


I am free of all prejudices. I hate every one equally.
W. C. Fields

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
William James

One may no more live in the world without picking up the moral prejudices of the world than one will be able to go to hell without perspiring.
H. L. Mencken

Premonition


Beware the Ides of March.
William Shakespeare

Present


Indeed, almost all that we can be said to enjoy is past or future; the present is in perpetual motion, leaves us as soon as it arrives, ceases to be present before its presence is well perceived, and is only known to have existed by the effects which it leaves behind.
Samuel Johnson

Price


For what is worth in anything
But so much money as ’twill bring?
Samuel Butler

A great business at a fair price is superior to a fair business at a great price.
Charlie Munger

Pride


Pride goes before destruction,
a haughty spirit before a fall.
Proverbs 16:18

[His pride] had not yet sunk to the level of his fortune.
Edward Gibbon

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

My pride fell with my fortunes.
Shakespeare

It may easily come to pass that a vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.
John Locke

Many who could have conquered their anger, are unable to combat pride, and pursue offences to extremity of vengeance, lest they should be insulted by the triumph of an enemy.
Samuel Johnson

Prince


We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution.
Edmund Burke

Principle


We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.
Author unidentified

Printing


He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.
Thomas Carlyle

Privacy


I give the fight up: let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God.
Robert Browning

Privilege


Equality before the law is probably forever [unattainable]. It is a noble ideal, but it can never be realized, for what men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
H. L. Mencken

Probability


The theory of probabilities is at bottom nothing but common sense reduced to calculus.
Pierre Simon de Laplace

Problem


If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Maslow

An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
Robert A. Humphrey

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller

When there is food on the table there are many problems. When there is no food, there is only one problem.
Chinese proverb

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities — brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John Gardner

Problem-Solving


To extraordinary circumstance we must apply extraordinary remedies.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Procrastination


The folly of allowing ourselves to delay what we know cannot be finally escaped, is one of the general weaknesses, which, in spite of the instruction of moralists, and the remonstrances of reason, prevail to a greater or less degree in every mind.
Samuel Johnson

Thus life is languished away in the gloom of anxiety, and consumed in collecting resolutions which the next morning dissipates; in forming purposes which we scarcely hope to keep, and reconciling ourselves to our own cowardice by excuses, which, while we admit them, we know to be absurd.
Samuel Johnson

Procreation


The procreation of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned.
Martin Luther

Prodigality


These men are advancing towards misery by soft approaches, and destroying themselves, not by the violence of a blow, which, when once given, can never be recalled, but by a slow poison, hourly repeated, and obstinately continued.
Samuel Johnson

Profit


The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.
Samuel Gompers

I know that it is the Socialist idea that making profits is a vice, and that making large profits is something of which a man ought to be ashamed. I hold the other view. I consider that the real vice is making losses.
Winston Churchill

Civilization and profits go hand in hand.
Calvin Coolidge

Progress


All progress is based upon the universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

[All] that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.
Edward Gibbon

We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.
Edward Gibbon

Things will get better despite our efforts to improve them.
Will Rogers

The most dangerous strategy is to jump a chasm in two leaps.
Benjamin Disraeli

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : "Dentistry".
P. J. O'Rourke

If you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
C. S. Lewis

[We] assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?
Mark Steyn

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
Russell Baker

He that is not handsome at twenty, nor strong at thirty, nor rich at forty, nor wise at fifty, will never be handsome, strong, rich, or wise.
George Herbert

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.
H. L. Mencken

I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.
Winston Churchill

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

What we call 'progress' is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
Havelock Ellis

Progressive


By the end of the 20th century, "liberals" had again discredited themselves, to the point where they went back to calling themselves "progressives" to escape their past, much as people do when they declare bankruptcy.
Thomas Sowell

[To] the progressive mind, the very concept of "the enemy" is obsolescent: there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated.
Mark Steyn

[Progressives] think the Constitution is like Felix the Cat's magic bag: Look in there long enough and hard enough, and you can find anything.
Jonah Goldberg

So-called "progressives" actively wage war on progress. … Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.
Mark Steyn

And in the minds of progressives you are free to live anyway you want so long as it's progressive.
Jonah Goldberg

Promiscuity


A light (promiscuous) wife doth make a heavy (sad) husband.
Shakespeare

Promise


But alas! I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises, that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out.
Mark Twain

Propaganda


Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
Eric Hoffer

Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.
Samuel Johnson

I ran the paper [Daily Express] purely for propaganda, and with no other purpose.
Lord Beaverbrook

That branch of the art of lying which consists in very nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.
Propaganda M. Cornford, of propaganda

Propensity


All men that are ruined are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.
Edmund Burke

Prophesy


Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
George Eliot

Prophet


Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.
Fedor Dostoevsky

Prose


Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.
Molière

Prosperity


Everything in the world may be endured except continued prosperity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.
Genesis 1:28

He that is warm thinks all so.
George Herbert

Our loving Lord God wills that we eat, drink, and be merry, making use of his creatures, for therefore he created them.
Martin Luther

In the time of plenty think of the time of hunger; in days of wealth think of poverty and need.
Ecclesiasticus 18:25

When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health.
J. P. Donleavy

Proverb


When elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
African saying

The nail that sticks out is hammered down.
Japanese proverb

Who is wise? He that learns from everyone.
Who is powerful? He that governs his passions.
Who is rich? He that is content.
Who is that? Nobody.
Benjamin Franklin

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Benjamin Franklin

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat in a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.
Nelson Algren

The wise make proverbs and fools repeat them.
Isaac D'Israeli

[Proverbs are] short sentences drawn from long experiences.
Miguel de Cervantes

A penny saved is a penny earned.
Author unidentified

He that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night.
Author unidentified

Well done is better than well said.
Author unidentified

If a man could have half his wishes, he would double his troubles.
Author unidentified

Act uprightly, and despise Calumny; Dirt may stick to a Mud Wall, but not to polish'd Marble.
Author unidentified

Speak little, do much.
Author unidentified

A slip of the foot you may soon recover;
But a slip of the Tongue you may never get over.
Author unidentified

When the Well's dry, we know the Worth of Water.
Author unidentified

Do not do what you would not have known.
Author unidentified

Don't get furious, get curious.
Author unidentified

To rise at six, to dine at ten,
To sup at six, to sleep at ten,
Makes a man live for ten times ten.
Victor Hugo, inscription over the door of his study

Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.
Benjamin Disraeli

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Providence


Follow your heart. Follow your principles. And leave the rest to Providence.
Author unidentified

Provision


The first years of man must make provision for the last.
Samuel Johnson

Prudence


In these honorable contests his spirit soared above the consideration of danger, and perhaps of prudence.
Edward Gibbon

Psychiatry


A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.
Jerome Lawrence

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sigmund Freud

Public Debt


The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.
Thomas Jefferson

I desire to go on record as predicting that we will never pay our public debt in full.
Lewis H. Haney

Public School


Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.
Henry Fielding

Publishing


The world needs your book, just not many copies of it.
Derek Brewer, to an author

Pun


Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
Dave Barry

Punctuality


If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late.
Author unidentified

I do think unpunctuality is a vile habit, and all my life I have tried to break myself of it.
Winston Churchill

Punctuation


My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.
Ernest Hemingway

Punishment


But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
Friedrich Nietzsche

Puritan


The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas Babington Macaulay

At the bottom of Puritanism one finds envy of the fellow who is having a better time in the world, and hence hatred of him. At the bottom of democracy one finds the same thing. This is why all Puritans are democrats and all democrats are Puritans.
H. L. Mencken

Pursuit


You will never possess what you are unwilling to pursue.
Mike Murdock

Quality


Qualities too elevated often unfit a man for society. We don't take ingots with us to market; we take silver or small change. (Des qualités trop supérieures rendent souvent un homme moins propre à la société. On ne va pas au marché avec des lingots; on y va avec de l'argent ou de la petite monnaie.)
Nicolas-Sébastien Chamfort

Quarrel


Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.
La Rochefoucauld

Those who in quarrels interpose
Must often wipe a bloody nose.
John Gay

Question


Scott Buchanan … taught me that the questions that can be answered are not worth asking.
Milton Mayer

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting no answers, stops asking.
George Wald

Quotation


It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
Winston Churchill

A short saying oft contains much wisdom.
Sophocles

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.
Benjamin Disraeli

I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself.
Marlene Dietrich

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
Seneca

A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion.
Robert Chapman

A fine quotation is a diamond on the finger of a man of wit, and a pebble in the hand of a fool.
Joseph Roux

I know heaps of quotations, so I can always make quite a fair show of knowledge.
O. Douglas

Race


There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Booker T. Washington

Why do black people need white people to tell them that their lives matter?
Author unidentified

The black community [in the U.K.] wants race/colour suppressed in court cases and reports of riots and violent assaults, but stressed where its mention is favourable to its members, for instance in sports stories.
Paul Johnson

The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken

I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man and forgets his colour or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes. I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe that the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The law has made him equal, but man has not.
Clarence Darrow

Racism


The soft bigotry of low expectations …
Michael Gerson

Assume there's a vaccine against white racism. Would 70% of black kids STILL be raised in fatherless homes? Would 50% of blacks STILL dropout of many urban high schools? Would 25% of young black urban men STILL have criminal records? Would blacks STILL kill 7,000 blacks every year?
Larry Elder

I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.
Charles Murray

Reactionary


Conquest's Law: Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands. (Alternatively, "Everyone is a conservative in his own field of expertise").
Robert Conquest

Reader


’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; … in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reading


Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein

A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel Johnson

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain

In reading, observe the course of your thoughts rather than of your books. Sometimes your reading will give occasion to a thought, not connected with the subject which your book treats of; and in such a case, drop the course of your reading, and follow the course of the thought that has been started.
Author unidentified

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith

Luther advised all who proposed to study, in what art soever, to read some sure and certain books over and over again; for to read many sorts of books produces rather confusion than any distinct result; just as those who dwell everywhere, and remain in no place, dwell nowhere, and have no home.
Author unidentified

He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?
Samuel Johnson

It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.
Samuel Johnson

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison

Much reading is harmful to thinking. The greatest thinkers I have known have been precisely those who of all the scholars I have known had read least.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Rearmament


I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.
Winston Churchill

Reason


Reason — the Devil's harlot.
Martin Luther

Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
David Hume

Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired. [Modern variation: A man cannot be reasoned out of a position he did not reason himself into.]
Jonathan Swift

Rebel


Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken

Rebellion


I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
Thomas Jefferson

Recession


You cannot now, if you ever could, spend your way out of a recession.
James Callaghan

Recurrence


What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9

Redress


Things past redress are now with me past care.
Shakespeare

Reform


Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Reformation


"If you meddle with popedom you will have the whole world against you;" and he added:— "yet the church is built on blood, and with blood must be sprinkled."
Martin Luther

Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Reformer


It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.
Edward Gibbon

A reformer should be exempt from the suspicion of interest, and he must possess the confidence and esteem of those whom he proposes to reclaim.
Edward Gibbon

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.
William Graham Sumner

Regret


I repent of my diets, the delicious dishes rejected out of vanity, as much as I lament the opportunities for making love that I let go by because of pressing tasks or puritanical virtue.
Isabel Allende

Regulation


[Experience] seems to shew that law can never regulate them [wages] properly, though it has often pretended to do so.
Adam Smith

Relationship


The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez

Contrary to what many women believe, it's fairly easy to develop a long-term, stable, intimate, and mutually fulfilling relationship with a guy. Of course this guy has to be a Labrador retriever. With human guys, it's extremely difficult. This is because guys don't really grasp what women mean by the term relationship.
Dave Barry

Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.
Marianne Faithfull

Relativism


At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.
Paul Johnson

Religion


Hear the verbal protestations of all men: nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: you will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.
David Hume

It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.
Tertullian

The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Edmund Burke

Show me any mischief produced by the madness or wickedness of theologians, and I will show you an hundred resulting from the ambition and villany of conquerors and statesmen. Show me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to show you an hundred for one in political laws and institutions.
Edmund Burke

Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke

Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion.
Sir Thomas Browne

To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
Samuel Johnson

Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem — for purely religious purposes, of course — to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.
Rudyard Kipling

I don't have much truck with the "religion is the cause of most of our wars" school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.
Terry Pratchett

In their religion they are so uneven,
That each man goes his own byway to heaven.
Daniel Defoe

Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States.
Alexis de Tocqueville

Religious Freedom


All religions must be tolerated, and the sole concern of the authorities should be to see that one does not molest another, for here every man must be saved in his own way.
Frederick the Great

Every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.
George Washington

The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion.
H. L. Mencken

Remedy


Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.
Shakespeare

Remembrance


When time has supplied us with events sufficient to employ our thoughts, it has mingled them with so many disasters, that we shrink from their remembrance, dread their intrusion upon our minds, and fly from them as from enemies that pursue us with torture.
Samuel Johnson

Remorse


Nothing then remains but murmurs and remorse; for if the spendthrift's poverty be embittered by the reflection that he once was rich, how must the idler’s obscurity be clouded by remembering that he once had lustre!
Samuel Johnson

Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.
William Cowper

Reorganization


We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
Charlton Ogburn

Repentance


Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.
John Dryden

Repentance is but want of power to sin.
John Dryden

Repetition


As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs; so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.
Samuel Johnson

Representative


Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke

Reproach


The Sting of a Reproach, is the Truth of it.
Author unidentified

His enemies did not forget to reproach him, when he became conspicuous enough to excite malevolence.
Samuel Johnson

Republican


The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
P. J. O'Rourke

"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.
Mark Steyn

Reputation


Reputation, reputation, reputation! O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
Shakespeare

Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
Shakespeare

But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
Shakespeare

There is a general succession of events in which contraries are produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.
Samuel Johnson

Without a genius learning soars in vain;
And without learning genius sinks again;
Their force united crowns the sprightly reign.

