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Cool Quotes - P
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.
Pain
To each his suff'rings, all are men,
Condemned alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
Th' unfeeling for his own.
Thomas Gray
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
C. S. Lewis
Those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.
Samuel Johnson
The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.
Samuel Johnson
Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enough to feel misery.
S. T. Coleridge
He preaches patience that never knew pain.
H. G. Bohn
Man endures pain as an undeserved punishment; woman accepts it as a natural heritage.
Author unidentified
Painter
The most sensible men I know, taken as a class, are painters; that is, they are the most lively observers of what passes in the world about them, and the closest observers of what passes in their own heads.
William Hazlitt
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
There are three things I have always loved and never understood - painting, music and women.
Bernard de Fontenelle
I have generally found that persons who had studied painting least were the best judges of it.
William Hogarth
The power of enjoying music, being common to brutes, must be considered inferior to the capability of appreciating painting, which is peculiar to him who was made after the image of God.
John Ruskin
You may weep over a book or on hearing music, but you never weep before a picture or a piece of sculpture.
Alfred Stevens
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
Papacy
The papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.
Thomas Hobbes
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
Parasite
The wide world is little else, in nature,
But parasites or sub-parasites.
Ben Jonson
We humans are the greatest of the earth's parasites.
Martin H. Fischer
Pardon
Pardoning the bad is injuring the good.
Thomas Fuller
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
Having one child makes you a parent; having two you are a referee.
David Frost
Parents and Children
Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.
Russell Baker
He looked upon the time that had been my future in a disturbing way. My future was his past, and being young, he was indifferent to the past.
Russell Baker
If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
George Bernard Shaw
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
The tendency to dissipation at Paris seems to be irresistible. There is a moral incapacity for industry and application, a mollesse [laxity], against which I am as ill guarded as I was at the age of twenty.
John Quincy Adams
In Paris life passes like a dream.
French Proverb
Parisian
I admire the Parisians prodigiously. They are the happiest people in the world, I believe, and have the best disposition to make others so.
John Adams
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
People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament.
A. P. Herbert
What's the thing call'd a parliament, but a mock? compos'd of a people that are only suffer'd to sit there because they are known to have no virtue, after the exclusion of all others that were not suspected to have any? What are they but pimps of tyranny, who are only employed to draw in the people to prostitute their liberty?
Edward Soxby
Parliament can do anything but turn a boy, into a girl.
English Proverb
England is the mother of parliaments.
John Bright
Parting
Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
Shakespeare
Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection. This is why even people who were indifferent to each other rejoice so much if they come together again after twenty or thirty years' separation.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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
I always voted at my party's call,
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W. S. Gilbert
There can not a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful spirit of division as rends a government into two distinct people, and makes them greater strangers and more averse to one another than if they were actually two different nations.
Joseph Addison
The spirit of party serves always to distract the public councils, and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another; foments occasional riot and insurrection.
George Washington
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
Chastise your passions, that they may not chastise you.
Epictetus
Give me that man
That is not passion's slave.
Shakespeare
The end of passion is the beginning of repentance.
Owen Felltham
We are ne'er like angels till our passion dies.
Thomas Dekker
Passions unguided are for the most part mere madness.
Thomas Hobbes
If we resist our passions it is more from their weakness than from our strength.
La Rochefoucauld
The passions are the only advocates which always persuade. The simplest man with passion will be more persuasive than the most eloquent without.
La Rochefoucauld
It is the passions which do and undo everything. If reason ruled, nothing would get on … The passions in men are the winds necessary to put everything in motion, though they often cause storms.
Bernard de Fontenelle
Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us. It, more than anything, deprives us the use of our judgment; for it raises a dust very hard to see through. It may not unfitly be termed the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.
William Penn
A man in a passion rides a wild horse.
Benjamin Franklin
Mankind suffers more by the conflict of contrary passions than by that of passion and reason: yet perhaps the truest way to quench one passion is to kindle up another.
William Shenstone
Men are often false to their country and their honor, false to duty and even to their interest, but multitudes of men are never long false or deaf to their passions.
Fisher Ames
Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions.
Benjamin Disraeli
No man can guess in cold blood what he may do in a passion.
H. G. Bohn
The church combats passion by excision; its remedy is castration. It never inquires how desire can be spiritualized, beautified, deified.
F. W. Nietzsche
Conquer your passions and you conquer the whole world.
Hindu Proverb
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
Carl Gustav Jung
If we conquer our passions, it is more from their weakness than from our strength. (Si nous résistons à nos passions, c'est plus par leur faiblesse que par notre force.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
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
Stop romanticizing the past.
You've always been miserable.
Dave Tarnowski
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley
That which is past is gone and irrevocable, and wise men have enough to do with things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves that labor in past matters.
Francis Bacon
The past at least is secure.
Daniel Webster
Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence, then, this worship of the past?
R. W. Emerson
No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
T. B. Macaulay
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
Robert Frost
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
Patience is the best medicine.
John Florio
Be patient, my soul: thou hath suffered worse than this.
Homer
Patience provoked often turns to fury.
Publilius Syrus
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
St. Augustine
All men commend patience, although few be willing to practise it.
Thomas à Kempis
A man must learn to endure that patiently which he cannot avoid conveniently.
Michel de Montaigne
He invites a new injury who bears the old patiently.
