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Cool Quotes - R

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

What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races.
Abraham Lincoln

Race is precisely of as much consequence in man as it is in any other animal.
John Ruskin

The instincts and faculties of different men and races differ in a variety of ways almost as profoundly as those of animals in different cages of the zoological gardens.
Francis Galton

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

Radio


To converse at the distance of the Indies by sympathetic contrivances may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.
Joseph Glanvill, 1661

Rage


Rage is a vulgar passion with vulgar ends.
Ernst von Feuchtersleben

Railroad


Your railroad, when you come to understand it, is only a device for making the world smaller.
John Ruskin

Rainbow


Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.
Yip Harburg

Look at the rainbow, and praise him who made it; it is exceedingly beautiful in its brightness.
Ecclesiasticus 43:11

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

A well-read fool is the most pestilent of blockheads: his learning is a flail which he knows not how to handle, and with which he breaks his neighbor's shins as well as his own.
Stanislaus Leszcynski

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.
C. C. Colton

A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.
J. R. Lowell

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

They praise those works, but read these. (Laudant illa sed ista legunt.)
Martial

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
W. Somerset Maugham

I would sooner read a time-table or a catalogue than nothing at all. … They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
W. Somerset Maugham

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.
Jonathan Swift

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
Lord Chesterfield

I forget the greater part of what I read, but all the same it nourishes my mind.
G. C. Lichtenberg

Some of the greatest geniuses who ever lived never read half so much as our mediocre scholars of today. Not a few of those mediocrities might have become greater men if they had not read so much.
G. C. Lichtenberg

It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the result of good food in a strong body, and the result of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
Sydney Smith

We read to say that we have read.
Charles Lamb

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
H. D. Thoreau

Be sure to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.
R. W. Emerson

All that wearies profoundly is to be condemned for reading. The mind profits little by what is termed heavy reading.
Lafcadio Hearn

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury

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

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic.
W. Somerset Maugham

We love without reason, and without reason we hate.
J. F. Regnard

Let any man but look back upon his own life, and see what use he has made of his reason, how little he has consulted it, and how less he has followed it.
William Law

Logicians have but ill defin'd,
As rational, the human kind;
Reason, they say, belongs to man;
But let them prove it if they can.
Jonathan Swift

Passion and prejudice govern the world; only under the name of reason.
John Wesley

Reason unites us, not only with our contemporaries, but with men who lived two thousand years before us, and with those who will live after us.
Lyof N. Tolstoy

When a man begins to reason he ceases to feel.
French Proverb

Reason is the wise man's guide, example the fool's.
Welsh Proverb

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

Who draws his sword against his prince must throw away the scabbard.
James Howell

The only justification of rebellion is success.
Thomas B. Reed

Recession


You cannot now, if you ever could, spend your way out of a recession.
James Callaghan

Recrimination


Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.
S. T. Coleridge

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

Repentance for past crimes is just and easy; but sin no more's a task too hard for mortals.
John Vanbrugh

It is easier to bear what's amiss than go about to reform it.
Thomas Fuller

The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
Oscar Wilde

Reform must come from within, not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue.
James Cardinal Gibbons

Reforms should begin at home and stay there.
Author unidentified

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

The Thurians ordained that whosoever would go about to abolish an old law, or establish a new one, should present himself with a halter around his neck, to the end that, if his proposal were not approved, he might be hanged at once.
Michel de Montaigne

With most men reform is a trade—with some a swindling trade—with others an honest but yet a lucrative trade. Reform for its own sake seldom thrives.
John Quincy Adams

In efforts to soar above our nature we invariably fall below it. Your reformist demigods are merely devils turned inside out.
E. A. Poe

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertness and fossilism making so large a part of human institutions.
Walt Whitman

The fact that every sort of reform movement teems with neuropaths is to be explained by the transference of interest from censored egoistic (erotic or violent) tendencies of the unconscious to fields where they can work themselves out without any self-reproach.
S. Ferenczi

A reformer is a guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat.
James J. Walker

At twenty a man is full of fight and hope. He wants to reform the world. When he's seventy he still wants to reform the world, but he knows he can't.
Clarence Darrow

Regimentation


Men will submit to any rule by which they may be exempted from the tyranny of caprice and of chance. They are glad to supply by external authority their own want of constancy and resolution, and court the government of others when long experience has convinced them of their own inability to govern themselves.
Samuel Johnson