(Ego nec studium sine divite venû,
Nec rude quid prosit video ingenium; alterius sic
Altera poscit opem res, et conjurat amice.
)

Elphinston, based on Horace

[The] reputation raised by a long train of success may be finally ruined by a single failure; for weakness or errour will be always remembered by that malice and envy which it gratifies.
Samuel Johnson

The reputation which the world bestows is like the wind, that shifts now here now there, its name changed with the quarter whence it blows. (Non è il mondan romore altro che un fiato di vento, ch'or vien quinci ed or qien quindi, e muta nome perchè muta lato.)
Dante Alighieri

Research


Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
Marston Bates

Resentment


Resentment is an union of sorrow with malignity, a combination of a passion which all endeavour to avoid, with a passion which all concur to detest.
Samuel Johnson

Resilience


We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find the harbour of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.
Winston Churchill

Resolution


Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.
Samuel Johnson

I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a child-like trust in God.
Bishop John H. Vincent

When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption or morbid infirmity, when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because Reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try in humble hope of the help of God.
Samuel Johnson

Thus procrastination is accumulated on procrastination, and one impediment succeeds another, till age shatters our resolution, or death intercepts the project of amendment. Such is often the end of salutary purposes, after they have long delighted the imagination, and appeased that disquiet which every mind feels from known misconduct, when the attention is not diverted by business or by pleasure.
Samuel Johnson

Resourcefulness


Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
Ernest Hemingway

Responsibility


It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.
Peter Ustinov

We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C. S. Lewis

Son, you came in the house yesterday with shit on your hands. Human shit. I don't know how that happened, but if someone has shit on their hands, it's an indicator that maybe the whole responsibility thing isn't for them.
Samuel Halpern

Would you live with ease, Do what you ought, not what you please.
Author unidentified

Retirement


The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do — and makes you what you are — is to back up into the grave.
Ernest Hemingway

Retrospective


Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, 'I told you so.'
Lord Byron

Revelation


Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha.
Terry Pratchett

Revenge


The revenge of a guilty woman is implacable.
Edward Gibbon

Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge — and has to content oneself with dreaming.
Paul Gauguin

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.
William Shakespeare

For revenge is always the delight of a mean spirit, of a weak and petty mind! You may immediately draw proof of this that no one rejoices more in revenge than a woman.
Juvenal

Living well is the best revenge.
George Herbert

Sweet is revenge — especially to women.
Lord Byron

Revolution


All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.
Mark Twain

In Latin America, every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a "liberator"; murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people.
Paul Johnson

You may have made a Revolution, but not a Reformation. You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom.
Edmund Burke

But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations.
John Adams

The generation which commences a revolution can rarely complete it.
Thomas Jefferson

Revolutionary


The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic. (Tout révolutionnaire finit en oppresseur ou en hérétique.)
Albert Camus

Rhyme


If it be justly observed by Milton, that rhyme obliges poets to express their thoughts in improper terms, these improprieties must always be multiplied, as the difficulty of rhyme is increased by long concatenations.
Samuel Johnson

Right


The fact is, that there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the price of it … Something for nothing is not to be found on earth.
William Graham Sumner

Right … is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
Jeremy Bentham

We owe it to our ancestors to preserve entire those rights, which they have delivered to our care: we owe it to our posterity, not to suffer their dearest inheritance to be destroyed.
The Letters of Junius

Right And Wrong


If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth … it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.
H. L. Mencken

Righteous


The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.
Proverbs 4:18

Righteousness


A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

Riposte


Pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker to Clare Boothe Luce, who had stood aside for her saying, "Age before Beauty"

Risk


Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world, knowing they're going to light the bottom, and doesn't get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation.
John Young, astronaut, when asked about the risks of space flight

Risk-Taking


Live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.
Winston Churchill

Rival


The finest woman in nature should not detain me an hour from you; but you must sometimes suffer the rivalship of the wisest men.
Sir Richard Steele

Robert Browning


When it was written, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant; now only God knows.
Anonymous, on Sordello

Roman Catholic Church


Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action — that the end will sanction any means.
S. T. Coleridge

She [the Roman Catholic Church] was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
T. B. Macaulay

When Socialism comes to power, the [Roman Catholic] church will advocate Socialism with the same vigor it is now favoring feudalism and slavery. And it will find plenty of proof in the New Testament that the church has always been communistic.
August Bebel

Rome


The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
Edward Gibbon

[Instead] of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
Edward Gibbon

Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war.
Edward Gibbon

The commonwealth of Rome grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind.
Samuel Johnson

The Romans triumphed over all their enemies, by keeping constantly on foot forty-two legions of six thousand men each, disciplined troops, practiced in war.
Martin Luther

While stands the Coliseum,
Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls — the world.
Lord Byron

Routine


Routine is supposed to be the great deadener of souls; how much worse is the half-completed task, the broken round, the unfulfilled routine?
Richard Brookhiser

Royalty


When the Quaker Penn kept his hat on in the royal presence, Charles (King Charles II) politely removed his, explaining that it was the custom in that place for only one person at a time to remain covered.
Arthur Bryant

Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it … Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.
Walter Bagehot

Rudeness


Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer

Ruin


There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Adam Smith

Rule


No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.
Robert Burton

Reason to rule, but mercy to forgive:
The first is law, the last prerogative.
John Dryden

Russia


Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a very large country, a very old country, a very disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons and in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.
Winston Churchill

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill

Both Moscow and [Kiev], the modern and the ancient capitals, were reduced to ashes [by the Tartars]; a temporary ruin, less fatal than the deep, and perhaps indelible, mark, which a servitude of two hundred years has imprinted on the character of the Russians.
Edward Gibbon

This empire [Russia], vast as it is, is only a prison to which the emperor holds the key.
Astolphe Louis Léonard, Marquis de Custine

Russian


It is the Russians’ joy to drink; we cannot do without it.
The Primary Chronicle

Rust


The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
For want of fighting was grown rusty,
And eat into it self, for lack
Of some body to hew and hack.
Samuel Butler

Saint


Many of the insights of the saint stem from his experience as a sinner.
Eric Hoffer

Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited.
Ambrose Bierce

Salutation


Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you. (Ave, Imperator, morituri te salutant).
Author unidentified, (reportedly said before a mock naval battle in AD 52)

Samuel Johnson


I observed he [Samuel Johnson] poured a large quantity of it [wine] into a glass, and swallowed it greedily. Everything about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink wine, it was copiously. He could practise abstinence, but not temperance.
James Boswell

[Samuel Johnson] was unsentimental about the past, disturbed by the present, and apprehensive for the future.
John Cannon

The vacuity of life had so struck upon the mind of Mr Johnson that it became by repeated impression his favourite hypothesis, and the general tenor of his reasonings commonly ended in that.
Hester Thrale

He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. [Samuel] Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best: — there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.
William Gerard Hamilton

His [Samuel Johnson's] person was large, robust, I may say approaching to the gigantic, and grown unwieldy from corpulency.
James Boswell

There is no arguing with Johnson: for if his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.
Oliver Goldsmith

[To Dr. Johnson:] If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.
Oliver Goldsmith

The freedom with which Dr Johnson condemns whatever he disapproves is astonishing.
Fanny Burney

Pomposo, insolent and loud,
Vain idol of a scribbling crowd,
Whose cursory flattery is the tool
Of every fawning, flattering fool;
Who wit with jealous eye surveys,
And sickens at another's praise; …
Who to increase his native strength
Draws words six syllables in length,
With which, assisted with a frown,
By way of club, he knocks us down.
Charles Churchill

I can now look back upon threescore and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed; a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent or importunate distress.
Samuel Johnson

Johnson deals so much in tribal tautology, or, the fault of repeating the same sense in three different phrases, that I believe it would be possible, taking the ground-work for all three, to make one of his Ramblers into three different papers, that should all have exactly the same purport and meaning, but in different phrases.
Horace Walpole

Here lies poor Johnson. Reader! have a care,
Tread light, lest you rouse a sleeping bear.
Religious, moral, gen'rous and humane,
He was, but self-conceited, rude, and vain:
Ill-bred, and overbearing in dispute,
A scholar and a Christian, yet a brute.
Soame Jenyns

All his (Johnson's) books are written in a learned language, in a language which nobody hears from his mother or his nurse, in a language in which nobody ever quarrels, or drives bargains, or makes love, in a language in which nobody ever thinks.
T. B. Macaulay

I have always considered him (Johnson) to be, by nature, one of our great English souls. A strong and noble man; so much left undeveloped in him to the last: in a kindlier element what might he not have been, — poet, priest, sovereign, ruler!
Thomas Carlyle

San Diego


San Diego didn't look like the kind of town where people get born.
Steve Ellman

San Francisco


The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
Mark Twain

San Francisco is a mad city — inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people, whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
Rudyard Kipling

Sanctions


Sanctions rarely work: they damage, infuriate and embitter but they do not deter or frustrate an act of aggression.
Paul Johnson

Sarcasm


Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.
Thomas Carlyle

Satan


For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
Isaac Watts

Satire


Satire should, like a polished razor keen,
Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Satisfaction


I die without remorse, as I have lived without guilt.
Julian, Emperor of Rome

Schadenfreude


Never find your delight in another's misfortune.
Publilius

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.
Edmund Burke

Scholar


Thus the man of learning is often resigned, almost by his own consent, to languor and pain; and while in the prosecution of his studies he suffers the weariness of labour, is subject by his course of life to the maladies of idleness.
Samuel Johnson

We must distinguish between a man of polite learning and a mere scholar: the first is a gentleman and what a gentleman should be; the last is a mere book-case, a bundle of letters, a head stuffed with the jargon of languages, a man that understands every body but is understood by no body.
Daniel Defoe

School


But this interlude of school makes a sombre grey patch upon the chart of my journey. It was an unending spell of worries that did not then seem petty, of toil uncheered by fruition; a time of discomfort, restriction and purposeless monotony.
Winston Churchill

All my contemporaries and even younger boys seemed in every way better adapted to the conditions of our little world [in school]. They were far better both at the games and at the lessons. It is not pleasant to feel oneself so completely outclassed and left behind at the very beginning of the race.
Winston Churchill

Science


An old Jewish man reads about Einstein's theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him.

"Well, Zayda, it's sort of like this. Einstein says that if you're having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you're sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute."

The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, "And from this he makes a living?"

Arthur Naiman, "Every Goy's Guide to Yiddish"

Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison

I can't believe that God plays dice with the universe.
Albert Einstein

If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German, and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
Albert Einstein

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, you think it's only a minute. But when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it's two hours. That's relativity.
Albert Einstein

Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein

Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.
Albert Einstein

Science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of bricks is a house.
Henri Poincaré

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein (Attributed)

There's a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons that sound good.
Burton Hillis

No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.
Albert Einstein

If I have been able to see farther than others, it was because I stood on the shoulders of giants.
Sir Isaac Newton

Perfection [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas H. Huxley

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
Albert Einstein

The answer to unethical science is not to give up on ethics, but rather to pursue ethical science.
Author unidentified

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.
Bertrand Russell

Post-Normal Science is where facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.
Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong.
Wolfgang Pauli

[In] the post-Enlightenment world, science [has] taken the place of magic, miracles, and superstition.
Jonah Goldberg

Modern science and industry [can] turn the luxuries of one generation into the necessities of the next.
Paul Johnson

There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi.
Luis Walter Alvarez

Even those to whom Providence hath allotted greater strength of understanding, can expect only to improve a single science. In every other part of learning, they must be content to follow opinions, which they are not able to examine; and, even in that which they claim as peculiarly their own, can seldom add more than some small particle of knowledge, to the hereditary stock devolved to them from ancient times, the collective labour of a thousand intellects.
Samuel Johnson

The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short.
Winston Churchill

As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
Noam Chomsky

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.
Marie Curie

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.
Francis Darwin

When Columbus promised a new hemisphere, he was told that this hemisphere could not exist; & when he discovered it, it was claimed that it had been known for a long time. (Lorsque Colombo avait promis un nouvel hémisphère, on lui avait soutenu que cet hémisphère ne pouvait exister; & quand il l’eut découvert, on prétendit qu’il avait été connu depuis long-temps.)
Voltaire

Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers.
Arthur Eddington

The grand aim of all science [is] to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest possible number of hypotheses or axioms.
Albert Einstein

Science Fiction


Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
Isaac Asimov

Scientist


Mark all mathematical heads which be only and wholly bent on these sciences, how solitary they be themselves, how unfit to live with others, and how unapt to serve the world.
Roger Ascham

Scotland


A land of meanness, sophistry, and mist.
Lord Byron, of Scotland

Scripture


The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
William Shakespeare

He had been earnestly exhorting them to come and listen to the Word of God: "Well," they said, "if you will tap a good barrel of beer for us, we'll come with all our hearts and hear you."
Martin Luther

I am so great an enemy to the second book of the Maccabees, and to Esther, that I wish they had not come to us at all, for they have too many heathen unnaturalities. The Jews much more esteemed the book of Esther than any of the prophets; though they were forbidden to read it before they had attained the age of thirty, by reason of the mystic matters it contains.
Martin Luther

Sea


There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
James Russell Lowell

Season


To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana

Spring is the season of gaiety, and winter of terrour.
Samuel Johnson

This distinction of seasons is produced only by imagination operating on luxury. To temperance every day is bright, and every hour is propitious to diligence. He that shall resolutely excite his faculties, or exert his virtues, will soon make himself superior to the seasons, and may set at defiance the morning mist, and the evening damp, the blasts of the east, and the clouds of the south.
Samuel Johnson

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land.
T. S. Eliot

Secret


It is wise not to seek a Secret, and Honest not to reveal it.
Author unidentified

Three may keep a Secret, if two of them are dead.
Author unidentified

To tell our own secrets is generally folly, but that folly is without guilt; to communicate those with which we are intrusted is always treachery, and treachery for the most part combined with folly.
Samuel Johnson

Without this limitation [on keeping a secret] confidence must run on without end, the second person may tell the secret to the third, upon the same principle as he received it from the first, and a third may hand it forward to a fourth, till at last it is told in the round of friendship to them from whom it was the first intention to conceal it.
Samuel Johnson

The whole doctrine, as well as practice of secrecy, is so perplexing and dangerous, that next to him who is compelled to trust, I think him unhappy who is chosen to be trusted; for he is often involved in scruples without the liberty of calling in the help of any other understanding.
Samuel Johnson

As every one is pleased with imagining that he knows something not yet commonly divulged, secret history easily gains credit; but it is for the most part believed only while it circulates in whispers; and when once it is openly told, is openly confuted.
Samuel Johnson

I know that's a secret, for it's whispered every where.
William Congreve

Secrets with girls, like loaded guns with boys,
Are never valued till they make a noise.
George Crabbe

For secrets are edged tools,
And must be kept from children and from fools.
John Dryden

Security


Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature.
Helen Keller

Seduction


But seduction … isn't making someone do what they don't want to do. Seduction is enticing someone into doing what they secretly want to do already.
Waiter Rant Weblog (2005-11-29)

Self


There is nothing noble about being superior to some other men. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.
Hindustani proverb

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley

To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
Albert Camus

There is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.
Schopenhauer

Only the shallow know themselves.
Oscar Wilde

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Salvador Dali

We run fastest and farthest when we run from ourselves.
Eric Hoffer

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbors as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant of others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
Eric Hoffer

My life is one long escape from myself.
Samuel Johnson (Attributed)

Self-Absorption


There will always be a part, and always a very large part of every community, that have no care but for themselves, and whose care for themselves reaches little further than impatience of immediate pain, and eagerness for the nearest good.
Samuel Johnson

Self-Confidence


Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.
Samuel Johnson

Self-Control


Every observer, however superficial, has remarked that in many men the love of pleasures is the Ruling Passion of their youth, and the love of money that of their advanced years. However this be, it is not proper to dwell too long on the resistless power and despotic authority of this tyrant of the soul, lest the reader should, as it is very natural, take the present inclination, however destructive to society or himself, for the Ruling Passion, and forbear to struggle when he despairs to conquer.
Samuel Johnson

Self-Criticism


There is another man within me that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me.
Sir Thomas Browne

Self-Delusion


When we have once obtained an acknowledged superiority over our acquaintances, imagination and desire easily extend it over the rest of mankind, and if no accident forces us into new emulations, we grow old, and die in admiration of ourselves.
Samuel Johnson

Self-Discipline


He that would govern others, first should be
The master of himself.
Philip Massinger

Great numbers who quarrel with their condition, have wanted not the power but the will to obtain a better state.
Samuel Johnson

Self-Discovery


The nearer we approach to the goal of life, the better we begin to understand the true value of our existence, and the real weight of our opinions.
Edmund Burke

Self-Esteem


I think high self-esteem is overrated. A little low self-esteem is actually quite good … Maybe you're not the best, so you should work a little harder.
Jay Leno

Self-Importance


Self-importance is our greatest enemy. Think about it — what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self-importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.
Carlos Castaneda

Self-Improvement


Be at war with your vices,
At peace with your neighbors,
And let every New Year,
find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. But I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my country. When I found I couldn't change my country, I began to focus on my town. However, I discovered that I couldn't change the town, and so as I grew older, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only one I can change is myself, but I've come to recognize that if long ago I had started with myself, then I could have made an impact on my family. And my family and I could have made an impact on our town. And that, in turn, could have changed the country and we could all, indeed, have changed the world.
Rabbi Israel Salanter

Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.
Émile Coué

Self-Knowledge


I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[Every] errour in human conduct must arise from ignorance in ourselves, either perpetual or temporary; and happen either because we do not know what is best and fittest, or because our knowledge is at the time of action not present to the mind.
Samuel Johnson

He knows the universe, and himself he does not know.
Jean de La Fontaine

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Alexander Pope

Self-Love


Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.
La Rochefoucauld

Self-love is often rather arrogant than blind; it does not hide our faults from ourselves, but persuades us that they escape the notice of others, and disposes us to resent censures lest we should confess them to be just.
Samuel Johnson

He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Self-Perception


I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Sir Isaac Newton

Self-Reflection


Must I hold a candle to my shames?
Shakespeare

For such is the inequality of our corporeal to our intellectual faculties, that we contrive in minutes what we execute in years, and the soul often stands an idle spectator of the labour of the hands, and expedition of the feet.
Samuel Johnson

It [self-reflection] is, indeed, of so great use, that without it we should always be to begin life, be seduced for ever by the same allurements, and misled by the same fallacies.
Samuel Johnson

Let not sleep fall upon thy eyes till thou hast thrice reviewed the transactions of the past day. Where have I turned aside from rectitude? What have I been doing? What have I left undone, which I ought to have done?
Pythagoras

Self-Reliance


Goe not for every griefe to the physitian, nor for every quarrell to the lawyer, nor for every thirst to the pot.
George Herbert

Self-Respect


No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
George Bernard Shaw

Selfie


They [selfies] are this horrible thing where you are distorted. The chin is too big, the head is too small. No, this is electronic masturbation.
Karl Lagerfeld

Selfishness


Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
Jane Austen

Sense


Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.
Lewis Carroll

Where sense is wanting,
Everything is wanting.
Benjamin Franklin

We rarely find that people have good sense unless they agree with us.
La Rochefoucauld

Sentimentalist


A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
Oscar Wilde

Separation


In every parting there is an image of death.
George Eliot

Serfdom


Better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait till it begins to abolish itself from below.
Alexander II

Seriousness


They that [are] serious in ridiculous matters [will] be ridiculous in serious affairs.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

Sermon


I would not have preachers torment their hearers, and detain them with long and tedious preaching, for the delight of hearing vanishes therewith, and the preachers hurt themselves.
Martin Luther

Serpent


It was precisely because the serpent, at that time, was the most beautiful of creatures, that Satan selected it for his work, for the devil likes beauty, knowing that beauty attracts men unto evil.
Martin Luther

Sex


The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
Brendan Francis

There are three possible parts to a date, of which at least two must be offered: entertainment, food, and affection. It is customary to begin a series of dates with a great deal of entertainment, a moderate amount of food, and the merest suggestion of affection. As the amount of affection increases, the entertainment can be reduced proportionately. When the affection is the entertainment, we no longer call it dating. Under no circumstances can the food be omitted.
Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior

The daughter-in-law of Pythagoras said that a woman who goes to bed with a man ought to lay aside her modesty with her skirt, and put it on again with her petticoat.
Montaigne

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
Anatole France

Marriage has many pains but celibacy has no pleasures.
Samuel Johnson

They made love as though they were an endangered species.
Peter De Vries

The physical union of the sexes … only intensifies man's sense of solitude.
Nicolas Berdyaev

As a child of eight Mr. Trout had once kissed a girl of six under the mistletoe at a Christmas party, but there his sex life had come to abrupt halt.
P. G. Wodehouse

Ducking for apples — change one letter and it's the story of my life.
Dorothy Parker

Women complain about sex more often than men. Their gripes fall into two major categories: (1) Not enough. (2) Too much.
Ann Landers

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around.
David Lodge

Women can sleep with whoever they want;
Men have to sleep with whoever will let them.
Author unidentified

A man on a date wonders if he'll get lucky. The woman already knows.
Monica Piper

You don't get married to get sex. Getting married to get sex is like buying a 747 to get free peanuts.
Jeff Foxworthy

I know nothing about sex because I was always married.
Zsa Zsa Gabor

Golf and sex are about the only things you can enjoy without being good at.
Jimmy Demaret

Men want sex. If men ruled the world, they could get sex anywhere, anytime. Restaurants would give you sex instead of breath mints on the way out. Gas stations would give sex with every fill-up. Banks would give sex to anyone who opened a checking account.
Scott Adams

Lie back and think of England.
Author unidentified. There is an apocryphal story that Queen Victoria offered this advice on her daughter's wedding night.

After all, [female genital mutilation is] a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest.
Mark Steyn

I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me.
Tallulah Bankhead

You'll have to ask somebody older than me.
Eubie Blake, when asked at the age of 97 at what age the sex drive goes

What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,
Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
Lord Byron

She broke her marriage vows; she tried to sleep with me.
Tom Driberg, a homosexual who had married a widow

He may be the best lover in the world, but what do you do the other twenty-two hours of the day?
Zsa Zsa Gabor, on her boyfriend Porfirio Rubirosa

Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place.
Lowell Ganz

Men don't realize that if we're sleeping with them on the first date, we're probably not interested in seeing them again either.
Chelsea Handler

I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.
J. Edgar Hoover

What's the worst thing about oral sex? The view.
Maureen Lipman

What's a promiscuous person? It's usually someone who is getting more sex than you are.
Victor Lownes

Many years ago I chased a woman for almost two years, only to discover that her tastes were exactly like mine: we both were crazy about girls.
Groucho Marx

It's so long since I've had sex I've forgotten who ties up whom.
Joan Rivers

Why don't you come up sometime, and see me?
Mae West

Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.
Woody Allen

A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me and she said 'no'.
Woody Allen

On bisexuality: It immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.
Woody Allen

Every creature is sad after coitus. (Post coitum omne animal triste.)
Author unidentified

Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
Shakespeare

I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the World without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.
Sir Thomas Browne

The pleasure [of sex] is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
Lord Chesterfield (Attributed)

I have never yet seen anyone whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as sexual desire.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)

Shame


Shame, above any other passion, propagates itself.
Samuel Johnson

Ship


No man will be a sailor who has contrivance to get himself into a jail …. There is, in a gaol, better air, better company, better conveniency of every kind; and a ship has the additional disadvantage of being in danger …. Being in a ship is being in a jail with the chance of being drowned.
Samuel Johnson

Siesta


Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don't care to,
The Chinese wouldn't dare to,
The Hindus and Argentines
Sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen detest a siesta.
Noël Coward

Sight


'Tis always better to see with one's own eyes than with those of other people.
Martin Luther

Silence


Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
Beckett

Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent,
and discerning if he holds his tongue.
Proverbs 17:28

I think the first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy:
I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
Shakespeare

It is always observable that silence propagates itself, and that the longer talk has been suspended, the more difficult it is to find any thing to say.
Samuel Johnson

Silence is the virtue of fools. (Silentium, stultorum virtus.)
Francis Bacon

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
Blaise Pascal

Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time.
Thomas Carlyle

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Simplicity


Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
Leonardo da Vinci

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
Alan Perlis

All the greatest things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: Freedom; Justice; Honour; Duty; Mercy; Hope.
Winston Churchill

Sin


Few love to hear the sins they love to act.
Shakespeare

All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
W. H. Auden

With love for mankind and hatred of sins. [Often quoted as 'Love the sinner but hate the sin.']

(Cum dilectione hominum et odio vitiorum.)

St. Augustine

"Sins," he said. "Well, what did he say about sin?"

"He was against it."

Calvin Coolidge, perhaps apocryphal

As creeping ivy clings to wood or stone,
And hides the ruin that it feeds upon,
So sophistry, cleaves close to, and protects
Sin's rotten trunk, concealing its defects.
William Cowper

You think sin in the beginning full sweet,
Which in the end causeth the soul to weep,
When the body lieth in clay.
Everyman

Sincerity


A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Oscar Wilde

Singularity


Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Isaac Newton


Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
Alexander Pope

Sister


Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on. Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm.
Rudyard Kipling

Skepticism


Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana

Skill


Whatever is done skilfully appears to be done with ease.
Samuel Johnson

Sky


The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Slave


I am tired of ruling over slaves.
Frederick the Great

Slavery


Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils.
Benjamin Franklin

When … you have succeeded in dehumanizing the Negro; when you have put him down and made it forever impossible for him to be but as the beasts of the field; when you have extinguished his soul and placed him where the ray of hope is blown out in darkness like that which broods over the spirits of the damned, are you quite sure that the demon you have roused will not turn and rend you?
Abraham Lincoln

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
Edmund Burke

Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.
Samuel Johnson

It must be agreed that in most ages many countries have had part of their inhabitants in a state of slavery; yet it may be doubted whether slavery can ever be supposed the natural condition of man. It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children.
Samuel Johnson

That execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the Slave Trade.
John Wesley

Sleep


Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit.
Shakespeare

Whilst Adam slept, Eve from his side arose:
Strange his first sleep should be his last repose.
Anonymous

You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.
Anonymous

The world is full of fools, and he who would see none should live alone and smash his mirror. (Le monde est plein de fous, et qui n'en veut pas voir Doit se tenir tout seul, et casser son miroir.)
Anonymous

Sleep is sweet to the labouring man.
John Bunyan

He that would thrive
Must rise at five;
He that hath thriven
May lie till seven.
John Clarke

In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep — that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Sloth


Diligence overcomes Difficulties, Sloth makes them.
Author unidentified

Almost every occupation, however inconvenient or formidable, is happier and safer than a life of sloth.
Samuel Johnson

I am overcome by my own amazing sloth … Can you please forgive me and believe that it is really because I want to do something well that I don't do it at all?
Elizabeth Bishop

Smoking


I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
Mark Twain

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
Mark Twain

A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.
James I

Social Darwinism


[Social Darwinism] is the most influential misconception in history, since it produced the Marxism of Capital, the imperialism of Joe Chamberlain, and the racialism of Adolf Hitler.
Paul Johnson

Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies which shaped Hitlerism.
Paul Johnson

Social Engineering


Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area — crime, education, housing, race relations — the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Thomas Sowell

My point is that you cannot force social change at a speed that it cannot go. Social change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Deep social change takes time.
Camille Paglia

Social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age.
Paul Johnson

Social engineering is the creation of millenarian intellectuals who believe they can refashion the universe by the light of their unaided reason.
Paul Johnson

[The man of system] seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.
Adam Smith

Social Justice


I am certain, however, that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Friedrich von Hayek

Social Science


If any student of social science comes to appreciate the case of the Forgotten Man, he will become an unflinching advocate of strict scientific thinking in sociology, and a hard-hearted skeptic as regards any scheme of social amelioration. He will always want to know, Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?
William Graham Sumner

Social Security


I say we scrap the current [Social Security] system and replace it with a system wherein you add your name to the bottom of a list, and the you send some money to the person at the top of the list, and then you … Oh, wait that IS our current system.
Dave Barry

Socialism


To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.
Margaret Thatcher

Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion — how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.
John Maynard Keynes

[In the Soviet Union,] they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.
Author unidentified

Give people plenty and security, and they will fall into spiritual torpor.
Charles Murray

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.
Margaret Thatcher

[Socialists claim] that we reject fraternity, solidarity, organization, and association; and they brand us with the name of individualists. We can assure them that what we repudiate is not natural organization, but forced organization. It is not free association, but the forms of association that they would impose upon us. It is not spontaneous fraternity, but legal fraternity. It is not providential solidarity, but artificial solidarity, which is only an unjust displacement of responsibility. Socialism … confounds Government and society.
Frédéric Bastiat

Socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.
Paul Johnson

The chief difference between free capitalism and State socialism seems to be this: that under the former a man pursues his own advantage openly, frankly and honestly, whereas under the latter he does so hypocritically and under false pretenses.
H. L. Mencken

Let them [Socialists] abandon the utter fallacy, the grotesque, erroneous, fatal blunder of believing that by limiting the enterprise of man, by riveting the shackles of a false equality … they will increase the well-being of the world.
Winston Churchill

There can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its form, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its form, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
Winston Churchill

You may try to destroy wealth, and find that all you have done is to increase poverty.
Winston Churchill

Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.
Winston Churchill

Society


Society in its full sense … is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it.
Ruth Benedict

There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.
Margaret Thatcher

But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for.
Mark Steyn

To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father's has acquires too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily7 the first principle of association — 'the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.'
Thomas Jefferson

The form was still the same, but the animating health and vigor were fled.
Edward Gibbon

Stop chasing [Facebook] likes and start doing more likable things.
Peter Shankman

Society cannot subsist but by the power, first of making laws, and then of enforcing them.
Samuel Johnson

'Tis in cells and corners that the wicked wretches, the monks and nuns, lead shameful lives. But openly, and among people, a man must live decently and honestly.
Martin Luther

Society is no comfort
To one not sociable.
Shakespeare

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Aristotle

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.
Samuel Johnson

There is One great society alone on earth:
The noble Living and the noble Dead.
William Wordsworth

The social state is at once so natural, so necessary, and so habitual to man, that … he never conceives himself otherwise than as a member of a body.
John Stuart Mill

The prosperity of a people is proportionate to the number of hands and minds usefully employed. To the community, sedition is a fever, corruption is a gangrene, and idleness an atrophy. Whatever body, and whatever society, wastes more than it acquires, must gradually decay; and every being that continues to be fed, and ceases to labour, takes away something from the publick stock.
Samuel Johnson

Socratic Method


The Socratic manner is not a game at which two can play.
Max Beerbohm

Soldier


The patient and active virtues of a soldier are insensibly nursed in the habits and discipline of a pastoral life.
Edward Gibbon

For a soldier I listed [enlisted], to grow great in fame,
And be shot at for sixpence a-day.
Charles Dibdin

Solitude


Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all —
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

How did you enjoy yourself with these people? Answer: very much, almost as much as I do when alone.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Man may indeed preserve his existence in solitude, but can enjoy it only in society.
Samuel Johnson

When Eve, in paradise, walked by herself, the devil deceived her. In solitary places are committed murders, robberies, adulteries, etc.; for in solitude the devil has place and occasion to mislead people.
Martin Luther

He forgot, in the vehemence of desire, that solitude and quiet owe their pleasures to those miseries (vexations), which he was so studious to obviate.
Samuel Johnson

I feel like one,
Who treads alone
Some banquet hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed.
Thomas Moore

Son


He who causes his father's heart to bleed
Will one day have a son to avenge the deed.
Author unidentified

Beat your son every day; you may not know why, but he will.
Author unidentified

Sorrow


But for sorrow there is no remedy provided by nature; it is often occasioned by accidents irreparable, and dwells upon objects that have lost or changed their existence; it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed; that the dead should return, or the past should be recalled.
Samuel Johnson

Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul, which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away. It is the putrefaction of stagnant life, and is remedied by exercise and motion.
Samuel Johnson

I have much need of entertainment, spiritless, infirm, sleepless, and solitary, looking back with sorrow and forward with terrour.
Samuel Johnson

There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.
Dante Alighieri

Sorrow is properly that state of the mind in which our desires are fixed upon the past, without looking forward to the future, an incessant wish that something were otherwise than it has been, a tormenting and harassing want of some enjoyment or possession which we have lost, and which no endeavours can possibly regain.
Samuel Johnson

An habitual sadness seizes upon the soul …
Samuel Johnson

The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment.
Samuel Johnson

How oft in vain the son of Theseus said,
The stormy sorrows be with patience laid;
Nor are thy fortunes to be wept alone;
Weigh others’ woes, and learn to bear thy own.