Fynes Moryson
Patience and delay achieve more than force and rage.
Jean de la Fontaine
If God has taken away all means of seeking remedy, there is nothing left but patience.
John Locke
Patience is the art of hoping.
Luc de Vauvenargues
Patience is bitter, but its fruits are sweet.
J.J. Rousseau
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
We pause to … recall what our country has done for each of us and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country in return.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is sweet to serve one's country by deeds, and it is not absurd to serve her by words.
Sallust
Your forefathers worked hard, fought hard, and died hard to make this Empire for you. Don’t let them look down from heaven, and see you loafing about with hands in your pockets doing nothing to keep it up.
Robert Baden-Powell
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
Patron, n. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
Samuel Johnson
Pauperism
Paupers will raise paupers, even if the children be not their own, just as familiar contact with criminals will make criminals of the children of virtuous parents.
Henry George
Pay
He who pays the piper can call the tune.
John Ray
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
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
Peace becomes mankind; fury is for beasts.
Ovid
Plenty and peace breed cowards.
Shakespeare
It is madness for a sheep to treat of peace with a wolf.
Thomas Fuller
No nation ever yet enjoyed a protracted and triumphant peace without receiving in its own bosom ineradicable seeds of future decline.
John Ruskin
You may either win your peace or buy it—win it, by resistance to evil; buy it, by compromise with evil.
John Ruskin
In the tragedy of man peace is but an entr'acte.
Remy de Gourmont
May he rest in peace. (Requiescat in pace.)
Latin Phrase
Everlasting peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one.
Helmuth von Moltke
Peasant
Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
Oliver Goldsmith
I have never heard of a peer with an ancient lineage. The real old families of this country are to be found among the peasantry.
Benjamin Disraeli
A good, honest, well-to-do peasant, who knows nothing of politics, must be very nearly happy.
George Moore
Pedant
A man who has been brought up among books, and is able to talk of nothing else, is a very indifferent companion, and what we call a pedant.
Joseph Addison
Learn'd without sense, and venerably dull.
Charles Churchill
Pen
How much more cruel the pen may be than the sword.
Robert Burton
Penny
In for a penny, in for a pound.
Edward Ravenscroft
Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.
William Lowndes
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
It's 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
The common people suffer when the powerful disagree.
Phaedrus
The masses of the people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce, and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its good, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.
Niccolò Machiavelli
He who speaks of the people, speaks of a madman; for the people is a monster full of confusion and mistakes; and the opinions of the people are as far removed from the truth as, according to Ptolemy, the Indies are from Spain.
Francesco Guicciardini
Look, as I blow this feather from my face,
And as the air blows it to me again,
Obeying with my wind when I do blow,
And yielding to another when it blows,
Commanded always by the greater gust;
Such is the lightness of you common men.
Shakespeare
Nor is the people's judgment always true:
The most may err as grossly as the few.
John Dryden
I know the people: they change in a day. They bestow prodigally their hatred and their love.
Voltaire
The people are a many-headed beast.
Alexander Pope
The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.
Alexander Hamilton
Do not be too severe upon the errors of the people, but reclaim them by enlightening them.
Thomas Jefferson
We here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
You cannot keep the people out of government and progress. If their intelligence does not rule, their ignorance will.
Thomas B. Reed
He that builds upon the people builds upon the sand.
Italian Proverb
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
No perfection is so absolute
That some impurity doth not pollute.
Shakespeare
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see
Thinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
Alexander Pope
The desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind.
Louis Fontanes
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
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Martin Niemöller
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, Rasselas
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 give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honor 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
Anything pleasant easily persuades, and while it gives pleasure it fixes itself in the heart.
Lactantius
We are more easily persuaded, in general, by the reasons we ourselves discover than by those which are given to us by others.
Blaise Pascal
There is a danger in being persuaded before one understands.
Thomas Wilson
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
Pettiness
Those who apply themselves too closely to little things become incapable of great things.
La Rochefoucauld
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
There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.
Cicero
Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.
Francis Bacon
Many talk like philosophers and live like fools.
Thomas Fuller
A philosopher is a fool who torments himself while he is alive, to be talked about after he is dead.
Jean le Rond D'Alembert
There is nothing so unfortunate as to be a philosopher and a wise man and a reasoner, and to know what can and cannot be done.
Horace Walpole
Fools and philosophers were made out of the same metal.
H. G. Bohn
All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusion is called a philosopher.
Ambrose Bierce
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
To say that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it is passed and gone is like saying that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it is passed and gone.
Epicurus
I despise philosophy, and renounce its guidance — let my soul dwell with common sense.
Thomas Reid
Philosophy is a good horse in the stable, but an arrant jade on a journey.
Oliver Goldsmith
The flour is the important thing, not the mill; the fruits of philosophy, not the philosophy itself. When we ask what time it is we don't want to know how watches are constructed.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Philosophy is the middle state between science, or knowledge, and sophia, or wisdom.
S. T. Coleridge
What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom; an ever-renewed effort to transcend the sphere of blind custom, and so become transcendental?
Thomas Carlyle
Whenever philosophy has taken into its plan religion, it has ended in skepticism; and whenever religion excludes philosophy, or the spirit of free inquiry, it leads to wilful blindness and superstition.
