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Race
There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs—partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.
Booker T. Washington
Why do black people need white people to tell them that their lives matter?
Author unidentified
The black community [in the U.K.] wants race/colour suppressed in court cases and reports of riots and violent assaults, but stressed where its mention is favourable to its members, for instance in sports stories.
Paul Johnson
The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H. L. Mencken
I would like to see a time when man loves his fellow man and forgets his colour or his creed. We will never be civilized until that time comes. I know the Negro race has a long road to go. I believe that the life of the Negro race has been a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression. The law has made him equal, but man has not.
Clarence Darrow
Purity of race does not exist. Europe is a continent of energetic mongrels.
H. A. L. Fisher
I dislike this idea that if you're a black person in America then you must be called an African- American. I'm not an African. I'm an American. Just call me black, if you want to call me anything.
Whoopi Goldberg
Racism
The soft bigotry of low expectations …
Michael Gerson
Assume there's a vaccine against white racism. Would 70% of black kids STILL be raised in fatherless homes? Would 50% of blacks STILL dropout of many urban high schools? Would 25% of young black urban men STILL have criminal records? Would blacks STILL kill 7,000 blacks every year?
Larry Elder
I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.
Charles Murray
Racism, alas, is in very high demand but always extremely short supply.
Eugyppius
Rainbow
Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
E.Y. (Yip') Harburg
Random Number
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.
John von Neumann
Reactionary
Conquest's Law: Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands. (Alternatively, "Everyone is a conservative in his own field of expertise").
Robert Conquest
Reader
’Tis the good reader that makes the good book; … in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Imaginative readers rewrite books to suit their own taste, omitting and mentally altering what they read.
Robert Graves
Reading
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein
A man ought to read just as his inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel Johnson
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain
In reading, observe the course of your thoughts rather than of your books. Sometimes your reading will give occasion to a thought, not connected with the subject which your book treats of; and in such a case, drop the course of your reading, and follow the course of the thought that has been started.
Author unidentified
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith
Luther advised all who proposed to study, in what art soever, to read some sure and certain books over and over again; for to read many sorts of books produces rather confusion than any distinct result; just as those who dwell everywhere, and remain in no place, dwell nowhere, and have no home.
Author unidentified
It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them.
Samuel Johnson
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
Joseph Addison
Much reading is harmful to thinking. The greatest thinkers I have known have been precisely those who of all the scholars I have known had read least.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Read. Do not brood. Immerse yourself in long study: only the habit of persistent work can make one continually content; it produces an opium that numbs the soul.
Gustave Flaubert
The more that learn to read the less learn how to make a living. That's one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.
Will Rogers
Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
Henry David Thoreau
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
John Ruskin
The re-reader is looking not for actual surprises (which can only come once) but for a certain surprisingness. The point has often been misunderstood … We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savor the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness. The children understand this well when they ask for the same story over and over again, and in the same words.
C. S. Lewis
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C. S. Lewis
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Reality
IQ is off-limits today because people who are verbally facile, such as journalists and academics, tend to assume that reality is largely constructed from words. Thus, if we would all just stop writing about unpleasant facts, they would disappear.
Steve Sailer
Rearmament
I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.
Winston Churchill
Reason
Reason—the Devil's harlot.
Martin Luther
Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
David Hume
Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired. [Modern variation: A man cannot be reasoned out of a position he did not reason himself into.]
Jonathan Swift
I'll not listen to reason … Reason always means what someone else has got to say.
Elizabeth Gaskell
A man always has two reasons for what he does—a good one, and the real one.
J. P. Morgan
Reasoning
The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. … If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. … You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.
C. S. Lewis
Rebel
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
H. L. Mencken
Rebellion
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
Thomas Jefferson
Recession
You cannot now, if you ever could, spend your way out of a recession.
James Callaghan
Recurrence
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Redress
Things past redress are now with me past care.
Shakespeare
Reform
Experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
Mark Twain
Reformation
"If you meddle with popedom you will have the whole world against you;" and he added:—"yet the church is built on blood, and with blood must be sprinkled."
Martin Luther
Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Reformer
It is the first care of a reformer to prevent any future reformation.
Edward Gibbon
A reformer should be exempt from the suspicion of interest, and he must possess the confidence and esteem of those whom he proposes to reclaim.
Edward Gibbon
It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.