(Quoties flenti Theseius heros
Siste modum, dixit, neque enim fortuna querenda
Sola tua est, similes aliorum respice casus,
Mitius ista feres.
)

Ovid, translation by Catcott, from Samuel Johnson's Rambler 52

One acquainted with pain understands how cruel a traveling companion sorrow is for someone with few friends at his side.
The Wanderer

Pleasure of love lasts only a moment, sorrow of love lasts all life long.
Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep.
Lord Byron

How small and selfish is sorrow. But it bangs one about until one is senseless.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother

Soul


Coddle the body and you harm the soul.
Polish proverb

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold …. The same reason that makes us bicker with a neighbor creates a war between princes.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?
Psalms 42:5

Source


If there is but little water in the stream, it is the fault, not of the channel, but of the source.
Saint Jerome

Sovereign


Such was the unhappy condition of the Roman emperors, that, whatever might be their conduct, their fate was commonly the same. A life of pleasure or virtue, of severity or mildness, of indolence or glory, alike led to an untimely grave; and almost every reign is closed by the same disgusting repetition of treason and murder.
Edward Gibbon

Alas! the republic has lost a useful servant, and the rashness of an hour has destroyed the services of many years. You know not, the misery of sovereign power; a sword is perpetually suspended over our head. We dread our very guards, we distrust our companions. The choice of action or of repose is no longer in our disposition, nor is there any age, or character, or conduct, that can protect us from the censure of envy. In thus exalting me to the throne, you have doomed me to a life of cares, and to an untimely fate.
Saturninus, when his troops put him forward as a contender to the Roman Emperor.

[If] the exercise of justice is the most important duty, the indulgence of mercy is the most exquisite pleasure, of a sovereign.
Theodosius I

The usual disease of princes, grasping covetousness, had made them suspicious and quarrelsome neighbors.
Plutarch

Pyrrhus revived this image [of Alexander the Great] by the fire and vigor of his movements in the field of battle; the rest only mimicked the hero, whose title they assumed, in their demeanor, and in the trappings and state of royalty.
Plutarch

[The] day of his inauguration was the last day of his happiness.
Edward Gibbon

The Romans derided [Marius's] indolence; they soon bewailed his activity.
Edward Gibbon

For my own part, I adhere to the maxim of antiquity, that the throne is a glorious sepulchre.
Theodora

To maintain the harmony of authority and obedience, to chastise the proud, to protect the weak, to reward the deserving, to banish vice and idleness from his dominions, to secure the traveller and merchant, to restrain the depredations of the soldier, to cherish the labors of the husbandman, to encourage industry and learning, and, by an equal and moderate assessment, to increase the revenue, without increasing the taxes, are indeed the duties of a prince.
Edward Gibbon

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
William Shakespeare

To know nor faith, nor love nor law; to be
Omnipotent but friendless is to reign.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Space


Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
Fred Hoyle

Space … is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Douglas Adams

Spaniard


Honor to a Spaniard, no matter how dishonest, is as real a thing as water, wine, or olive oil. There is honor among pickpockets and honor among whores. It is simply that the standards differ.
Ernest Hemingway

Sparrow


Once upon a time, there was a non-conforming sparrow who decided not to fly south for the winter. However, soon after the weather turned cold, the sparrow changed his mind and reluctantly started to fly south. After a short time, ice began to form his on his wings and he fell to earth in a barnyard almost frozen. A cow passed by and crapped on this little bird and the sparrow thought it was the end, but the manure warmed him and defrosted his wings. Warm and happy the little sparrow began to sing. Just then, a large Tom cat came by and, hearing the chirping, investigated the sounds. As Old Tom cleared away the manure, he found the chirping bird and promptly ate him.

There are three morals to this story:

  1. Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
  2. Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
  3. If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.
Author unidentified

Speaking


When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Charles Caleb Colton

Species


It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.
Mary Wollstonecraft

Speech


It is a great misfortune neither to have enough wit to talk well nor enough judgment to be silent.
Jean de la Bruyere

10 persons who speak make more noise than 10,000 who are silent.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.
Ambrose Bierce

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
Robert Benchley

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Publilius Syrus

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Mark Twain.

Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
Dionysus the Elder

[He] possessed that vehemence of speech, which seldom fails to impart the persuasion of the soul.
Edward Gibbon

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.
Horace

Most men with any convictions in a confused and complicated age have had the almost uncanny sensation of shouting at people that a mad dog is loose or the house is on fire, to be met merely with puzzled and painfully respectful expressions, as if the remark were a learned citation in Greek or Hebrew.
G. K. Chesterton

Do not praise anyone before he speaks, for this is the way people are tested.
Ecclesiasticus 27:7

More have repented speech then silence.
George Herbert

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.
John Locke

Spendthrift


In squandering wealth was his peculiar art:
Nothing went unrewarded, but desert.
Beggared by fools, whom still he found too late:
He had his jest, and they had his estate.
John Dryden

Spirit


Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
Shakespeare

Spite


I am ignorant, sir, of your motives or provocations; I only know, that you have acted like a man who cuts off his right hand with his left.
Author unidentified

Sports


Some [soccer] players suffer four or five fatal injuries per game. That's how tough they are.
Dave Barry

Rockne wanted nothing but "bad losers." Good losers get into the habit of losing.
George E. Allen

It's never just a game when you're winning.
George Carlin

Sportsmanship


What I admire most in any man is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, and all-embracing tolerance — in brief, what is commonly called sportsmanship.
H. L. Mencken

Spouse


Spouse, n. Someone who'll stand by you through all the trouble you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed single.
Author unidentified

I don't like those men who claim that their wife is their best friend. I think spouses should tolerate each other and occasionally have sex.
Adam Carolla (paraphrased)

I don't like those men who claim that their wife is their best friend. My wife doesn't even crack the top 25.
Adam Carolla (paraphrased)

Spring


The variegated verdure of the fields and woods, the succession of grateful odours, the voice of pleasure pouring out its notes on every side, with the gladness apparently conceived by every animal, from the growth of his food, and the clemency of the weather, throw over the whole earth an air of gaiety, significantly expressed by the smile of nature.
Samuel Johnson

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If winter comes, can spring be far behind?
Percy Bysshe Shelley

St. Jerom


The stories of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus, by [St. Jerom], are admirably told: and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense.
Edward Gibbon

St. Peter


It is a thing not to be believed that St Peter ever was at Rome.
Martin Luther

Stability


There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'.
Jack Cohen

Stalinism


Arrest, try, shoot!
Central Committee's response to Stalin's mere mention of internal enemies

Stanley Baldwin


It was the voice of the new England: uncomfortable with greatness, wary of excellence, indifferent to challenges abroad … an appropriate debut for this evangelist of political mediocrity.
William Manchester, on Stanley Baldwin

Stardom


I don't want to be a star — most of the ones I know are too unhappy.
Vivian Vance

State


A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Edmund Burke

For every state, from the smallest to the largest, the principle of enlargement is the fundamental law of life.
Frederick the Great

The body politic, like the human body, begins to die from its birth, and bears in itself the causes of its destruction.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Statesman


The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.
Dean Acheson

Statist


The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority.
Mark Steyn

Statistics


There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Benjamin Disraeli

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.
Mark Twain

Status


Noblesse oblige [Rank has its obligations].
Gaston Pierre Marc, Duc de Lévis

Story


Never tell a story because it is true: tell it because it is a good story.
John Pentland Mahaffy

Stranger


The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy.
Edward Gibbon

Listen up, if someone is being nice to you, and you don't know them, run away. No one is nice to you just to be nice to you, and if they are, well, they can go take their pleasant ass somewhere else.
Samuel Halpern

We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know, because they have never deceived us.
Samuel Johnson

Strategy


Short-term thinking drives out long-term strategy.
Herbert Simon

Strength


The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
Winston Churchill

Study


This, she says, is the consequence of female study: girls grow too wise to be advised, and too stubborn to be commanded.
Samuel Johnson

Stupidity


Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Author unidentified

A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell

Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich Schiller

Remember, when you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It is painful only for others. The same applies when you are stupid. (La mort, c'est un peu comme la connerie. Le mort, lui, il ne sait pas qu'il est mort. Ce sont les autres qui sont tristes. Le con, c'est pareil.)
Philippe Geluck (paraphrased)

Sherry is dull, naturally dull; but it must have taken him a great deal of pains to become what we now see him. Such an excess of stupidity, Sir, is not in Nature.
Samuel Johnson

Sublime


From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step.
Napoleon

Subservience


Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.
Theodore Dalrymple

Success


It is not enough to succeed, a friend must fail.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

What is success?
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived;
That is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Lose as if you like it; win as if you were used to it.
Tommy Hitchcock

Success is a journey, not a destination.
Ben Sweetland

Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend's success.
Oscar Wilde

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
Woody Allen

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.
Bill Gates

It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead for a year.
Tom Lehrer

Be nice to people on your way up because you'll meet 'em on your way down.
Wilson Mizner

The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.
Dwight Morrow

It is difficult to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by turkeys.
Helen Osborne

It matters not whether you win or lose: what matters is whether I win or lose.
Darin Weinberg (Attributed)

There are two kinds of success: initial and ultimate. To act by half-measures, with a lack of conviction miscalled "caution," is to run the greatest risks and lose the prize.
Winston Churchill

In the real world, very smart people fail and mediocre people rise. Part of what makes people fail or succeed are skills that have nothing to do with IQ.
Camille Paglia

'Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we'll do more, Sempronius; we'll deserve it.
Joseph Addison

It is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.
Terry Pratchett

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Emily Dickinson

Success is relative: It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
T. S. Eliot

Success And Failure


The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.
H. L. Mencken

It's a good habit to trumpet your failures and be quiet about your successes.
Charlie Munger

Suffering


The sufferings that fate inflicts on us should be borne with patience, what enemies inflict with manly courage.
Thucydides

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
Author unidentified

Great souls suffer in silence.
Johann [Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller

Life isn't finished for us yet! We're going to live! … Maybe, if we wait a little longer, we shall find out why we live, why we suffer.
Anton Chekhov

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Suicide


When we have lost everything, including hope, life becomes a disgrace and death a duty.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Unhappy men! If you are thus weary of your lives, is it so difficult for you to find ropes and precipices?
Antoninus Pius (Attributed), to zealous Christians who apparently provoked the authorities in order to become martyrs

The criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age.
Edward Gibbon

Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life.
Edward Gibbon

If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window.
Samuel Beckett

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours-on the wall —BR/> Are drawing a long breath to shout 'Hurray!'
The strangest whim has seized me … After all
I think I will not hang myself today.
G. K. Chesterton

Sumptuary Law


It is the highest impertinence and presumption in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense, either by sumptuary laws or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.
Adam Smith

Sunday


[Sunday] should be different from another day. People may walk, but not throw stones at birds. There may be relaxation, but there should be no levity.
Samuel Johnson

Superficial


The writers who have undertaken the task of reconciling mankind to their present state, … frequently remind us that we judge too hastily of good and evil, that we view only the superfices of life, and determine of the whole by a very small part; and that in the condition of men it frequently happens, that grief and anxiety lie hid under the golden robes of prosperity, and the gloom of calamity is cheered by secret radiations of hope and comfort; as in the works of nature the bog is sometimes covered with flowers, and the mine concealed in the barren crags.
Samuel Johnson

Superfluous


The superfluous is very necessary.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Superstition


A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.
George Iles

Fear has been the original parent of superstition, and every new calamity urges trembling mortals to deprecate the wrath of their invisible enemies.
Edward Gibbon

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Edmund Burke

Supper


For my part now, I consider supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to get to bed.
Oliver Edwards

Suppression


Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.
Saul Bellow

Surprise


Zounds! I was never so bethump'd with words
Since I first call'd my brother's father dad.
William Shakespeare

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
Jane Austen

Surroundings


There are animals that borrow their colour from the neighbouring body, and consequently vary their hue as they happen to change their place. In like manner it ought to be the endeavour of every man to derive his reflections from the objects about him; for it is to no purpose that he alters his position, if his attention continues fixed to the same point. The mind should be kept open to the access of every new idea, and so far disengaged from the predominance of particular thoughts, as easily to accommodate itself to occasional entertainment.
Samuel Johnson

Survival


The fox knows many things — the hedgehog one big one.
Archilochus

Suspense


The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde

Suspicion


As it is necessary not to invite robbery by supineness, so it is our duty not to suppress tenderness by suspicion; it is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
Francis Bacon

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.
Samuel Johnson

There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies against despots — suspicion.
Demosthenes

Swiss


The Swiss are not a people so much as a neat, clean, quiet solvent business.
William Faulkner

Switzerland


Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.
Ernest Hemingway

Sympathy


Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
Edward Gibbon

Tact


Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.
Abraham Lincoln

Talent


They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort. They ascribe failure to a lack of inspiration or ability, or to misfortune, rather than to insufficient application. At the core of every true talent there is an awareness of the difficulties inherent in any achievement, and the confidence that by persistence and patience something worthwhile will be realized. Thus talent is a species of vigor.
Eric Hoffer

Hide not your Talents, they for Use were made. What's a Sun-Dial in the Shade!
Author unidentified

I am always grieved when a man of real talent dies. The world needs such men more than Heaven does.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
Arthur Conan Doyle

Talk


It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
Dame Rose Macaulay

Great talkers, little doers.
Benjamin Franklin

He that speaks much, is much mistaken.
Benjamin Franklin

Talking too much, too soon, and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster.
Meg Greenfield

Talk uses up ideas … Once I have spoken them aloud, they are lost to me, dissipated into the noisy air like smoke. Only if I bury them, like bulbs, in the rich soil of silence do they grow.
Doris Grumbach

The evil tongue slays three, the slanderer, the slandered, and the listener.
Midrash Tehillim

Talker


Talkers are no good doers.
Shakespeare

People who know little are usually great talkers, while men who know much say little.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Task


Every day brings its task, and often without bringing abilities to perform it: difficulties embarrass, uncertainty perplexes, opposition retards, censure exasperates, or neglect depresses.
Samuel Johnson

When we have diligently laboured for any purpose, we are willing to believe that we have attained it, and, because we have already done much, too suddenly conclude that no more is to be done.
Samuel Johnson

Taste


I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.
Oscar Wilde

Tavern


There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
Samuel Johnson

Taxation


Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages.
H. L. Mencken

The power to tax involves the power to destroy.
John Marshall

Prosperity of the middling and lower orders depends upon the fortunes and light taxes of the rich.
Andrew Mellon

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has. Even when you make a tax form out on the level, you don't know when it's through if you are a crook or a martyr.
Will Rogers

If Patrick Henry thought that taxation without representation was bad, he should see how bad it is with representation.
The Old Farmer's Almanac

Count the day won when, turning on its axis,
The earth imposes no additional taxes.
Franklin P. Adams

Taxes are going up so fast that the government is likely to price itself right out of the market.
Dan Bennett

I love to go to Washington — if only to be near my money.
Bob Hope

It seems a little silly now, but [the United States of America] was founded as a protest against taxation.
Author unidentified

The taxing power is especially something after which the reformer's finger always itches.
William Graham Sumner

The tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news.
Dave Camp (Attributed)

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax.
Mark Steyn

Why does a slight tax increase cost you two hundred dollars and a substantial tax cut save you thirty cents?
Peg Bracken

Logic and taxation are not always the best of friends.
James C. McReynolds

Taxation, gentlemen, is very much like dairy farming. The task is to extract the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of moo.
Sir Terry Pratchett