S. T. Coleridge
Philosophy may teach us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of our neighbors.
Oscar Wilde
Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false, but senseless.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils triumph over it. (La philosophie triomphe aisément des maux passés et des maux à venir. Mais les maux présents triomphent d'elle.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
Photography
Photography is truth. The cinema is truth 24 times per second.
Jean-Luc Godard
Phrase
The minute a phrase becomes current it becomes an apology for not thinking accurately to the end of the sentence.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Physician
He that sinneth before his Maker, let him fall into the hand of the physician.
Ecclesiasticus 38:15 (KJVAAE)
I will follow that method of treatment which, according to my judgment, I consider best for my patients, and abstain from whatever is injurious. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel. I will not give to a woman any instrument to produce abortion.
The Hippocratic Oath
I die by the help of too many physicians.
Alexander the Great
That sick man does badly who makes his physician his heir.
Publilius Syrus
Other things being equal, a friend makes a better physician than a stranger.
Aulus Cornelius Celsus
The physician is only nature's assistant.
Galen
A physician should be the servant of nature, not her enemy.
Theophratus Bombast von Hohenheim (Paracelsus)
Physicians, of all men, are most happy: whatever good success soever they have, the world proclaimeth, and what faults they commit, the earth covereth.
Francis Quarles
He's the best physician that knows the worthlessness of the most medicines.
Benjamin Franklin
You medical people will have more lives to answer for in the other world than even we generals.
Napoleon I
No man can be a good physician who has never been sick.
Arab Proverb
Pianist
Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
Oscar Wilde
He who plays the piano keeps sane.
Italian Proverb
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
Pictures are the books of the ignorant.
English Proverb
Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.
R. W. Emerson
Piety
Ah! though I am a pious Christian, the feelings of a man do not the less burn in my breast.
J. B. Molière
Strange, but true, that those who have loved God most have loved men least.
R. G. Ingersoll
If your neighbor has made one pilgrimage to Mecca, watch him; if two, avoid him; if three, move to another street.
Arab Proverb
Pig
The life of a pig is short and sweet.
French Proverb
Pilot
In a calm sea every man is a pilot.
John Ray
Pipe
Every morning I wake up and think good, another 24 hours' pipe-smoking.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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
It is hard to have pity and be wise.
Ascribed to Acesilaus
All feel pity for those like themselves.
Claudius Claudianus
Pity is imagination or fiction of future calamity to ourselves, proceeding from the sense of another man's calamity. But when it lighteth on such as we think have not deserved the same, the compassion is greater, because there then appeareth more probability that the same may happen to us; for the evil that happeneth to an innocent man may happen to every man.
Thomas Hobbes
If you pity rogues you are no great friend to honest men.
Thomas Fuller
Pity is not natural to man. Children are always cruel. Savages are always cruel. Pity is acquired and improved by the cultivation of reason.
Samuel Johnson
Plagiarism
They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.
Robert Burton
If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.
C. C. Colton
If I take an old plot from a play that has been a dead failure and redress it, put living words into the mouths of its characters, give it the proper technique and action that it lacks, making it an actable play and so a successful one, I claim that play is mine, for I have made from the dead a living thing.
Dion Boucicault
When you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many, it’s research.
Wilson Mizner
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
Plainspeaking
The Macedonians … had not the wit to call a spade by any other name than a spade.
Nicholas Udall, translation of Desiderius Erasmus
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
Play
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
John Ray
Pleasant
Pleasant words are like a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones.
Proverbs 16:24 NET https://bible.com/bible/107/pro.16.24.NET
The three most pleasant things in the world are a cat's kittens, a goat's kid, and a young woman.
Irish Proverb
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
Whoever loves pleasure will become poor; whoever loves wine and olive oil will never be rich.
Proverbs 21:17
To be a slave to pleasure is the life of a harlot, not of a man.
Anaxandrides
Pleasure is the first good. It is the beginning of every choice and every aversion. It is the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.
Epicurus
The most noble and excellent gift of Heaven to man is reason; and of all the enemies that reason has to engage with pleasure is the chief.
Cicero
There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it.
Ovid
It is the rare pleasures that especially delight us.
Epictetus
Love of pleasure is the disease which makes men most despicable,
Longinus
An influx of riches, and constant health; a wife who is dear and is of kind and gentle speech; a child who is obedient, and useful knowledge, are the six pleasures of life.
The Hitopadesa
Follow pleasure, and then will pleasure flee,
Flee pleasure, and pleasure will follow thee.
John Heywood
All the instances of pleasure have a sting in the, tail.
Jeremy Taylor
The liberty of using harmless pleasure will not be disputed; but it is still to be examined what pleasures are harmless.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas
The best pleasures of this world are not quite pure.
J. W. Goethe
When we talk of pleasure we mean sensual pleasure. When a man says he had pleasure with a woman he does not mean conversation.
Samuel Johnson
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.
Thomas Jefferson
When anyone takes great pleasure in doing a thing it is almost always from some motive other than the ostensible one.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Pleasure is to women what the sun is to the flower: if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, deteriorates, and destroys.
C. C. Colton
Pleasure and Pain
Short pleasure, long lament.
John Ray
Pleasure is nothing else but the intermission of pain, the enjoying of something I am in great trouble for till I have it.
John Selden
Pain wastes the body; pleasures the understanding.