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

A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies, and I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
Woody Allen

Relative


Dreadful indeed are the feuds of relatives, and difficult the reconciliation.
Euripides

No man will be respected by others who is despised by his own relatives.
Plautus

A man cannot bear all his kin on his back.
James Kelly

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that we can't stand other people having the same fault as ourselves.
Oscar Wilde

The rich never lack relatives.
Italian Proverb

The unfortunate have no relatives. (Infelicium nulli sunt affines.)
Italian Proverb

He who refuses to die does not love his relatives.
West African Proverb

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

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Christopher Marlowe

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … It is the opium of the people.
Karl Marx

How many evils have flowed from religion!
Lucretius

It is for the good of states that men should be deluded by religion.
Varro

It was fear that first brought gods into the world.
Petronius Arbiter

It is when we are in misery that we revere the gods; the prosperous seldom approach the altar.
Silius Italicus

What excellent fools
Religion makes of men.
Ben Jonson

Religion is like the fashion; one man wears his doublet slashed, another laced, another plain; but every man has a doublet; so every man has a religion. We differ about the trimming.
John Selden

That religion cannot be right that a man is the worse for having.
William Penn

In matters of religion, it is very easy to deceive a man, and very hard to undeceive him.
Pierre Bayle

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another.
Jonathan Swift

Religion and morality put a brake on nature's strength, but they cannot destroy it. The drunkard in a cloister, reduced to a half-sétier of cider at each meal, will no longer get drunk, but he will always like wine.
Voltaire

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.
George Washington

May it not be that good men venerate religion, instead of religion making men good?
G. C. Lichtenberg

Men will wrangle for religion; write for it; fight for it; die for it, anything but—live for it.
C. C. Colton

Religion among the low becomes low.
R. W. Emerson

No state is ever without religion, or can be without it. Consider the freest states in the world the United States and the Swiss Confederacy—and note how Divine Providence figures in all their public utterances.
M. A. Bakunin

Religion is full of difficulties, but if we are often puzzled what to think, we need seldom be in doubt what to do.
John Lubbock

Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived.
Oscar Wilde

Religions are not revealed: they are evolved. If a religion were revealed by God, that religion would be perfect in whole and in part, and would be as perfect at the first moment of its revelation as after ten thousand years of practise. There has never been a religion which fulfils those conditions.
Robert Blatchford

Religion takes refuge in the unknowable from the terrors of the unknown.
Author unidentified

A man who is without religion is like a horse without bridle. (Homo sine religione, sicut equus sine fræno.)
Latin Proverb

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

For extreme diseases, extreme remedies.
Hippocrates

To do nothing is sometimes a good remedy.
Hippocrates

There are remedies worse than the disease.
Publilius Syrus

For every ill beneath the sun
There is some remedy or none;
If there be one, resolve to find it;
If not, submit, and never mind it.
Anonymous

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

Remembrance wakes with all her busy train,
Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain.
Oliver Goldsmith

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

Remorse goes to sleep when we are in the enjoyment of prosperity, but makes itself felt in adversity.
J. J. Rousseau

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

He that repents is angry with himself; I need not be angry with him.
Benjamin Whichcote

The seeds of repentance are sown in youth by pleasure, but the harvest is reaped in age by pain.
C. C. Colton

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

A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
Daniel Kahneman

Report


Of money, wit and virtue, believe one-fourth of what you hear.
H. G. Bohn

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

Republic


Republics are brought to their ends by luxury; monarchies by poverty.
C. L. de Montesquieu

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of society against the injustice of the other part.
Alexander Hamilton

In a republic, all are masters, and each tyrannizes over the others.
Max Stirner

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

I am now past the craggy paths of study, and come to the flowery plains of honor and reputation.
Ben Jonson

The worst of me is known, and I can say that I am better than my reputation.
J. C. F. Schiller

I am accounted by some people a good man. How cheap that character is acquired! Pay your debts, don't borrow money, nor twist your kitten's neck off, nor disturb a congregation, etc., your business is done. I know things (thoughts or things, thoughts are things) of myself, which would make every friend I have fly me as a plague patient.
Charles Lamb

What people say behind your back is your standing in the community in which you live.
E. W. Howe

Research


Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.
Marston Bates

To discover and teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person.
J. H. Newman