William Graham Sumner
Regret
I repent of my diets, the delicious dishes rejected out of vanity, as much as I lament the opportunities for making love that I let go by because of pressing tasks or puritanical virtue.
Isabel Allende
The business of life is to go forwards: he who sees evil in prospect meets it in his way; but he who catches it by retrospection turns back to find it. That which is feared may sometimes be avoided, but that which is regretted to-day may be regretted again to-morrow.
Samuel Johnson
I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations—one can do either this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it—you will regret both.
Søren Kierkegaard
My sad heart foams at the stern. (Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe.)
Arthur Rimbaud
Regulation
[Experience] seems to shew that law can never regulate them [wages] properly, though it has often pretended to do so.
Adam Smith
Rejection
When someone leaves you … the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts which adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed-over British Rail sandwich?
Helen Fielding
Relationship
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10,000 people. The hardest is with one.
Joan Baez
Contrary to what many women believe, it's fairly easy to develop a long-term, stable, intimate, and mutually fulfilling relationship with a guy. Of course this guy has to be a Labrador retriever. With human guys, it's extremely difficult. This is because guys don't really grasp what women mean by the term relationship.
Dave Barry
Maybe the most that you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.
Marianne Faithfull
Relativism
At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.
Paul Johnson
Religion
Hear the verbal protestations of all men: nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: you will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them.
David Hume
It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.
Tertullian
The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own.
Edmund Burke
Show me any mischief produced by the madness or wickedness of theologians, and I will show you an hundred resulting from the ambition and villany of conquerors and statesmen. Show me an absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to show you an hundred for one in political laws and institutions.
Edmund Burke
Religious persecution may shield itself under the guise of a mistaken and over-zealous piety.
Edmund Burke
Persecution is a bad and indirect way to plant religion.
Sir Thomas Browne
To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant, and which is animated only by faith and hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example.
Samuel Johnson
Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious purposes, of course—to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.
Rudyard Kipling
I don't have much truck with the "religion is the cause of most of our wars" school of thought because that is manifestly done by mad, manipulative and power-hungry men who cloak their ambition in God.
Terry Pratchett
In their religion they are so uneven,
That each man goes his own byway to heaven.
Daniel Defoe
Various forms of religious madness are quite common in the United States.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I hope I will be religious again but as for regaining my character I despair for it.
Marjory Fleming
As I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the tailor, so I take my religion from the priest.
Oliver Goldsmith
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from its readiness to fit in with our instinctual wishful impulses.
Sigmund Freud
Religious Freedom
All religions must be tolerated, and the sole concern of the authorities should be to see that one does not molest another, for here every man must be saved in his own way.
Frederick the Great
Every man, conducting himself as a good citizen, and being accountable to God alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.
George Washington
The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion.
H. L. Mencken
Remedy
Things without all remedy
Should be without regard: what’s done is done.
Shakespeare
Remembrance
When time has supplied us with events sufficient to employ our thoughts, it has mingled them with so many disasters, that we shrink from their remembrance, dread their intrusion upon our minds, and fly from them as from enemies that pursue us with torture.
Samuel Johnson
Remorse
Nothing then remains but murmurs and remorse; for if the spendthrift's poverty be embittered by the reflection that he once was rich, how must the idler’s obscurity be clouded by remembering that he once had lustre!
Samuel Johnson
Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid.
William Cowper
Of all means to regeneration Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissue with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil.
E. M. Forster
Renewal
At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.
Henry Adams
Rent Control
In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.
Assar Lindbeck
Reorganization
We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we would be reorganized. Presumably the plans for our employment were being changed. I was to learn later in life that, perhaps because we are so good at organizing, we tend as a nation to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
Charlton Ogburn
Repentance
Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.
John Dryden
Repentance is but want of power to sin.
John Dryden
Repetition
As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs; so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.
Samuel Johnson
Representative
Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Edmund Burke
Reproach
The Sting of a Reproach, is the Truth of it.
Author unidentified
His enemies did not forget to reproach him, when he became conspicuous enough to excite malevolence.
Samuel Johnson
Republican
The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then gets elected and proves it.
P. J. O'Rourke
"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.
Mark Steyn
Reputation
Reputation, reputation, reputation! O! I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
Shakespeare
Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.
Shakespeare
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
Shakespeare
There is a general succession of events in which contraries are produced by periodical vicissitudes; labour and care are rewarded with success, success produces confidence, confidence relaxes industry, and negligence ruins that reputation which accuracy had raised.