Benjamin Franklin
The honest man takes pains, and then enjoys pleasures; the knave takes pleasure, and then suffers pain.
Benjamin Franklin
My chief study all my life has been to lighten misfortunes and multiply pleasures, as far as human nature can.
Mary Wortley Montagu
Pleasure is oft a visitant; but pain
Clings cruelly to us.
John Keats
There is a pleasure which is born of pain.
E. R. Bulwer-Lytton
From a short pleasure comes a long repentance.
French Proverb
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
Plenty
Plenty ever breeds contempt.
Tertullian
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
Poem
I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase “a long poem” is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Edgar Allan Poe
The great end of the poem is to instruct, which is performed by making pleasure the vehicle of that instruction; for poesy is an art, and all arts are made to profit.
Ascribed to René Rapin
A poem is never finished, only abandoned.
Paul Valéry
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, Rasselas
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
O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.
James Elroy Flecker
Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.
Maud Gonne, to W. B. Yeats
To have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.
Walt Whitman
Many brave men lived before Agamemnon's time; but they are all, unmourned and unknown, covered by the long night, because they lack their sacred poet.
(Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Multi; sed omnes illacrimabiles
Urgentur ignotique longa
Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.)
Horace
Poets … though liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions.
David Hume
A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
Oscar Wilde
An orator is made; a poet is born. (Orator fit, poeta nascitur.)
Latin proverb
Knowledge of the subject is to the poet, what durable materials are to the architect.
Samuel Johnson
That book is good in vain, which the reader throws away. He only is the master, who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity: whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.
Samuel Johnson
Democritus maintains that there can be no great poet without a spice of madness.
Cicero
The man is either crazy, or he is a poet.
Horace
Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all upwept and unknown they sleep in endless night, for they had no poets to sound their praises.
Horace
He does not write whose verses no one reads.
Martial
There is no more self-assured man than a bad poet.
Martial
A poet is born, not made. (Poeta nascitur non fit.)
Florus
If anything is certain, it is that women are not composed of moon substance, that their eyes are not twin lotuses, and that their skin is not made of gold. Why do poets try to fool us in these matters?
Bhartrihari
The employment of a poet is like that of a curious gunsmith or watchmaker: the iron or silver is not his own, but they are the least part of that which gives the value; the price lies wholly in the workmanship.
John Dryden
While Butler, needy wretch, was yet alive,
No gen'rous patron would a dinner give.
See him, when starved to death, and turn'd to dust,
Presented with a monumental bust.
The poet's fate is here in emblem shown;
He ask'd for bread, and he received a stone.
Samuel Wesley
Poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories.
Jonathan Swift
Pensive poets painful vigils keep,
Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep.
Alexander Pope
He that lives with the muses shall die in the straw.
Thomas Fuller
The poets have so many tricks that they remind me of trumpet-players. If we musicians were so bound by rules we'd make music as bad as their books.
W. A. Mozart
I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in love.
Robert Burns
A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.
P. B. Shelley
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet.
P. B. Shelley: The Defence of Poetry, 1821.
It is a lie that poets are envious. I have known the best of them, and can speak to it, that they give each other their merits, and are the kindest critics as well as best authors.
Charles Lamb
Why should not one poet write like another? The situations of life are alike; why, then, should those of poems be unlike?
J. W. Goethe
As fire is kindled by fire, so is a poet's mind kindled by contact with a brother poet.
John Keble
Words become luminous when the poet's finger has passed its phosphorescence over them.
Joseph Joubert
Poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
Thomas Hardy
Verse, that was once an art of general interest, is now, like archery, the concern of a very small minority; and in these days a poet has no more reason than an archer for expecting that many people will care to hear him talk of his craft.
Clifford Bax
Poets and pigs are not appreciated until they are dead.
Italian Proverb
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 and 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
I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
Thou source of all my bliss, and all my woe,
That found'st me poor at first, and keep'st me so.
Oliver Goldsmith, of poetry
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
John Keats
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle
O divine and mighty power of poetry, thou rescuest all things from the grasp of death, and biddest the mortal hero live to all time.
Lucan
Poetry is the Devil's wine.
St. Augustine
It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one.
Michel de Montaigne
Oh, what a deal of blasphemy
And heathenish impiety,
In Christian poets may be found,
Where heathen gods with praise are crowned.
Michael Wigglesworth
O gracious God! how far have we
Profaned thy heav'nly gift of poesy!
Made prostitute and profligate the muse,
Debased to each obscene and impious use,
Whose harmony was first ordained above
For tongues of angels and for hymns of love!
John Dryden
It is very seldom seen that any one discovers mines of gold or silver in Parnassus. 'Tis a pleasant air but a barren soil.
John Locke
I would advise no man to attempt the writing of verse except he cannot help it, and if he cannot it is in vain to dissuade him from it.
Matthew Prior
Addict not thyself to poetry. Reputation is much oftener lost than gained by verse.
Thomas Fuller
What is poetry? Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is.
Samuel Johnson
Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.
S. T. Coleridge
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
T. B. Macaulay
To please me, a poem must be either music or sense; if it is neither, I confess I cannot interest myself in it.
S. T. Coleridge
All poetry is difficult to read.