It should be known that at the beginning of a dynasty, taxation yields a large revenue from small assessments. At the end of a dynasty, taxation yields a small revenue from large assessments.
Ibn Khaldun

Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions, any bungler can add to the old.
Edmund Burke

The doctrines that by keeping out foreign goods more wealth, and consequently more employment, will be created at home, are either true or they are not true. We contend that they are not true. We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle.
Winston Churchill

Taxes are an evil — a necessary evil, but still an evil, and the fewer of them we have the better.
Winston Churchill

We have pushed taxation of wealth to a point in Great Britain where in many cases the yield would be greater if the rate were less. The idea that prosperity can be wooed by chasing millionaires is one of the most common and most foolish of modern popular delusions.
Winston Churchill

Tea


[I am] a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has, for twenty years, diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle has scarcely time to cool, who with tea amuses the evening, with tea solaces the midnights, and with tea welcomes the morning.
Samuel Johnson

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? — how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
Sydney Smith

Teacher


A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
Henry Brooks Adams

Tears


Let not women’s weapons, waterdrops,
Stain my man’s cheeks!
Shakespeare

Technology


For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman

Putt's Law: Technology is dominated by two types of people: Those who understand what they do not manage. Those who manage what they do not understand.
Author unidentified

Television


I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Orson Welles

Television is bear-led by its visuals, not to speak of the neuroses of the people who work for this irrational and self-corrupting medium. … in wartime, truth is hard to come by but you are more likely to find it in newspapers than in the flickering images and babble of the box.
Paul Johnson

If everyone agrees that television has unrivaled efficiency at selling goods, services, culture, music, God, politics and fashion, why does the industry continue to claim that the one thing it cannot sell is violence?
Paul Johnson

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
Hunter S. Thompson

Television is for appearing on, not looking at.
Noël Coward

Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television … [Television] strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.
Robin Day

Temptation


I can resist everything except temptation.
Oscar Wilde

Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. … You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. … We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.
C. S. Lewis

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful.
Oscar Wilde

God delights in our temptations, and yet hates them; he delights in them when they drive us to prayer; he hates them when they drive us to despair.
Martin Luther

I am not over-fond of resisting temptation.
William Beckford

Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.
Matthew 26:41

"Temptations can be got rid of."
"How?"
"By yielding to them."
Honoré de Balzac

Terror


Terror has its inspiration, as well as competition.
Benjamin Disraeli

Terrorism


Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.
Margaret Thatcher

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists' morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.
Margaret Thatcher

But, as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. … Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an Air Force.
P. J. O'Rourke

Terrorist


Murder will never be in my eyes an object of admiration and an argument for freedom; I know nothing more servile, more despicable, more cowardly, more narrow-minded than a terrorist.
François René de Chateaubriand

Thanksgiving


My favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving … the holiday that is solely based on stuffing your face until you have to be rolled away from the table so you start the exhausting task of sitting in front of the TV watching football all day.
Stephen Furst

Theory


I never guess. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Thinker


Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.
Harriet Martineau

Thinking


Sloppy writing reflects sloppy thinking.
Author unidentified

People calculate too much and think too little.
Charlie Munger

We [Munger and Warren Buffet] both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.
Charlie Munger

But far more numerous was the herd of such
Who think too little and who talk too much.
John Dryden

Third World


Cuba illustrated the gap between words and reality which was to become the most striking characteristic of the Third World. Everyone in politics talked revolution and practiced graft.
Paul Johnson

[The term "Third World"] satisfied the human longing for simple moral distinctions. There were "good" nations (the poor ones) and "bad" nations (the rich ones). Nations were rich precisely because they were bad, and poor because they were innocent.
Paul Johnson

Thomas Carlyle


I lead a most dyspeptic, solitary, self-shrouded life: consuming, if possible in silence, my considerable daily allotment of pain; glad when any strength is left in me for working, which is the only use I can see in myself.
Thomas Carlyle

Carlyle is a poet to whom nature has denied the faculty of verse.
Alfred Tennyson

Carlyle’s eye was a terrible organ: he saw everything.
Augustine Birrell

Thomas Jefferson


[Thomas Jefferson is] a man of profound ambition and violent passions.
Alexander Hamilton

If not an absolute atheist, he [Thomas Jefferson] had no belief in a future existence. All his ideas of obligation or retribution were bounded by the present life. His duties to his neighbor were under no stronger guarantee than the laws of the land and the opinions of the world. The tendency of this condition upon a mind of great compass and powerful resources is to produce insincerity and duplicity, which were his besetting sins through life.
John Quincy Adams

The moral character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually puling about liberty, equality, and the degrading curse of slavery, he brought his own children to the hammer, and made money of his debaucheries.
Thomas Hamilton

Thompson, Hunter S.


Thompson, if he is to be believed, has sampled the entire rainbow of legal and illegal drugs in heroic efforts to feel better than he does.

As for the truth about his health: I have asked around about it. I am told that he appears to be strong and rosy, and steadily sane. But we will be doing what he wants us to do, I think, if we consider his exterior a sort of Dorian Gray facade. Inwardly, he is being eaten alive by tinhorn politicians.

The disease is fatal. There is no known cure. The most we can do for the poor devil, it seems to me, is to name his disease in his honor. From this moment on, let all those who feel that Americans can be as easily led to beauty as to ugliness, to truth as to public relations, to joy as to bitterness, be said to be suffering from Hunter Thompson's disease. I don't have it this morning. It comes and goes. This morning I don't have Hunter Thompson's disease.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson: Excerpt from "A Political Disease", Vonnegut's review of "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"

Thought


The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
Thomas Hobbes

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.
J. W. Goethe

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.
Victor Hugo

Time


November, n. The eleventh twelfth of a weariness.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Ah! the clock is always slow;
It is later than you think.
Robert W. Service

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein

Methinks I see the wanton hours flee,
And as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham

Curse ruthless time! Curse our mortality. How cruelly short is the allotted span for all we must cram into it!
Winston Churchill

Once, adv. Enough.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Twice, adv. Once too often.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Present, n. That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Tempus edax rerum.
Time, the devourer of all things.
Ovid

Those who make the worst use of their time are the first to complain of its shortness.
Jean de La Bruyère

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.
George Carlin

Ah simple man!
When a boy two precious jewels were given thee,
Time and good advice;
One thou hast lost, and the other thrown away.
Benjamin Franklin

Dost thou love life?
then do not squander time;
For that's the stuff
life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
William Shakespeare

I do love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go past.
Douglas Adams

The trouble with being punctual is that there is no-one there to appreciate it.
Author unidentified

Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.
Jean-Paul Sartre

What then is time? Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.
St. Augustine

Give me today, and take tomorrow.
Author unidentified

The time of life is short;
To spend that shortness basely were too long.
Shakespeare

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end.
Shakespeare

Time, which strengthens friendship, weakens love.
Jean de La Bruyère

Time obliterates the fictions of opinion, and confirms the decisions of nature. (Opinionum commenta delet dies, natura judicia Confirmat.)
Cicero

He told me … that it was the stated and established method of computing time. It was not, indeed, likely that I should understand him; for I never yet knew time computed in my life, nor can imagine why we should be at so much trouble to count what we cannot keep.
Samuel Johnson

We never consider ourselves as possessed at once of time sufficient for any great design, and therefore indulge ourselves, in fortuitous amusements.
Samuel Johnson

He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years, must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.
Samuel Johnson

Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.
Dion Boucicault

What's not destroyed by Time's devouring hand?
Where's Troy, and where's the Maypole in the Strand?
James Bramston

I recommend to you to take care of minutes: for hours will take care of themselves.
Lord Chesterfield

Time will rust the sharpest sword,
Time will consume the strongest cord;
That which molders hemp and steel,
Mortal arm and nerve must feel.
Sir Walter Scott

Time has too much credit It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary.
Ivy Compton-Burnett

Time … puts an end to all human pleasures and sorrows.
Samuel Johnson

Time is the great physician.
Benjamin Disraeli

Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
Henry Austin Dobson

It is well known, that time once passed never returns; and that the moment which is lost, is lost for ever. Time therefore ought, above all other kinds of property, to be free from invasion; and yet there is no man who does not claim the power of wasting that time which is the right of others.
Samuel Johnson

Whoever pays a visit that is not desired, or talks longer than the hearer is willing to attend, is guilty of an injury which he cannot repair, and takes away that which he cannot give.
Samuel Johnson

Time, with all its celerity, moves slowly to him whose whole employment is to watch its flight.
Samuel Johnson

Tobacco


Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosopher’s stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases … but as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, 'tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul.
Robert Burton

Pernicious weed [tobacco]! whose scent the fair annoys,
Unfriendly to society's chief joys.
William Cowper

Today


Happy the man, and happy he alone,
He who can call today his own;
He who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow, do thy worst, for I have liv’d today.
John Dryden, Imitation of Horace

It's not perfect, but to me on balance Right Now is a lot better than the Good Old Days.
Maeve Binchy

Together


Two souls with but a single thought,
Two hearts that beat as one.

(Zwei Seelen und ein Gedanke,
Zwei Herzen und ein Schlag!
)

Friedrich Halm Der Sohn der Wildnis

Tolerance


I have seen gross intolerance shown in support of tolerance.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tomorrow


After all, tomorrow is another day.
Margaret Mitchell

Tool


Man is a tool-using animal … . Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.
Thomas Carlyle

Torment


I tried so hard, I never knew still waters.
Violent Femmes, Country Death Song

Toronto


Toronto is a kind of New York operated by the Swiss.
Peter Ustinov

Tourism


What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.
Bill Bryson

Tradition


Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Training


Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Mark Twain

Transience


Loveliest of lovely things are they,
On earth, that soonest pass away.
The rose that lives its little hour
Is prized beyond the sculptured flower.
William Cullen Bryant

Translation


However excellent the verses, it is impossible to translate them from one language into another without losing much of their beauty and dignity.
Bede

Travel


Those who go overseas find a change of climate, not a change of soul.
Horace

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
Oscar Wilde

Doc Daneeka hated to fly. He felt imprisoned in an airplane. In an airplane there was absolutely no place in the world to go except to another part of the airplane.
Joseph Heller

A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
J. B. Priestley

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Mark Twain

Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.
Mark Twain

The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson

Boswell: Is not the Giant's-Causeway worth seeing?
Johnson: Worth seeing? yes; but not worth going to see.
James Boswell and Samuel Johnson

The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
David Hume

Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
Fanny Burney

Why do people so love to wander? I think the civilized parts of the world will suffice for me in the future.
Mary Cassatt

Treason


[Treason], Sire, is a question of date.
Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
Sir John Harington

Princes in this case
Do hate the traitor, though they love the treason.
Samuel Daniel

Tree


I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa Cather

Tribalism


I against my brother; I and my brother against our cousin; my brother and our cousin against the neighbors; all of us against the strangers.
Bedouin Proverb

Triumph


He sickened at all triumphs but his own.
Charles Churchill, of Thomas Franklin

Triviality


There is no snare more dangerous to busy and excursive minds, than the cobwebs of petty inquisitiveness, which entangle them in trivial employments and minute studies.
Samuel Johnson

Trouble


It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
G. K. Chesterton

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it is just possible you haven't grasped the situation.
Jean Kerr

Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
Edward Gibbon

This too shall pass.
Author unidentified

He that seekes trouble never misses.
George Herbert

Truce


When a public quarrel is envenomed by private injuries, a blow that is not mortal or decisive can be productive only of a short truce, which allows the unsuccessful combatant to sharpen his arms for a new encounter.
Edward Gibbon

Trust


He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a horse’s health, a boy’s love, or a whore’s oath.
Shakespeare

The way to learn whether a person is trustworthy is to trust him.
Ernest Hemingway

Truth


The truth is rarely pure, and never simple
Oscar Wilde

It is one of the most fundamental fallacies of the post-Sixties Left that there is no such thing as objective truth.
Paul Johnson

Superstition, idolatry, and hypocrisy, have ample wages, but truth goes a begging.
Martin Luther

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.
Samuel Johnson

The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.
Ben Johnson

Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.
Matthew Arnold

Truth … never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her forth.
John Milton

It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.
Arthur James Balfour

Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.
George Herbert

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than from the arguments of its opposers.
William Penn

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.
Voltaire

In order that all men may be taught to speak truth, it is necessary that all likewise should learn to hear it; for no species of falsehood is more frequent than flattery, to which the coward is betrayed by fear, the dependant by interest, and the friend by tenderness.
Samuel Johnson

Great is truth, and it prevails. (Magna est veritas, et praevalet.)
III Esdras 4:41 (Vulgate, 1 Esdras 4:41 in modern translations)

One of the favourite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd.
Niels Bohr

Soothsayers make a better living in the world than truthsayers.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.
Thomas Jefferson

Truth will ultimately prevail where pains [are] taken to bring it to light.
George Washington

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
Arthur Conan Doyle

Truth And Deception


We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Deceive not thy physician, confessor, nor lawyer.
George Herbert

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Aristotle

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are those who try to tell the truth.
H. L. Mencken

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain

Hope deceives more men than cunning can.
Marquis Vauvenargues

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Denis Diderot

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.
Mark Twain

Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough and … it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Robert Frost

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler

And after all what is a lie? 'Tis but the truth in masquerade.
George Gordon, Lord Byron

A lie is halfway around the world before truth has got its boots on. (Fama, malum qua non aliud velocius alium)
Virgil

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
Adolf Hitler

The great masses of the people … will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
Adolf Hitler

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
Mark Twain

The truth is what is; what should be is a dirty lie.
Lenny Bruce

These Macedonians are a rude and clownish people; they call a spade a spade.
Plutarch

[Stanley Baldwin] occasionally stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill

I was brought up in a clergyman's household so I am a first-class liar.
Dame Sybil Thorndike

No totalitarian censor can approach the implacability of the censor who controls the line of communication between the outer world and our consciousness. Nothing is allowed to reach us which might weaken our confidence and lower our morale. To most of us nothing is so invisible as an unpleasant truth.
Eric Hoffer

Truthful, adj. Dumb and illiterate.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

A woman may tell ninety-nine lies, but the hundredth will betray her.
Haussa Proverb

One lie draws ten after it.
Italian Proverb

Tell a lie and you will hear the truth.
Spanish Proverb

O, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
Sir Walter Scott

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.
H. L. Mencken

Truth, n. Something somehow discreditable to someone.
H. L. Mencken

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Mark Twain

We lie loudest when we lie to ourselves.
Eric Hoffer

The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Mark Twain

Truth does not blush. (Veritas non erubescit).
Tertullian

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.
Lenin

What I tell you three times is true.
Lewis Carroll

Is honesty always the best policy? Not when it does unnecessary harm or gets in the way of doing good.
Dennis Prager

A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.
Saki

By the time you say you're his,
Shivering and sighing
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying —
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
Dorothy Parker

Tyranny


They [Americans] augur misgovernment at a distance and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
Edmund Burke

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.
Edmund Burke

The power of the Executive to cast a man in prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government, whether Nazi or Communist.
Winston Churchill

The salvation of the common people of every race and of every land from war or servitude must be established on solid foundations and must be guarded by the readiness of all men and women to die rather than submit Tyranny tyranny.
Winston Churchill

Tyrant


Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
Aesop

Sic semper tyrannis [Thus always to tyrants].
Author unidentified

Tyrants seldom want pretexts.
Edmund Burke

Nature has left this tincture in the blood,
That all men would be tyrants if they could.
Daniel Defoe