Samuel Johnson
Without a genius learning soars in vain;
And without learning genius sinks again;
Their force united crowns the sprightly reign.
(Ego nec studium sine divite venû,
Nec rude quid prosit video ingenium; alterius sic
Altera poscit opem res, et conjurat amice.)
Elphinston, based on Horace
[The] reputation raised by a long train of success may be finally ruined by a single failure; for weakness or errour will be always remembered by that malice and envy which it gratifies.
Samuel Johnson
The reputation which the world bestows is like the wind, that shifts now here now there, its name changed with the quarter whence it blows. (Non è il mondan romore altro che un fiato di vento, ch'or vien quinci ed or qien quindi, e muta nome perchè muta lato.)
Dante Alighieri
Research
Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
Marston Bates
Resentment
Resentment is an union of sorrow with malignity, a combination of a passion which all endeavour to avoid, with a passion which all concur to detest.
Samuel Johnson
Resilience
We have surmounted all the perils and endured all the agonies of the past. We shall provide against and thus prevail over the dangers and problems of the future, withhold no sacrifice, grudge no toil, seek no sordid gain, fear no foe. All will be well. We have, I believe, within us the life-strength and guiding light by which the tormented world around us may find the harbour of safety, after a storm-beaten voyage.
Winston Churchill
Resolution
Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.
Samuel Johnson
I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a child-like trust in God.
Bishop John H. Vincent
When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption or morbid infirmity, when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because Reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try in humble hope of the help of God.
Samuel Johnson
Thus procrastination is accumulated on procrastination, and one impediment succeeds another, till age shatters our resolution, or death intercepts the project of amendment. Such is often the end of salutary purposes, after they have long delighted the imagination, and appeased that disquiet which every mind feels from known misconduct, when the attention is not diverted by business or by pleasure.
Samuel Johnson
Resourcefulness
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.
Ernest Hemingway
Responsibility
It is our responsibilities, not ourselves, that we should take seriously.
Peter Ustinov
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C. S. Lewis
Son, you came in the house yesterday with shit on your hands. Human shit. I don't know how that happened, but if someone has shit on their hands, it's an indicator that maybe the whole responsibility thing isn't for them.
Samuel Halpern
Would you live with ease, Do what you ought, not what you please.
Author unidentified
Resurrection
It was the assurance of a resurrection that gave patience to the confessor, and courage to the martyr.
John Rogers
Retirement
The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do—and makes you what you are—is to back up into the grave.
Ernest Hemingway
Retrospective
Of all the horrid, hideous notes of woe,
Sadder than owl-songs or the midnight blast,
Is that portentous phrase, 'I told you so.'
Lord Byron
Revelation
Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha.
Terry Pratchett
Revenge
The revenge of a guilty woman is implacable.
Edward Gibbon
Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge—and has to content oneself with dreaming.
Paul Gauguin
Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war.
William Shakespeare
For revenge is always the delight of a mean spirit, of a weak and petty mind! You may immediately draw proof of this that no one rejoices more in revenge than a woman.
Juvenal
Living well is the best revenge.
George Herbert
Sweet is revenge—especially to women.
Lord Byron
Indeed, revenge is always the pleasure of a paltry, feeble, tiny mind.
(Quippe minuti
Semper et infirmi est animi exiguique voluptas
Ultio.)
Juvenal
Reverence
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Aldous Huxley
Revolution
All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.
Mark Twain
In Latin America, every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a "liberator"; murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people.
Paul Johnson
You may have made a Revolution, but not a Reformation. You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom.
Edmund Burke
But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American war? The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations.
John Adams
The generation which commences a revolution can rarely complete it.
Thomas Jefferson
The revolution is like Saturn—it eats its children.
Georg Büchner
The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.
Lenin
Revolutionary
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.
Hannah Arendt
Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic. (Tout révolutionnaire finit en oppresseur ou en hérétique.)
Albert Camus
Reward
I will not forget it, nor fail to reward that which is given: fealty with love, valour with honour, oath-breaking with vengeance.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Rhyme
If it be justly observed by Milton, that rhyme obliges poets to express their thoughts in improper terms, these improprieties must always be multiplied, as the difficulty of rhyme is increased by long concatenations.