Robert Browning
You must have rules in poetry, if it is only for the pleasure of breaking them, just as you must have women dressed, if it is only for the pleasure of imagining them as Venuses.
George Moore
Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.
Ezra Pound
Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation. That little poem means just what it says it means, nothing less but nothing more.
Robert Frost
Poetry has not often been worse employed than in dignifying the amorous fury of a raving girl.
Samuel Johnson
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
Poetry and Prose
All that is not prose passes for poetry.
George Crabbe
Why do you write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so much more difficult.
Walter Pater, to Oscar Wilde
A greater command of language is required to write in prose than in verse.
George Moore
Point Of No Return
The die has been cast. (Alea iacta est.)
Julius Caesar
Poison
What is food to one man may be poison to another.
Lucretius
Learning to the inexperienced is a poison; eating upon a full stomach is a poison; the society of the vulgar is a poison; a young wife to an old man is a poison.
The Hitopadesa
Police
I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.
Brendan Behan
Policy
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Milton Friedman
Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offence; benefits ought to be handed out drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Never battle with a man who has nothing to lose, for then the conflict is unequal.
Baltasar Gracián
Politeness
The superior man is polite but not cringing; the common man is cringing but not polite.
Confucius
Politeness is the chief sign of culture.
Baltasar Gracián
Perhaps if we could examine the manners of different nations with impartiality, we should find no people so rude as to be without any rules of politeness; nor any so polite as not to have some remains of rudeness.
Benjamin Franklin
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.
T. B. Macaulay
Be polite. Write diplomatically. Even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.
Otto von Bismarck
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
It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have all wanted to do something.
Anthony Trollope
A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.
George F. Will
A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
Russell Baker
All politicians are humble, and seldom let you forget it. They go around the country boasting about their humility. They are proud of their humility. Many are downright arrogant about their humility and insist that it qualifies them to be President.
Russell Baker
In friendship false, implacable in hate,
Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.
John Dryden
Among politicians the esteem of religion is profitable; the principles of it are troublesome.
Benjamin Whichcote
A cool blooded and crafty politician, when he would be thoroughly revenged on his enemy makes the injuries which have been inflicted, not on himself, but on others, the pretext of his attack.
C. C. Colton
A politician, where factions run high, is interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it. The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates.
T. B. Macaulay
Timid and interested politicians think much more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country.
T. B. Macaulay
Great politicians owe their reputation, if not to pure chance, then to circumstances at least which they themselves could not foresee.
Otto von Bismarck
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke
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
[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
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
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
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
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.
P. J. O'Rourke
I knew that the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election would be interesting times. I had no idea they would rise to the level of an ancient Chinese curse.
P. J. O'Rourke
I did not come to Washington to be loved, and I have not been disappointed.
Phil Gramm
The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money—the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.
George F. Will
When a politician, on a subject implicating science—hard science, economic science, social science—says, "The debate is over," you may be sure of two things. It’s that the debate is raging and he’s losing it.
George F. Will
Conservatives think leftists are mistaken. Leftists think conservatives are evil.
Author unidentified
Taking offense has become America’s national pastime; being theatrically offended supposedly signifies the exquisitely refined moral delicacy of people who feel entitled to pass through life without encountering ideas or practices that annoy them.
George F. Will
Politics makes strange bedfellows.
Charles Dudley Warner
So Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So, basically, that’s wrong.
Kamala Harris
This is just an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy and strengthening alliances.
Kamala Harris
It's nice to elect the right people, but that isn't the way you solve things. The way you solve things is by making it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right things.
Milton Friedman
There is an invisible hand in politics that operates in the opposite direction to the invisible hand in the market.
Milton Friedman
I don't give a good goddamn what Milton Friedman says. He's not running for re-election!
Richard Nixon
If I had engaged in politics, O men of Athens, I should have perished long ago, and done no good either to you or to myself.
Socrates
Politics, as the word is commonly understood, are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift
When vice prevails and impious men bear sway,
The post of honor is a private station.
Joseph Addison
Politics is such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with it.
Thomas Jefferson
Vain hope, to make people happy by politics!
Thomas Carlyle
That a man before whom the two paths of literature and politics lie open, and who might hope for eminence in either, should choose politics, and quit literature, seems to me madness.
T. B. Macaulay
Contact with the affairs of state is one of the most corrupting of the influences to which men are exposed.
J. Fenimore Cooper
Politics is not an exact science.
Otto von Bismarck
Do not preach politics. You have no commission to preach politics. The divinity of the Church is never more strikingly displayed than when it holds on its ever straightforward way in the midst of worldly commotions.
Bishops James O. Andrew, Robert Paine, and George F. Pierce
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
R. L. Stevenson
We should all be glad if we could step aside and say: "Now let us have a day of rest. Politics are over and the millennium is begun." But we live in a world of sin and sorrow.
Thomas B. Reed
The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.
T. H. Huxley
Politics is the doctrine of the possible, the attainable.
Otto von Bismarck
Our political division in America today is a class division, and we need to expose it as such whenever we see it. The ruling class tries to keep racial and other forms of division stirred up in our politics so that we don’t notice the class protection racket they are running.
Mark Steyn
Every Communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Mao Zedong
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
Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it—not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend. So the answer is to allow only pollution that’s worth what it costs, and not any pollution that isn’t worth what it costs.