U. S. Constitution


[Let any modification of the constitutional powers be done] by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.
George Washington

It is surely only a matter of time before some federal judge finds the Constitution unconstitutional.
Mark Steyn

Nothing is more senseless than to base so many expectations on the state, that is, to assume the existence of collective wisdom and foresight after taking for granted the existence of individual imbecility and improvidence.
Frédéric Bastiat

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.
George Washington

It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.
George Bernard Shaw

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the Ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading.
Thomas Jefferson

When the Constitution was first framed I predicted that it would last fifty years. I was mistaken. It will evidently last longer than that. But I was mistaken only in point of time. The crash will come, but not quite so quick as I thought.
Ascribed to Aaron Burr

There is a higher law than the Constitution.
W. H. Seward

I yield slowly and reluctantly to the conviction that our Constitution cannot last. Our opinions are incompatible with a united government, even among ourselves. The Union has been preserved thus far by miracles. I fear they cannot continue.
John Marshall

What's the Constitution among friends?
Ascribed to Congressman Timothy Campbell

We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.
Charles E. Hughes

The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.
F. D. Roosevelt

If the Constitution is to be construed to mean what the majority at any given period in history wish the Constitution to mean, why a written Constitution and deliberate processes of amendment?
Frank J. Hogan

U. S. Grant


I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.
Ascribed to Abraham Lincoln

He [Grant] is a scientific Goth, resembling Alaric, destroying the country as he goes and delivering the people over to starvation. Nor does he bury his dead, but leaves them to rot on the battlefield.
John Tyler

Uncertainty


Such, indeed, is the uncertainty of all human affairs, that security and despair are equal follies; and as it is presumption and arrogance to anticipate triumphs, it is weakness and cowardice to prognosticate miscarriages.
Samuel Johnson

Understanding


They condemn what they do not understand. (Damnant quod non intelligunt.)
Cicero

An emendation of the text has been proposed: but surely the learning of the ancients had been long ago obliterated, had every man thought himself at liberty to corrupt the lines which he did not understand.
Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Unhappiness


The general remedy of those, who are uneasy without knowing the cause, is change of place; they are willing to imagine that their pain is the consequence of some local inconvenience, and endeavour to fly from it, as children from their shadows; always hoping for some more satisfactory delight from every new scene, and always returning home with disappointment and complaints.
Samuel Johnson

Unintended Consequence


But we have inherited a vast number of social ills which never came from Nature. They are the complicated products of all the tinkering, muddling, and blundering of social doctors in the past.
William Graham Sumner

Unionism


Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
H. L. Mencken

Unions may have existed to serve workers' interests at one time. These days, they exist to serve liberalism.
Stephen Spruiell

When school children start paying union dues, that's when I'll start representing the interests of school children.
Al Shanker, former American Federation of Teachers president

British trade unionism has … become a formula for national misery.
Paul Johnson

[A closed shop union] is evil because it is a form of monopoly achieved by coercion and it has all the anti-social consequences of any other monopoly.
Paul Johnson

[Union leaders are] an ugly factional interest, like any other which has stained the pages of history, operating at the expense of the community, and motivated by an insatiable lust for personal power, and by enormous greed.
Paul Johnson

United Nations


More and more, the UN begins to resemble, and sound like, a thieves' kitchen. … why do the powers still attached to civilised standards continue to give it their countenance?
Paul Johnson

Universe


In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Douglas Adams

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams

I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
Woody Allen

University


A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students.
John Ciardi

San Diego State University [is] Harvard, without all the smart people.
Samuel Halpern

It is a myth that universities are nurseries of reason. They are hot-houses for every kind of extremism, irrationality, intolerance and prejudice, where intellectual and social snobbery is almost purposefully instilled and where dons attempt to pass on to their students their own sins of pride.
Paul Johnson

Universities are the most overrated institutions of our age.
Paul Johnson

He that lives in a college, after his mind is sufficiently stocked with learning, is like a man who, having built and rigged and victualled a ship, should lock her up in a dry dock.
Edmund Burke

The delusion that there are thousands of young people about who are capable of benefiting from university training, but have somehow failed to find their way there, is … a necessary component of the expansionist case … More will mean worse.
Kingsley Amis

I feel no pain dear mother now
But oh, I am so dry!
O take me to a brewery
And leave me there to die.
Anonymous, parody of "The Collier's Dying Child"

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
Francis Bacon

Utopia


Utopian movements produce dystopias.
Dennis Prager

What begins as a Utopian vision, always — always — ends in bloodshed. Because you have to force a utopia on a free people. Free people want to pursue their own happiness, but a one-size-fits-all approach requires herding the free, against their will, into the state's idea of what's right. Then it's not utopia.
Greg Gutfeld

Vacant


Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die.
Sir Walter Scott

Vacation


It doesn't matter where I go, just as long as no one goes with me. I could vacation in my own home if everyone would leave me the fuck alone.
Samuel Halpern

No, I'm gonna stay home. You can take a family vacation, and I'll take a vacation from the family. Trust me, it'll make both of our time more enjoyable.
Samuel Halpern

Valentinian


[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.
Edward Gibbon

Valor


The invariable laws of nature [have] connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valor.
Edward Gibbon

Vanity


Vanity makes us do more things against inclination than reason.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Vanity, thus confirmed in her dominion, readily listens to the voice of idleness, and sooths the slumber of life with continual dreams of excellence and greatness.
Samuel Johnson

Nothing, therefore, can show greater depravity of understanding, than to delight in the show when the reality is wanting; or voluntarily to become poor, that strangers may for a time imagine us to be rich.
Samuel Johnson

Variety


The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence.
Samuel Johnson

Veneration


As there is no character so deformed as to fright away from it the prostitutes of praise, there is no degree of encomiastick veneration which pride has refused.
Samuel Johnson

Veterinarian


I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.
Terry Pratchett

Vice


The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.
William Graham Sumner

Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.
William Graham Sumner

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.
Kenneth Minogue

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
William Shakespeare

If this be a world of vice and woe, I'll take the vice and you take the woe.
Winston Churchill

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
Alexander Pope

A man, indeed, is not genteel when he gets drunk; but most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly.
Samuel Johnson

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.
Edmund Burke

Victimhood


[We] live in an age where victimhood is the new currency, victims a new kind of aristocracy, and pity a cardinal virtue.
Jonah Goldberg

Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.
Charlie Munger

Victory


The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
Winston Churchill

Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. (La vittoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l'insuccesso.)
Count Galeazzo Ciano

Vidal, Gore


His self-love is well requited.
Joseph Rago, of Gore Vidal

Vietnam


In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.
P. J. O'Rourke

View


See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.
Robert Burton

Viking


When we reflect upon the brutal vices of these salt-water bandits [Vikings], pirates as shameful as any whom the sea has borne, or recoil from their villainous destruction and cruel deeds, we must also remember the discipline, the fortitude, the comradeship and martial virtues which made them at this period beyond all challenge the most formidable and daring race in the world.
Winston Churchill

Virginity


Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite virginity.
Shakespeare

Virtue


The easy, gentle, and sloping path … is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

[For] the great incentive to virtue is the reflection that we must die.
Samuel Johnson

The tribe is likewise very numerous of those who regulate their lives, not by the standard of religion, but the measure of other men's virtue; who lull their own remorse with the remembrance of crimes more atrocious than their own, and seem to believe that they are not bad while another can be found worse.
Samuel Johnson

Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable … one false step involves her in endless ruin.
Jane Austen

Most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore.
John Milton

Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.
John Locke

It may be at least inculcated that pleasures are more safely postponed than virtues, and that greater loss is suffered by missing an opportunity of doing good, than an hour of giddy frolick and noisy merriment.
Samuel Johnson

The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws.
Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke

The utmost excellence at which humanity can arrive, is a constant and determinate pursuit of virtue, without regard to present dangers or advantage; a continual reference of every action to the divine will; an habitual appeal to everlasting justice; and an unvaried elevation of the intellectual eye to the reward which perseverance only can obtain.
Samuel Johnson

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

(Considerate la vostra semenza:
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza
.)

Dante Alighieri

Virtue And Vice


I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.
Michel Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne

I prefer an accommodating vice to an obstinate virtue.
Molière

Perhaps it would not be easy, within the same historical space, to find more vice and less virtue. We are continually shocked by the union of savage [Barbarian] and corrupt [Roman] manners.
Edward Gibbon

It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected; that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue; and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.
Edward Gibbon

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Elizabeth Taylor

[Only] a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
Benjamin Franklin

Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.
Author unidentified

But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.
Samuel Johnson

It seldom happens that we can contain ourselves long in a neutral state, or forbear to sink into vice, when we are no longer soaring towards virtue.
Samuel Johnson

Virtue can stand without assistance, and considers herself as very little obliged by countenance and approbation: but vice, spiritless and timorous, seeks the shelter of crowds, and support of confederacy.
Samuel Johnson

Vision


It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
Henry David Thoreau (Attributed)

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Arthur Schopenhauer

Visit


Visits always give pleasure — if not the arrival, the departure.
Portuguese proverb

Seldom set foot in your neighbor's house —
too much of you, and he will hate you.
Proverbs 25:17

Vitriol


There are many that think I am too fierce against popedom; on the contrary, I complain that I am, alas! too mild; I wish I could breath out lightning against pope and popedom, and that every word were a thunderbolt.
Martin Luther

Wagner


Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain

Wagner had some wonderful moments but awful half hours.
Gioacchino Rossini

One cannot judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin from a first hearing, and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.
Gioacchino Rossini

Walking


I nauseate walking; ’tis a country diversion, I loathe the country.
William Congreve

Wants


It is impossible to supply wants as fast as an idle imagination may be able to form them, or to remove all inconveniences by which elegance refined into impatience may be offended.
Samuel Johnson

War


Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Howell M. Forgy

I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the center, and the group opened up like a flowering rose. It was most entertaining.
Vittorio Mussolini

Hang yourself, brave Crillon; we fought at Arques and you were not there.
William Shakespeare

A general and a bit of shooting makes you forget your troubles … it takes your mind off the cost of living.
Brendan Behan

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
George Orwell

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.
Demosthenes

It takes in reality only one to make a quarrel. It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
William Ralph Inge

There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.
G. K. Chesterton

In war, truth is the first casualty.
Aeschylus

I reverence the field of battle, stained with their blood, and the blood of the Barbarians. Those honorable marks have been already washed away by the rains; but the lofty monuments of their bones, the bones of generals, of centurions, and of valiant warriors, claim a longer period of duration.
Libanius

If you are a god, we shall not be harmed by you, for we have done no wrong; but if you are a man, you may meet with a stronger man than yourself.
Mandrokleides, a Spartan envoy, to Pyrrhus

If we win one more such victory over the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.
Pyrrhus, when congratulated on his victory

Carthage must be destroyed! (Carthago delenda est!)
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Attributed to Leon Trotsky

I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
Artemus Ward

Not those alone who make the war must feel the war!
George Alfred Townsend

For what fortress, what city, in the wide extent of the Roman empire, can hope to exist, secure and impregnable, if it is our pleasure that it should be erased from the earth?
Attila the Hun

The conflict was obstinate; the slaughter was mutual.
Edward Gibbon

We make war that we may live in peace.
Aristotle

[Whole] generations may be swept away by the madness of kings in the space of a single hour.
Edward Gibbon

A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.
Edward Gibbon

[Every age], however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown.
Edward Gibbon

[To] the vanquished, death [is] a relief, life a burden, and infamy the only object of terror.
Gelimer, King of the Vandals (Attributed)

[It is a melancholy truth] that the first and most cruel sufferings [in war] must be the lot of the innocent and helpless.
Edward Gibbon

[The] events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.
Edward Gibbon

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
Sir Winston Churchill

Those who can win a war well can rarely make a good peace and those who could make a good peace would never have won the war.
Sir Winston Churchill

Don't Delay: The best is the enemy of the good [emphasis added]. By this I mean that a good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week. War is a very simple thing, and the determining characteristics are self-confidence, speed, and audacity. None of these things can ever be perfect, but they can be good.
George S. Patton, Jr.

[In] the national and religious conflict of the [Byzantine and Saracen] empires, peace was without confidence, and war without mercy.
Edward Gibbon

So familiar, and as it were so natural to man, is the practice of violence, that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility.
Edward Gibbon

[Every] hour of delay abates the fame and force of the invader, and multiplies the resources of defensive war.
Edward Gibbon

War kills men, and men deplore the loss; but war also crushes bad principles and tyrants, and so saves societies.
Colton

The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skillful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion.
Edward Gibbon

Weakness is a provocation.
Donald Rumsfeld

[Much] as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year … what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is.
Winston Churchill

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on.
Joseph Heller

It is only those who have never heard a shot, never heard the shriek and groans of the wounded and lacerated … that cry aloud for more blood, more vengeance, more desolation.
William T. Sherman

War is Hell!
William T. Sherman

War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.
William T. Sherman

For Christ's sake men — come on! Do you want to live forever?
Daniel Daly

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

If we clear the air of the fog of catchwords which surround the conduct of war, and grasp that in the human will lies the source and mainspring of all conflict, as of all other activities of man's life, it becomes clear that our object in war can only be attained by the subjugation of the opposing will. All acts, such as defeat in the field, propaganda, blockade, diplomacy, or attack on the centres of government and population, are seen to be but means to that end.
Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart

War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has become cruel and squalid.
Winston Churchill

Don't give up the ship!
Captain James Lawrence

I believe in fighting until lack of supplies forces you to stop — then digging in.
George S. Patton, Jr.

I maintained my contention that it is better to attack with a small force at once, and attain surprise, than it is to wait and lose it.
George S. Patton, Jr.

One continues to learn about war by practicing war.
George S. Patton, Jr.

It always made me mad to have to beg for opportunities to win battles.
George S. Patton, Jr.

The acid test of battle brings out the pure metal.
George S. Patton, Jr.

In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.
George S. Patton, Jr.

When we got to the far side [of the Rhine], I also deliberately stubbed my toe and fell, picking up a handful of German soil, in emulation of Scipio Africanus and William the Conqueror, who both stumbled and both made a joke of it, saying, "I see in my hands the soil of Africa" or "… the soil of England." I saw in my hands the soil of Germany.
George S. Patton, Jr.

Here again we took advantage of a theory of our own, that the impossible place is usually the least well defended.
George S. Patton, Jr.

It is an unfortunate fact that few commanders, and no politicians, realize the individuality of units and the necessity of playing on human emotion.
George S. Patton, Jr.

It is an unfortunate and, to me, tragic fact that, in our attempts to prevent war, we have taught our people to belittle the heroic qualities of the soldier.
George S. Patton, Jr.

If you want to know when a war might be coming, you just watch the United States and see when it starts cutting down on its defenses. It's the surest barometer in the world.
Will Rogers

The best armor (and the best defense) is a rapid and well-directed fire.
David Farragut

When soldiers are caught in a barrage, either from mortars, rockets, or artillery, the surest way to get out of it is to go forward fast, because it is almost the invariable practice of the enemy to increase rather than decrease his range.
George S. Patton, Jr.

In small operations, as in large, speed is the essential element of success.
George S. Patton, Jr.

It is much better to go over difficult ground where you are not expected than it is over good ground where you are expected.
George S. Patton, Jr.

The Americans, as a race, are the foremost mechanics in the world. America, as a nation, has the greatest ability for mass production of machines. It therefore behooves us to devise methods of war which exploit our inherent superiority.
George S. Patton, Jr.