Samuel Johnson
Richard Savage
He [Richard Savage] declares his contempt of the contracted views and narrow prospects of the middle state of life, and declares his resolution either to tower like the cedar, or be trampled like the shrub.
Samuel Johnson
Right
The fact is, that there is no right whatever inherited by man which has not an equivalent and corresponding duty by the side of it, as the price of it … Something for nothing is not to be found on earth.
William Graham Sumner
Right … is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
Jeremy Bentham
We owe it to our ancestors to preserve entire those rights, which they have delivered to our care: we owe it to our posterity, not to suffer their dearest inheritance to be destroyed.
The Letters of Junius
A man does not attain the status of Galileo merely because he is persecuted; he must also be right.
Stephen Jay Gould
Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Abraham Lincoln
Right and Wrong
If there is one mental vice, indeed, which sets off the American people from all other folks who walk the earth … it is that of assuming that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that ninety-nine percent of them are wrong.
H. L. Mencken
Righteous
The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day.
Proverbs 4:18
Righteousness
A superior man in dealing with the world is not for anything or against anything. He follows righteousness as the standard.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)
The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit.
Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu)
Riposte
Pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker to Clare Boothe Luce, who had stood aside for her saying, "Age before Beauty"
Risk
Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
George S. Patton, Jr.
Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen fueled system in the world, knowing they're going to light the bottom, and doesn't get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation.
John Young, astronaut, when asked about the risks of space flight
Risk-Taking
Live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.
Winston Churchill
Rival
The finest woman in nature should not detain me an hour from you; but you must sometimes suffer the rivalship of the wisest men.
Sir Richard Steele
Robert Browning
When it was written, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant; now only God knows.
Anonymous, on Sordello
Rock and Roll
Most people get into bands for three very simple rock and roll reasons: to get laid, to get fame, and to get rich.
John Gay
Roman Catholic Church
Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action—that the end will sanction any means.
S. T. Coleridge
She [the Roman Catholic Church] was great and respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
T. B. Macaulay
When Socialism comes to power, the [Roman Catholic] church will advocate Socialism with the same vigor it is now favoring feudalism and slavery. And it will find plenty of proof in the New Testament that the church has always been communistic.
August Bebel
Rome
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
Edward Gibbon
[Instead] of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.
Edward Gibbon
Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war.
Edward Gibbon
The commonwealth of Rome grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind.
Samuel Johnson
The Romans triumphed over all their enemies, by keeping constantly on foot forty-two legions of six thousand men each, disciplined troops, practiced in war.
Martin Luther
While stands the Coliseum,
Rome shall stand;
When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls—the world.
Lord Byron
Routine
Routine is supposed to be the great deadener of souls; how much worse is the half-completed task, the broken round, the unfulfilled routine?
Richard Brookhiser
Royal We
There are three classes of people who always say 'we' instead of 'I.' They are emperors, editors, and men with a tape-worm.
Roscoe Conkling
Royalty
When the Quaker Penn kept his hat on in the royal presence, Charles (King Charles II) politely removed his, explaining that it was the custom in that place for only one person at a time to remain covered.
Arthur Bryant
Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it … Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.
Walter Bagehot
Rudeness
Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength.
Eric Hoffer
Rule
No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.
Robert Burton
Reason to rule, but mercy to forgive:
The first is law, the last prerogative.
John Dryden
Rumination
Sit quietly and concentrate on terrible things. You’ll feel much better.
Ann Coulter
We ought to learn from the kine one thing: ruminating.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Russia
Nobody wants to intervene in Russian affairs. Russia is a very large country, a very old country, a very disagreeable country inhabited by immense numbers of ignorant people largely possessed of lethal weapons and in a state of extreme disorder. Also Russia is a long way off.
Winston Churchill
I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston Churchill
Both Moscow and [Kiev], the modern and the ancient capitals, were reduced to ashes [by the Tartars]; a temporary ruin, less fatal than the deep, and perhaps indelible, mark, which a servitude of two hundred years has imprinted on the character of the Russians.
Edward Gibbon
This empire [Russia], vast as it is, is only a prison to which the emperor holds the key.
Astolphe Louis Léonard, Marquis de Custine
Russian
It is the Russians’ joy to drink; we cannot do without it.
The Primary Chronicle
Rust
The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty,
For want of fighting was grown rusty,
And eat into it self, for lack
Of some body to hew and hack.
Samuel Butler
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Last updated: October 4, 2024