Milton Friedman
If you want to clear the stream get the hog out of the spring.
American Proverb
Polygamy
In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made a sin.
John Dryden
Poor
Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.
Herman Melville
The poor man is happy: he expects no change for the worse.
Demetrius
The poor man, when he tries to ape the powerful, comes to ruin.
Phaedrus
He is not poor that hath little, but he that desireth much.
George Herbert
The labor of the body frees us from the pains of the mind; that is why the poor are happy.
La Rochefoucauld
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
Poppy
In Flanders fields the poppies grow
Between the crosses, row on row.
John McCrae
Popularity
The best of us would rather be popular than right.
Mark Twain
I cannot see why people are ashamed to acknowledge their passion for popularity. The love of popularity is the love of being beloved.
William Shenstone
Popularity is exhausting. The life of the party almost always winds up in a corner with an overcoat over him.
Wilson Mizner
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
Man tends to increase at a greater rate than his means of subsistence; consequently he is occasionally subjected to a severe struggle for existence.
Charles Darwin
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
I desire you will use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not to flatter me at all; but remark all those roughnesses, pimples, warts, and everything as you see me: otherwise I will never pay one farthing for it.
Oliver Cromwell
Portuguese
The community is eminently Portuguese—that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
Mark Twain
The Portuguese ladies … would think their charms insulted if, when left alone with a man, he did not at least attempt to be grossly familiar with their persons.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Possession
We must like what we have when we don't have what we like.
Roger de Bussy-Rabutin
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
“Whatever is not nailed down is mine.” This is the motto of the exploiter. “Whatever can be pried loose is not nailed down.” This is the second maxim in a country where people are rich, caring little in their present prosperity what shall become of the future.
David Starr Jordan
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
Post Office
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift accomplishment of their appointed routes.
Herodotus
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
Strange Delusion! that can confine all their Thoughts to a Race of Men [posterity] whom they neither know, nor can know; from whom nothing is to be feared, nor any Thing expected.
Samuel Johnson
To evoke posterity
Is to weep on your own grave,
Ventriloquizing for the unborn.
Robert Graves
Posterity is always the author's favorite.
Samuel Johnson
What has posterity done for us?
John Trumbull
Contemporaries appreciate the man rather than the merit; but posterity will regard the merit rather than the man.
C. C. Colton
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow.
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae
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
Poorly (poor man) he lived; poorly (poor man) he died.
Phineas Fletcher
The misfortunes of poverty carry with them nothing harder to bear than that it makes men ridiculous.
(Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se
Quam quod ridiculos homines facit.)
Juvenal
The inevitable consequence of poverty is dependence.
Samuel Johnson
To admit poverty is no disgrace to a man, but to make no effort to escape it is indeed disgraceful.
Thucydides
A generous and noble spirit cannot be expected to dwell in the breasts of men who are struggling for their daily bread.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus
The worst unhappiness of poverty is that it makes men ridiculous.
Juvenal
No one should commend poverty save the poor.
St. Bernard
Poverty is certainly and invariably despised.
Samuel Johnson
Poverty often deprives a man of all spirit and virtue.
Benjamin Franklin
Poverty, of course, is no disgrace, but it is damned annoying.
William Pitt
Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor.
William Cobbett
Poverty makes strange bedfellows.
English Proverb
Poverty is not a misfortune to the poor only who suffer it, but it is more or less a misfortune to all with whom he deals.
H. W. Beecher
All ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children; for poverty is not only a great evil, but tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage.
Charles Darwin
Poverty is a bad guard for chastity.
Italian Proverb
The poor man risks nothing when he meets a thief.
Spanish Proverb
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
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
The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.
Herodotus
I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.
Thomas Hobbes
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically.
C. S. Lewis
Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
C. S. Lewis
My opinion is, that power should always be distrusted, in whatever hands it is placed.
William Jones
The problem in this world is to avoid concentration of power—we must have a dispersion of power.
Milton Friedman
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Milton Friedman
Power without responsibility: the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.
Rudyard Kipling
We want the kind of world in which greedy people can do the least harm to their fellow men. That’s the kind of world in which power is widely dispersed and each of us has as many alternatives as possible.
Milton Friedman
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Milton Friedman
Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine or women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age, or vanity to a woman.
Jonathan Swift
Let not thy will roar when thy power can but whisper.
Thomas Fuller
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate'er it touches.
P. B. Shelley
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
T. B. Macaulay
It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint.
J. S. Mill
In order to obtain and hold power a man must love it. Thus the effort to get it is not likely to be coupled with goodness, but with the opposite qualities of pride, craft and cruelty. Without hypocrisy, lying, punishments, prisons, fortresses and murders, no new power can arise and no existing one hold its own.
Lyof N. Tolstoy
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
Powers, Reserved
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Constitution of the United States, Amendment X
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
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least that is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can.
C. S. Lewis
Prague
If you throw a stone in Prague, you throw a bit of history.
Czech Proverb
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
Praising all alike, is praising none.
John Gay
He who refuses praise only wants to be praised again.
La Rochefoucauld
I would have praised you more if you had praised me less.
Louis XIV of France, to Nicholas Boileau
Praise makes good men better and bad men worse.
Thomas Fuller
Praise [and] money are the two powerful corrupters of mankind.