In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war …
2 Samuel 11:1 (NIV)

As war is one of the heaviest of national evils, a calamity in which every species of misery is involved; as it sets the general safety to hazard, suspends commerce, and desolates the country; as it exposes great numbers to hardships, dangers, captivity, and death; no man, who desires public prosperity, will inflame general resentment.
Samuel Johnson

History shows that trade wars have a depressing tendency to erupt into fighting wars.
Paul Johnson

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
Edward Grey

The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet.
Titus Flavius Vespasian

Don't cheer, boys; the poor devils are dying.
John Woodward Philip

War spares not the brave, but the cowardly.
Anacreon

In peace, children inter their parents; war violates the order of nature and causes parents to inter their children.
Euripides

We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?
Seneca

"War," says Machiavel, "ought to be the only study of a prince;" and by a prince he means every sort of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes imagine that war was the state of nature.
Edmund Burke

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.
Brooks Atkinson

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier."
Rudyard Kipling

What your soldier wants — really, really wants — is no-one shooting back at him.
Terry Pratchett

There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented … The common man, I think, is the great protection against war.
Ernest Bevin

To be always ready for war, said Mentor, is the surest way to avoid it.
François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon

But now … when the resources of science and civilisation sweep away everything that might mitigate their fury, a European war can only end in the ruin of the vanquished and the scarcely less fatal commercial dislocation and exhaustion of the conquerors.
Winston Churchill

The wars of peoples will be more terrible than those of kings.
Winston Churchill

Unless Germany is beaten in a manner which leaves no room for doubt or dispute, unless she is convinced by the terrible logic of events that the glory of her people can never be achieved by violent means, unless her war-making capacity after the war is sensibly diminished, a renewal of the conflict, after an uneasy and malevolent truce, seems unavoidable.
Winston Churchill, 1917

I think a curse should rest on me — because I love this war. I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment — and yet — I can't help it — I enjoy every second of it.
Winston Churchill

We cannot, in any circumstances acquiesce to the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier.
Winston Churchill

Is this the end? Is it to be merely a chapter in a cruel and senseless story? Will a new generation in their turn be immolated to square the black accounts of the Teuton and Gaul? Will our children bleed and gasp again in devastated lands? Or will there spring from the very fires of conflict that reconciliation of the three giant combatants, which would unite their genius and secure to each in safety and freedom a share in rebuilding the glory of Europe.
Winston Churchill, at the end of World War I

I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.
George Washington

We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.
George Washington

Always remember, however sure you are that you could easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.
Winston Churchill

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
Edward Gibbon

Except for a few handfuls of ferocious romanticists, or sordid would-be profiteers, war spells nothing but toil, waste, sorrow and torment to the vast mass of ordinary folk in every land.
Winston Churchill

We were told that the old wars of religion had ended, but that is not much comfort if the wars of various kinds of secular religions or non-God religions are to begin and are to make Europe the arena of their hideous conflict, and if all that makes life worth living to the mass of the people is to be destroyed in the process.
Winston Churchill

Whensoever hostile aggressions … require a resort to war, we must meet our duty and convince the world that we are just friends and brave enemies.
Thomas Jefferson

It is magnificent, but it is not war. (C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre.)
Pierre Bosquet, on the charge of the Light Brigade

The story of the human race is war. Except for brief and precarious interludes, there has never been peace in the world; and before history began, murderous strife was universal and unending.
Winston Churchill

War always finds a way.
Bertolt Brecht

War is horrible, but slavery is worse, and you may be sure that the British people would rather go down fighting than live in servitude.
Winston Churchill

You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war.
Winston Churchill

But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy — we shall ask for none.
Winston Churchill

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Winston Churchill

The hour has come; kill the Hun.
Winston Churchill

Here is the answer which I will give to President Roosevelt: Put your confidence in us. … We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.
Winston Churchill

How many wars have been precipitated by firebrands! How many misunderstandings which led to wars could have been removed by temporizing! How often have countries fought cruel wars and then after a few years found themselves not only friends but allies!
Winston Churchill

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders.
Winston Churchill

No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.
Winston Churchill

War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
Karl von Clausewitz

War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men.
Georges Clemenceau

But what they fought each other for, I could not well make out.
Robert Southey, on the Battle of Blenheim

But war's a game, which, were their subjects wise,
Kings would not play at.
William Cowper

Put your trust in God, my boys, and keep your powder dry!
Valentine Blacker

War is the most exciting and dramatic thing in life. In fighting to the death you feel terribly relaxed when you manage to come through.
Moshe Dayan

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
Ernest Hemingway

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for ones country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough.
Ernest Hemingway

An aggressive war is the great crime against everything good in the world. A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and ask the dead.
Ernest Hemingway

Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God. In it the noblest virtues of mankind are developed; courage and the abnegation of self, faithfulness to duty, and a spirit of sacrifice: the soldier gives his life. Without war the world would stagnate, and lose itself in materialism.
Helmuth von Moltke

All delays are dangerous in war.
John Dryden

Warrior


Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he
That every man in arms should wish to be?
William Wordsworth

Washington


Washington is a city of southern efficiency and northern charm.
John F. Kennedy

Waste


Yet we see men that waste their patrimony in luxury, destroy their health with debauchery, and enervate their minds with idleness.
Samuel Johnson

Weakness


Feeble and timid minds … consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence.
Edward Gibbon

Wealth


I've been rich and I've been poor; rich is better.
Sophie Tucker

I have no complex about wealth. I have worked hard for my money, producing things people need. I believe that the able industrial leader who creates wealth and employment is more worthy of historical notice than politicians or soldiers.
J. Paul Getty

It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
Logan Pearsall Smith

[We've] been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it and they have an antipathy towards the means of redistributing wealth.
Jim Moran

He does not possess wealth, it possesses him.
Benjamin Franklin

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.
Edmund Burke

If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
Edmund Burke

A mere madness, to live like a wretch and die rich.
Robert Burton

All this [wealth] excludes but one evil, — poverty.
Samuel Johnson

Riches are for spending.
Francis Bacon

With respect to the mind, it has rarely been observed, that wealth contributes much to quicken the discernment, enlarge the capacity, or elevate the imagination; but may, by hiring flattery, or laying diligence asleep, confirm errour, and harden stupidity.
Samuel Johnson

When therefore the desire of wealth is taking hold of the heart, let us look round and see how it operates upon those whose industry or fortune has obtained it.
Samuel Johnson

Little wealth, little care.
George Herbert

Get place and wealth, if possible with grace;
If not, by any means get wealth and place.
Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace

I noted this almost universal respect for wealth early in life, and have put it to profitable use ever since. That is, I have always pretended to be a great deal better heeled than I am in fact. It has got me deference in quarters where, otherwise, I might have been scorned, and materially eased my days.
H. L. Mencken

It is better to live rich, than to die rich.
Samuel Johnson

I am rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
Edward Moore

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.
Adam Smith

Retire, and enjoy thy riches in sordid ostentation; thou wast born to be wealthy, but never canst be great.
Samuel Johnson

The lust of wealth can never bear delay. (Dives qui fieri vult, Et cilo vult fieri.)
Samuel Johnson, variation on Juvenal

Wealth And Money


A rich man's joke is always funny.
Thomas Edward Brown

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.
Sojourner Truth

One of the weaknesses of our age is our apparent inability to distinguish our needs from our greeds.
Don Robinson

Not he who has little, but he who wishes more, is poor.
Seneca

Citizens of rich countries often fret about the occasional harm that corporations do, yet take for granted the prosperity they create. People in developing countries do not have that luxury.
Author unidentified (The Economist Editors)

Don't I have the right to do what I want with my own money?
Matthew 20:15

A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money.
W. C. Fields

Wealth And Poverty


Too much wealth is very frequently the occasion of poverty. He whom the wantonness of abundance has once softened, easily sinks into neglect of his affairs; and he that thinks he can afford to be negligent, is not far from being poor.
Samuel Johnson

Where Plenty smiles-alas! she smiles for few,
And those who taste not, yet behold her store,
Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,
The wealth around them makes them doubly poor.
George Crabbe

Weapon


Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.
George Orwell

Hence it comes about that all armed Prophets have been victorious, and all unarmed Prophets have been destroyed.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Let none presume to tell me that the pen is preferable to the sword.
Cervantes

Weariness


Weariness and negligence are perpetually prevailing by silent encroachments, assisted by different causes, and not observed till they cannot, without great difficulty, be opposed.
Samuel Johnson

Weather


Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Mark Twain

The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it.
Patrick Young

The weather is a nobler and more interesting subject; it is the present state of the skies, and of the earth, on which plenty and famine are suspended, on which millions depend for the necessaries of life.
Samuel Johnson

Wedding


Saw a wedding in the church … and strange to see what delight we married people have to see these poor fools decoyed into our condition.
Samuel Pepys

No man is in love when he marries. He may have loved before; I have even heard he has sometimes loved after: but at the time never. There is something in the formalities of the matrimonial preparations that drive away all the little cupidons.
Fanny Burney

O! how short a time does it take to put an end to a woman's liberty!
Fanny Burney, of a wedding

Weed


Now ’tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now and they’ll o’ergrow the garden.
Shakespeare

What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Welfare


The lessons of history, confirmed by the evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

[Giving welfare to poor people] is the equivalent of the government sending [fat people] a jumbo bag of Bugles in the mail twice a month.
Adam Carolla

The danger of the kind of welfare state [President] Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the state.
Paul Johnson

Western World


Everything great in western culture has come from the quarrel with nature.
Camille Paglia

Whiskey


A congressman was once asked his attitude about whiskey. "If you mean the demon drink that poisons the mind, pollutes the body, desecrates family life, and inflames sinners, then I'm against it. But if you mean the elixir of Christmas cheer, the shield against winter chill, the taxable potion that puts needed funds into public coffers to comfort little crippled children, then I'm for it. This is my position, and I will not compromise."
Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin

It [Scotch whisky] was strong, but not pungent, and was free from the empyreumatic [burnt] taste or smell. What was the process I had no opportunity of inquiring, nor do I wish to improve the art of making poison pleasant.
Samuel Johnson

Wickedness


Wickedness is always easier than virtue; for it takes the short cut to everything.
Samuel Johnson

Wife


Houses and wealth are inherited from parents,
but a prudent wife is from the LORD.
Proverbs 19:14

Better to live on a corner of the roof
than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.
Proverbs 21:9

Better to live in a desert
than with a quarrelsome and ill-tempered wife.
Proverbs 21:19

A quarrelsome wife is like
a constant dripping on a rainy day;
restraining her is like restraining the wind
or grasping oil with the hand.
Proverbs 27:15,16

Many a man owes his success to his first wife and his second wife to his success.
Jim Backus (Attributed)

Here lies my wife; here let her lie!
Now she's at peace and so am I.
John Dryden

The comfortable estate of widowhood, is the only hope that keeps up a wife's spirits.
John Gay

When you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy.
James Goldsmith

Only two things are necessary to keep one's wife happy. One is to let her think she is having her own way, and the other, to let her have it.
Lyndon B. Johnson

Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
She ain't no lady; she's my wife.
Joe Weber and Lew Fields

Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
Francis Bacon

Happy wife, happy life.
Author unidentified

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Jane Austen

You are my true and honorable wife,
As dear to me as are the ruddy drops
That visit my sad heart.
Shakespeare

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.
Samuel Johnson

I find my wife hath something in her gizzard, that only waits an opportunity of being provoked to bring up; but I will not, for my content-sake, give it.
Samuel Pepys

Wine


Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water.
Benjamin Franklin

In wine [there is the] truth. (In vino veritas.)
Pliny the Elder

I cook with wine, sometimes I even add it to food.
W. C. Fields

Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!
Benjamin Franklin

The wine urges me on, the bewitching wine, which sets even a wise man to singing and to laughing gently and rouses him up to dance and brings forth words which were better unspoken.
Homer

It is better to hide ignorance, but it is hard to do this when we relax over wine.
Heraclitus

I am falser than vows made in wine.
Shakespeare

O thou invisible spirit of wine! if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!
Shakespeare

Wine makes a man more pleased with himself. I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others.
Samuel Johnson

Bacchus, that first from out the purple grape
Crush’d the sweet poison of misused wine.
John Milton

From wine what sudden friendship springs!
John Gay

When the wine goes in, strange things come out.
Johann [Christoph] Friedrich von Schiller

I rather like bad wine … one gets so bored with good wine.
Benjamin Disraeli

Wine And Women


Wine and women lead intelligent men astray.
Ecclesiasticus 19:2

I may not here omit those two main plagues, and common dotages of human kind, wine and women, which have infatuated and besotted myriads of people. They go commonly together.
Robert Burton

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter,
Sermons and soda-water the day after.
Lord Byron

Winning


Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is.
Vince Lombardi

Of course, when you are winning a war almost everything that happens can be claimed to be right and wise.
Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill


He [Winston Churchill] does not talk the language of the 20th century but that of the 18th. He is still fighting Blenheim all over again. His only answer to a difficult situation is send a gun-boat.
Aneurin Bevan

I have never accepted what many people have kindly said — namely, that I inspired the nation. Their will was resolute and remorseless and it proved unconquerable. It fell to me to express it and if I found the right word you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen, and by my tongue.
Winston Churchill

Historians are apt to judge war ministers less by the victories achieved under their direction than by the political results which flowed from them. Judged by that standard, I am not sure that I shall be held to have done very well.
Winston Churchill

I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.
Winston Churchill

Winter


From winter, plague and pestilence, good Lord, deliver us!
Thomas Nashe

Wisdom


We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.
Ecclesiastes 1:18

I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.
Anatole France

He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.
James Gibbons Huneker

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Great men are not always wise.
Job 32:9 (KJV)

[It is] better [to] be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.
Aesop

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
George Orwell

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell

He is no wise man who will quit a certainty for an uncertainty.
Samuel Johnson

'Tis sometimes the height of wisdom to feign stupidity.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise.
Cato the Elder (Marcus Porcius Cato)

The doors of wisdom are never shut.
Benjamin Franklin

Wisdom comes from context.
Author unidentified

A proud person talks about all he has done, a foolish person talks about all he will do, and a wise man does it, and says nothing.
Keith Harmon

Wisdom is the accumulation of insights into how the world actually works — as opposed to how we would like it to work.
Jonah Goldberg

Wisdom comes through suffering.
Aeschylus

A lawyer is wise according to human wisdom, a divine according to God's wisdom.
Martin Luther

I consider our fore-fathers as deeper Thinkers than ourselves, because they set an higher Value on good sense than Knowledge in various Sciences, & this good sense was derived very often from as much study & more knowledge, though of another sort.
Edmund Burke

The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are.
Francis Bacon

Wisdom is supreme — so acquire wisdom, and whatever you acquire, acquire understanding!
Proverbs 4:7 (NET)

Be wise today; ’tis madness to defer.
Edward Young

So learn from this and understand true values.
I who tell you have wintered into wisdom.
Beowulf

Acknowledging what you don't know is the dawning of wisdom.
Charlie Munger

Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Day by day, and at the end of the day, if you live long enough … you will get out of life what you deserve.
Charlie Munger

He went like one that hath been stunned,
And is of sense forlorn:
A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The highest sacrifice is a broken and contrite heart; the highest wisdom is that which is found in the Torah; the noblest of all ornaments is modesty; and the most beautiful thing that man can do, is to forgive a wrong.
Eleazar of Worms

Wish


We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.
Aesop

Like our shadows,
Our wishes lengthen as our sun declines.
Edward Young

Wistfulness


For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!
John Greenleaf Whittier