Samuel Johnson
Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
Sydney Smith
Praises of the unworthy are robberies of the deserving.
S. T. Coleridge
Beware of the man who is praised by everybody.
Arab Proverb
The refusal of praise is only the wish to be praised twice. (Le refus des louanges est un désir d'être loué deux fois.)
François de La Rochefoucauld
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
Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
Mother Jones
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to heaven the measure and the choice.
Samuel Johnson
Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men? For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.
C. S. Lewis
Pray, for all men need the aid of the gods.
Homer
The only prayer which a well-meaning man can pray is, O ye gods, give me whatever is fitting unto me!
Apollonius of Tyana
God does not listen to the prayer of the lazy.
Pope Xystus I
Prayer is conversation with God.
Clement of Alexandria
Prayer should be short, without giving God Almighty reasons why He should grant this, or that; He knows best what is good for us. If your boy should ask you a suit of clothes, and give your reasons, would you endure it? You know it better than he; let him ask a suit of clothes.
John Selden
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
Voltaire
To pray together, in whatever tongue or ritual, is the most tender brotherhood of hope and sympathy that men can contract in this life.
Anna Louise de Staël
He pray'd by quantity,
And with his repetitions, long and loud,
All knees were weary.
Robert Pollok
Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.
Thomas Carlyle
The fewer the words, the better the prayer.
German Proverb
Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.
Romans 12:12 ESV
Preacher
A preacher must be both soldier and shepherd. He must nourish, defend, and teach; he must have teeth in his mouth, and be able to bite and to fight.
Martin Luther
I preach forever, but I preach in vain.
George Crabbe
Every preacher who preaches ably has two doors to his church; one where he attracts people in and the other through which he preaches them out.
Elbert Hubbard
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
The object of preaching is constantly to remind mankind of what mankind are constantly forgetting; not to supply the defects of human intelligence, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.
Sydney Smith
When we preach unworthily it is not always quite in vain. There is poetic truth concealed in all the commonplaces of prayer and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they may be wisely heard.
R. W. Emerson
Precedence
There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.
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
Preface
A preface is written to the public—a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.
John Keats
Pregnancy
It is a sad burden to carry a dead man's child.
Thomas Fuller
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
Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often needed, but seldom minded.
Lord Chesterfield
He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices.
Carlo Goldoni
Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room.
William Hazlitt
I try not to be prejudiced, but do not make much headway against it.
E. W. Howe
Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so.
Carl Gustav Jung
Premonition
Beware the Ides of March.
William Shakespeare
Preparedness
It is from their enemies, not their friends, that cities are taught to build walls and ships of war. This lesson saves their children, their homes and their goods.
Aristophanes
We should lay up in peace what we shall need in war.
Publilius Syrus
The commonwealth of Venice in their armory have this inscription: "Happy is that city which in time of peace thinks of war."
Robert Burton
In fair weather prepare for foul.
Thomas Fuller
There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy.
George Washington
Again and again we have owed peace to the fact that we were prepared for war.
Theodore Roosevelt
In time of peace prepare for war.
Greek Proverb
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
Let anyone try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.
William James
The present hour alone is man's.
Samuel Johnson
The past belongs to God: the present only is ours. And short as it is, there is more in it, and of it, than we can well manage. That man who can grapple it, and measure it, and fill it with his purpose, is doing a man's work; none can do more: but there are thousands who do less.
Donald G. Mitchell
He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.
H. D. Thoreau
Presidency
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
Europeans often ask, and Americans do not always explain, how it happens that this great office [the presidency], the greatest in the world, unless we except the Papacy, to which any man can rise by his own merits, is not more frequently filled by great and striking men.
James Bryce
No man will ever bring out of the Presidency the reputation which carries him into it.
Thomas Jefferson
The second office of the government is honorable and easy; the first is but a splendid misery.
Thomas Jefferson
I am tired of an office where I can do no more good than many others who would be glad to be employed in it. To myself, personally, it brings nothing but unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends.
Thomas Jefferson
If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering this house as I am in leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.
James Buchanan, to Abraham Lincoln
If forced to choose between the penitentiary and the White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.
W. T. Sherman
Press
The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
J. Fenimore Cooper
Pretension
The pretension is nothing; the performance every thing. A good apple is better than an insipid peach.
Leigh Hunt
Prevention
Prevention is better than cure.
Desiderius Erasmus
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
The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how well it functions until it is prevented from functioning, and even then we seldom recognize the source of the trouble.
Milton Friedman
Prices perform three functions in organizing economic activity: first, they transmit information; second, they provide an incentive to adopt those methods of production that are least costly and thereby use available resources for the most highly valued purposes; third, they determine who gets how much of the product—the distribution of income. These three functions are closely interrelated.
Milton Friedman
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
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
C. S. Lewis
A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
C. S. Lewis
Pride goeth before and shame cometh after.
Richard Hilles
They are proud in humility; proud in that they are not proud.
Robert Burton
Pride may be allowed to this or that degree, else a man cannot keep up his dignity. In gluttony there must be eating, in drunkenness there must be drinking; 'tis not the eating, nor 'tis not the drinking that is to be blamed, but the excess. So in pride.
John Selden
Pride, when wit fails, steps in to our defense,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
Alexander Pope
Every good thought that we have, every good action that we do, lays us open to pride, and exposes us to the assaults of vanity and self-satisfaction.