Wit


Conquered people tend to be witty.
Saul Bellow

A thing well said will be wit in all languages.
John Dryden

Witch


August 25, 1538, the conversation fell upon witches who spoil milk, eggs, and butter in farm yards. Dr. Luther said: "I should have no compassion on these witches; I would burn all of them."
Martin Luther

It was asked: Can good Christians and God fearing people also undergo witchcraft? Luther replied: Yes; for our bodies are always exposed to the attacks of Satan. The maladies I suffer are not natural, but devil's spells.
Martin Luther

Witchcraft


The nations, and the sects, of the Roman world, admitted with equal credulity, and similar abhorrence, the reality of that infernal art [witchcraft], which was able to control the eternal order of the planets, and the voluntary operations of the human mind. … They believed, with the wildest inconsistency, that this preternatural dominion of the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised, from the vilest motives of malice or gain, by some wrinkled hags and itinerant sorcerers, who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt.
Edward Gibbon

Wizard


Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.
J. R. R. Tolkien

Wolf


I beheld once a wolf tearing sheep. When the wolf comes into a sheep-fold, he eats not any until he has killed all, and then he begins to eat, thinking to devour all.
Martin Luther

Women


The great question which I have not been able to answer, despite my 30 years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does woman want?"
Sigmund Freud

If a woman likes another woman, she's cordial. If she doesn't like her, she's very cordial.
Irvin S. Cobb

Women are like elephants. They are interesting to look at, but I wouldn't want to own one.
W. C. Fields

If I were asked … to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of [Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.
Alexis de Tocqueville

When women kiss it always reminds me of prize-fighters shaking hands.
H. L. Mencken

She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, and not a thought of her own in her head.
Joseph Conrad

When there is an old maid in the house, a watch dog is unnecessary.
Honoré de Balzac

She wore far too much rouge last night and not quite enough clothes. That is always a sign of despair in a woman.
Oscar Wilde

Most women are not as young as they are painted.
Max Beerbohm

No trust is to be placed in women.
Homer

There is no fouler fiend than a woman when her mind is bent to evil.
Homer

I trust only one thing in a woman: that she will not come to life again after she is dead. In all other things I distrust her.
Antiphanes

In point of morals, the average woman is, even for business, too crooked.
Stephen Leacock

Never trust a woman, even though she has given you ten sons.
Chinese Proverb

Women always excel men in that sort of wisdom which comes from experience. To be a woman is in itself a terrible experience.
H. L. Mencken

If a woman has "It," she doesn't need anything else; but if she doesn't have "It," it doesn't matter what else she has.
Winston Churchill

But I'm not here to give you some bullshit talk about women. There are three billion of them, and to generalize that many people with some blanket statement is the definition of being an asshole. Women are all different, so I don't have any advice on them.
Samuel Halpern

Um, when a woman talks, she just wants to be heard.
Lisa Simpson, The Simpsons

Women complain about premenstrual syndrome, but I think of it as the only time of the month I can be myself.
Roseanne Barr

You know that look women get when they want to have sex? Me neither.
Steve Martin

Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honour … which is probably more than she ever did.
Bret Kalmar

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw

Her mother grieved in secret with the grim, philosophic, almost cheerful hopelessness of women whose lives have taught them always to expect the worst
Rudyard Kipling

These impossible women! How they do get around us!
The poet was right: can't live with them, or without them!
Aristophanes

When the candles are out all women are fair.
Plutarch

That's the nature of women … not to love when we love them, and to love when we love them not.
Cervantes

O tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide!
Shakespeare

Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak.
Shakespeare

Frailty, thy name is woman!
Shakespeare

[Women] are desirous to hide from themselves the advances of age, and endeavour too frequently to supply the sprightliness and bloom of youth by artificial beauty and forced vivacity.
Samuel Johnson

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.
Samuel Johnson

A woman always has her revenge ready.
Molière

How full of fury woman is!
The Madness of Tristan

There's such great nobility in a dog, such great deceit in woman.
The Madness of Tristan

After forty a woman has to choose between losing her figure or her face. My advice is to keep your face, and stay sitting down.
Barbara Cartland

And what is bettre than wisedoom? Womman.
And what is bettre than a good womman? Nothyng.
Chaucer

Women can't forgive failure.
Anton Chekhov

A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love.
Leonard Cohen

Women are like tricks by sleight of hand,
Which, to admire, we should not understand.
William Congreve

Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old.
Shelagh Delaney

Women are at once the boldest and most unmanageable revolutionaries.
Eamonn de Valera

Women's Liberation


The freedom women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion: things to make life easier for men, in fact.
Julie Burchill

Word


"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'"

"But glory doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master — that's all."

Lewis Carroll

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.
Edward Thorndike

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
Abraham Lincoln

The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?
Ecclesiastes 6:11

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
Winston Churchill

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
George Orwell

When ideas fail, words come in very handy.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts.
Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
Mark Twain

It ain't how many words you know, it's how you use them.
Samuel Halpern

By hard, honest labour I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary … I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same money for Cop.
Mark Twain

Words have a longer life than deeds.
Pindar

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs it sucks the meat out of the egg and leaves it an empty shell. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.
Theodore Roosevelt

Men of few words are the best men.
Shakespeare

How many honest words have suffered corruption since Chaucer's days!
Thomas Middleton

Good words are worth much, and cost little.
George Herbert

Many have fallen by the edge of the sword, but not as many as have fallen because of the tongue.
Ecclesiasticus

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
Winston Churchill

But words once spoke can never be recalled.
Wentworth Dillon

Confound those who have said our remarks before us. (Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.)
Aelius Donatus

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.
Ernest Hemingway

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
Ernest Hemingway

Work


I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.
Winston Churchill, first speech as prime minister

When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.
Henry J. Kaiser

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 2:11

So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.
Ecclesiastes 2:17

What does a man get for all the toil and anxious striving with which he labors under the sun? All his days his work is pain and grief; even at night his mind does not rest. This too is meaningless.
Ecclesiastes 2:22,23

In populous cities, which are the seat of commerce and manufactures, the middle ranks of inhabitants, who derive their subsistence from the dexterity or labor of their hands, are commonly the most prolific, the most useful, and, in that sense, the most respectable part of the community.
Edward Gibbon

Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.
Sam Ewing

[Personal] industry must be faint and languid, which is not excited by the sense of personal interest.
Edward Gibbon

If a man will not work, he shall not eat.
2 Thessalonians 3:10

Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment.
Robert Benchley

The things are mighty few on earth
That wishes can attain.
Whate'er we want of any worth
We've got to work to gain.
Edgar Guest

For great and low there's but one test:
'Tis that each man shall do his best.
Who works with all the strength he can
Shall never die in debt to man.
Edgar Guest

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, [and] Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Mark Twain

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.
Thomas Edison

I wish to preach not the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort.
Theodore Roosevelt

If a task is once begun
Never leave it till it's done.
Be the labor great or small
Do it well or not at all.
Author unidentified

I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.
Margaret Thatcher

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it. An amateur is a man who can't do his job when he does feel like it.
James Agate

Oh you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called EVERYBODY and they meet at the bar.
Drew Carey

It is allowed that vocations and employments of least dignity are of the most apparent use; that the meanest artisan or manufacturer contributes more to the accommodation of life than the profound scholar and argumentative theorist; and that the public would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade.
Samuel Johnson

It is not hard to work; it is hard to begin to work.
Constantin Brancusi (Attributed)

Shun those studies in which the work that results dies with the worker.
Leonardo da Vinci

All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.
Proverbs 14:23

Work keeps us from three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty.
Voltaire

Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
Albert Camus (Attributed)

Like Sisyphus, our work is never done;
Continually rolls back the restless stone.
Stephen Duck

Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

World


The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.
Horace Walpole

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;
A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
Shakespeare

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
Shakespeare

Who knows but the world may end tonight?
Robert Browning

The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility … The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.
Albert Einstein

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot

Worry


If evils come not, then our fears are vain: And if they do, Fear but augments the pain.
Author unidentified

Worry is a misuse of imagination.
Dan Zadra

Worrying


Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof — KJV)
Matthew 6:34

When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which never happened.
Winston Churchill

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry. Worry never fixes anything.
Mary Hemingway

Worship


The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.
Edward Gibbon

Worst


To fear the worst oft cures the worse.
Shakespeare

You do your worst! — and we will do our best!
Winston Churchill

Worthiness


What's not worth doing is not worth doing well.
Don Hebb

Wrath


Their wounded shall fill their ravines and gullies, and the swelling river shall be filled with their dead.
Judith 2:8

Wretch


The wretch, concentrated all in self
Living, shall forfeit fair renown
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
Sir Walter Scott

Writer


In Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.
Author unidentified

I suppose most editors are failed writers — but so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
Russell Baker

Those who claim to teach the craft are, almost by definition, failed writers, with not much value to impart. Most successful writers cannot talk about their books coherently or are unwilling to divulge what they have acquired the hard way.
Paul Johnson

Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.
Samuel Johnson

The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.
François René de Chateaubriand

Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Writers of all ages have had the same sentiments, because they have in all ages had the same objects of speculation; the interests and passions, the virtues and vices of mankind, have been diversified in different times, only by unessential and casual varieties: and we must, therefore, expect in the works of all those who attempt to describe them, such a likeness as we find in the pictures of the same person drawn in different periods of his life.
Samuel Johnson

The first qualification of a writer is a perfect knowledge of the subject which he undertakes to treat.
Samuel Johnson

Dostoevsky was made by being sent to Siberia. Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged.
Ernest Hemingway

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
Ernest Hemingway

Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
Ernest Hemingway

The bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Writing


Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

Omit needless words.
William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
Samuel Johnson

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
Robert Benchley

[Writing a book] is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
Winston Churchill

And, like every other ink-stained wretch, he could never be certain of future income.
William Manchester, on writing

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vain.
Red Smith

Just as the sentence contains one idea in all its fullness, so the paragraph should embrace a distinct episode; and as sentences should follow one another in harmonious sequence, so paragraphs must fit into another like the automatic couplings of railway carriages.
Winston Churchill

If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Journalist" is a term of contempt employed by writers who are not read to refer to writers who are read.
Ernest Newman (Attributed)

When I want to read a novel, I write one.
Benjamin Disraeli

Of writing well the source and fountainhead is wise thinking.
Horace

In matters editorial, I am a believer in totalitarian despotism. Most writers are lazy, difficult, selfish, thoughtless, and unreliable.
John Derbyshire

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.
Jonah Goldberg

Start. Don't look back. If at the end it doesn't meet your hopes, start again. Now you know more about your hopes.
Roger Ebert, on Writing

After being turned down by numerous publishers, he had decided to write for posterity.
George Ade

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
E. L. Doctorow

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper, and no telephone or wife.
Evelyn Waugh

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when reading.
Don Marquis

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.
Samuel Johnson

It is one of the common distresses of a writer to be within a word of a happy period, to want only a single epithet to give amplification its full force, to require only a correspondent term in order to finish a paragraph with elegance, and make one of its members answer to the other; but these deficiencies cannot always be supplied; and after a long study and vexation, the passage is turned anew, and the web unwoven that was so nearly finished.
Samuel Johnson

Gentlemen, you do me too much honor, but I have four reasons for not writing: I am too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich.
David Hume

I finished the lives of the Poets, which I wrote in my usual way, dilatorily and hastily, unwilling to work, and working with vigour and haste.
Samuel Johnson

If, as it has sometimes happened in general combinations against merit, he cannot persuade the world to buy his works, he may present them to his friends; and if his friends are seized with the epidemical infatuation (folly, foolishness), and cannot find his genius, or will not confess it, let him then refer his cause to posterity, and reserve his labours for a wiser age.
Samuel Johnson

It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives.
Samuel Johnson

[They] do not know, or do not reflect, that an author has a rule of choice peculiar to himself; and selects those subjects which he is best qualified to treat, by the course of his studies, or the accidents of his life; that some topicks of amusement have been already treated with too much success to invite a competition; and that he who endeavours to gain many readers must try various arts of invitation, essay every avenue of pleasure, and make frequent changes in his methods of approach.
Samuel Johnson

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write: a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson

Too many people want to have written.
Terry Pratchett

It requires no especially great talent to write in such a way that another will be very hard put to it to understand what you have written.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
Sydney Smith

Learn to write well, or not to write at all.
John Sheffield

Johnson's style was grand and Gibbon's elegant; the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantic, and the polish of the latter was occasionally finical. Johnson marched to kettle-drums and trumpets; Gibbon moved to flute and hautboys: Johnson hewed passages through the Alps, while Gibbon levelled walks through parks and gardens.
George Colman, the Younger

The perfect delight of writing tales where so many lives come and go at the cost of one which slips imperceptibly away.
Joseph Conrad

I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.
Ernest Hemingway

He that without forming his style by the study of the best models hastens to obtrude his compositions on the publick, may be certain, that whatever hope or flattery may suggest, he shall shock the learned ear with barbarisms, and contribute, wherever his work shall be received, to the depravation of taste and the corruption of language.
Samuel Johnson

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.
J. P. Donleavy

It is wonderful how much news there is when people write every other day; if they wait for a month, there is nothing that seems worth telling.
O. Douglas

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.
Ernest Hemingway

Sometimes many thoughts present themselves; but so confused and unconnected, that they are not without difficulty reduced to method, or concatenated in a regular and dependent series; the mind falls at once into a labyrinth, of which neither the beginning nor end can be discovered, and toils and struggles without progress or extrication.
Samuel Johnson

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.
Ernest Hemingway

Beginnings are always troublesome. … Even Macaulay's few pages of introduction to his 'Introduction' in the English History are the worst bit of writing in the book.
George Eliot

Wrong


Why should you mind being wrong if someone can show you that you are?
A. J. Ayer (Attributed)

Young And Old


Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
Bob Dylan

Youth


Whom the gods love dies young.
Menander

Whom the gods love die young no matter how long they live.
Elbert Hubbard (cf. Menander)

When the Greeks said, "Whom the gods love die young," they probably meant, as Lord Sankey suggested, that those favored by the gods stay young till the day they die; young and playful.
Eric Hoffer

It takes a long time to become young.
Pablo Picasso

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
Mark Twain

Oh, to be only half as wonderful as my child thought I was when he was small, and only half as stupid as my teenager now thinks I am.
Rebecca Richards

It is only an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it.
W. Somerset Maugham

The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children.
Duke of Windsor

Every child should have an occasional pat on the back as long as it is applied low enough and hard enough
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

Like its politicians and its wars, society has the teenagers it deserves.
J. B. Priestley

The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
H. H. Munro (Saki)

I am not young enough to know everything.
James M. Barrie

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.
Sydney Harris

There's not a man in America who at one time or another hasn't had a secret desire to boot a child in the ass.
W. C. Fields

Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.
Phyllis Diller

Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.
Eric Hoffer

In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
Oscar Wilde

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard Shaw

The contempt of risk, and the presumptuous hope of success, are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions.
Adam Smith

Youth doesn't take advice.
Thomas Edison

The one form of change we can always count on is the violent oscillation of intellectual fashion among the young.
Paul Johnson

Bewildered by a rapidly changing society, excessively fearful of becoming out of date, our leaders are increasingly turning to young people as guides and mentors.
Paul Johnson

Ah God! Had I but studied
In the days of my foolish youth.
François Villon

Young men think old men are fools; but old men know young men are fools.
George Chapman

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
William Wordsworth

I am resolved to grow fat and look young till forty, and then slip out of the world with the first wrinkle and the reputation of five-and-twenty.
John Dryden

Zen


You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.
Zen saying

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Last updated: March 28, 2024