William Law
Nobody has occasion for pride but the poor; everywhere else it is a sign of folly.
Thomas Gray
Pride is seldom delicate: it will please itself with very mean advantages.
Samuel Johnson
Of all the marvellous works of the Deity perhaps there is nothing that angels behold with such supreme astonishment as a proud man.
C. C. Colton
There is a paradox in pride—it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.
C. C. Colton
God hates the proud.
Turkish Proverb
When pride is highest, catastrophe is nearest.
Welsh Proverb
Priest
In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies of liberty.
David Hume
God's word they had not, but the priest's they had.
John Dryden
A powerful god has fat priests.
Chinese Proverb
Prince
We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution.
Edmund Burke
Since, then, a prince is necessitated to play the animal well, he chooses among the beasts the fox and the lion, because the lion does not protect himself from traps; the fox does not protect himself from wolves. The prince must be a fox, therefore, to recognize the traps and a lion to frighten the wolves.
(Uno principe necessitato sapere bene usare la bestia, debbe di quelle pigliare la golpe e il lione; perchè il lione non si defende da' lupi. Bisogna, adunque, essere golpe a conoscere e' lacci, e lione a sbigottire e' lupi.)
Niccolò Machiavelli
If a prince does wrong, let him make atonement with his head.
Telipinus
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
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
Human problems are complex. If something isn't complex it doesn't qualify as problematic. Very simple bad things are not worth troubling ourselves about.
P. J. O'Rourke
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
Idleness is often covered by turbulence and hurry. He that neglects his known duty and real employment, naturally endeavours to crowd his mind with something that may bar out the remembrance of his own folly, and does any thing but what he ought to do with eager diligence, that he may keep himself in his own favour.
Samuel Johnson
What may be done at all times with equal propriety, is deferred from day to day, till the mind is gradually reconciled to the omission, and the attention is turned to other objects.
Samuel Johnson
It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.
J. R. R. Tolkien
We find out some excuse or other for deferring good resolutions, 'till our intended retreat is cut off by death.
Addison
procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday.
Don Marquis
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
Professor
It [the writing of the Hobbit] all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs.
J. R. R. Tolkien
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
[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
For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s.
Eric Hobsbawm
Alteration though it be from worse to better hath in it inconveniences, and those weighty.
Richard Hooker
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are 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 man.
C. S. Lewis
An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.
Max Planck
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork?
Stanislaw Lec
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
Progressivism
Progressivism's aim is the modification of [other people's] behavior To progressives, the best thing about railroads is that people riding them are not in automobiles, which are subversive of the deference on which progressivism depends. Automobiles go hither and yon, wherever and whenever the driver desires, without timetables. Automobiles encourage people to think they—unsupervised, untutored, and unscripted—are masters of their fates. The automobile encourages people in delusions of adequacy, which make them resistant to government by experts who know what choices people should make.
George F. Will
Progressives understand that their program for a government-centered society becomes more plausible the more people believe that work—individual striving—is unavailing. Government grows as fatalism grows, and fatalism grows as progressivism inculcates in people the demoralizing—make that de-moralizing—belief that they are victims of circumstances.
George F. Will
Prohibition
The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs do. If it's in principle OK for the government to say you must not consume drugs because they'll do you harm, why isn't it all right to say you must not eat too much because you'll do harm?
Milton Friedman
One role of prohibition is in making the drug market more lucrative.
Milton Friedman
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
Proof
I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain. (Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.)
Pierre de Fermat
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
In a free society, a government has no business using the power of the law or the taxpayer's money to propagandize for some views and to prevent the transmission of others.
Milton Friedman
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.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky
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
Prudence is of more frequent use than any other intellectual quality; it is exerted on slight occasions, and called into act by the cursory business of common life.
Samuel Johnson
Nothing will supply the want of prudence; and that negligence and irregularity, long continued, will make knowledge useless, wit ridiculous, and genius contemptible.
Samuel Johnson
Psychiatrist
Any man who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.
Sam Goldwyn
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
It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those “impossible” professions in which one can be quite sure of unsatisfying results. The other two, much older-established, are the bringing-up of children and the government of nations.
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 Opinion
Who can be secure of private right,
If sovereign sway may be dissolved by might?
Nor is the people's judgment always true:
The more may err as grossly as the few.
John Dryden
When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton
Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.
J. S. Mill
Public opinion is no more than this: What people think that other people think.
Alfred Austin
Public opinion does not need hundreds and thousands of years to formulate itself and spread. It works by contagion, and swiftly seizes a great number of men.
Lyof N. Tolstoy
One should respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.
Bertrand Russell
Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.
John Galsworthy
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
[A pun] is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.
Charles Lamb
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
Punctuality is the politeness of kings. (L'exactitude est la politesse des rois.)
Louis XVIII
Punctuation
Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
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
Often a whole city is paid punishment for one bad man.
Hesiod
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Friedrich Wilhelm 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
The Puritans nobly fled from a land of despotism to a land of freedim, where they could not only enjoy their own religion, but could prevent everybody else from enjoyin his.
Artemus Ward
To the Puritan all things are impure …
D. H. Lawrence
Pursuit
You will never possess what you are unwilling to pursue.
Mike Murdock
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Last updated: November 4, 2024