Research, though toilsome, is easy; imagination, though delightful, is difficult.
A. C. Bradley

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

Resignation


A wise man cares not for what he cannot have.
George Herbert

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

Respectability


Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
Robert Towne

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

It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?
Eric Hoffer

Modern man is weighed down more by the burden of responsibility than by the burden of sin. We think him more a savior who shoulders our responsibilities than him who shoulders our sins. If instead of making decisions we have but to obey and do our duty, we feel it as a sort of salvation.
Eric Hoffer

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.
Eric Hoffer

Rest


Rest is for the dead.
Thomas Carlyle

Restlessness


Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.
Arthur Schopenhauer

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

Happy is the man who, ignored by the world, lives contented with himself in some retired nook.
Nicholas Boileau

Retribution


Most men employ their first years so as to make their last miserable.
Thomas Fuller

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

If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced?
P. B. Shelley

Revelry


I am for those who believe in loose delights—
I share the midnight orgies of young men;
I dance with the dancers, and drink with the drinkers.
Walt Whitman

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

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” says the Lord.
Romans 12:19 (NET)

It is better to avenge a friend than mourn him.
Beowulf

Men ought either to be indulged or utterly destroyed, for if you merely offend them they take vengeance, but if you injure them greatly they are unable to retaliate, so that the injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.
Niccolò Machiavelli

Neglect will kill an injury sooner than revenge.
Owen Felltham

Women do most delight in revenge.
Thomas Browne

Women will do more for revenge than they'll do for the Gospel.
John Vanbrugh

Revenge is barren. It feeds on its own dreadful self; its delight is murder; and its satiety is despair.
J. C. F. Schiller

Reverence


So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Aldous Huxley

All real joy and power of progress in humanity depend on finding something to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of humanity begin in a habit of disdain.
John Ruskin

Reverence, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man.
Ambrose Bierce

Review


I look upon reviews as a sort of infant disease to which new-born books are subject.
G. C. Lichtenberg

I never read a book before reviewing it. It prejudices one so!
Ascribed to Sydney Smith

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

Revolutions in democracies are mainly the work of demagogues. Partly by persecuting men of property and partly by arousing the masses against them, they induce them to unite, for a common fear brings even enemies together.
Aristotle

Revolutions are not about trifles, but they are produced by trifles.
Aristotle

Those who give the first shock to a state are the first overwhelmed in its ruin; the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed by him who was the first mover; he only beats the water for another's net.
Michel de Montaigne

Everything I see about me is sowing the seeds of a revolution that is inevitable, though I shall not have the pleasure of seeing it. The lightning is so close at hand that it will strike at the first chance, and then there will be a pretty uproar. The young are fortunate, for they will see fine things.
Voltaire

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.
Thomas Jefferson

Revolutions begin with infatuation and end with incredulity. In their origin proud assurance is dominant; the ruling opinion disdains doubt, and will not endure contradiction. At their completion skepticism takes the place of disdain, and there is no longer any care for individual convictions, or any belief in truth.
F. P. G. Guizot

A reform is a correction of abuses; a revolution is a transfer of power.
E. G. Bulwer-Lytton

The history of mankind is one long record of giving revolution another trial, and limping back at last to sanity, safety, and work.
E. W. Howe

Those who are inclined to compromise can never make a revolution.
Kemal Atatürk

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

Rhyme often makes mysterical nonsense pass with the critics for wit.
William Wycherley

Rich


No just man ever became rich suddenly.
Menander

It is difficult for a rich person to be modest, or a modest person rich.
Epictetus

He who wishes to become rich wishes to become so speedily.
Juvenal

The rich knows not who is his friend.
George Herbert

'Tis a sort of duty to be rich, that it may be in one's power to do good.
Mary Wortley Montagu

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expense, and my expense is equal to my wishes.
Edward Gibbon

A rich man is either a scoundrel or the heir of one.
Spanish Proverb

Rich and Poor


It is the nature of the poor to hate and envy men of property.
Plautus

The leaders of the French Revolution, from the beginning, excited the poor against the rich: this has made the rich poor, but it will never make the poor rich.
Fisher Ames

If rich, it is easy enough to conceal our wealth; but if poor, it is not quite so easy to conceal our poverty. It is less difficult to hide a thousand guineas than one hole in our coat.
C. C. Colton

The poor man is despised even by his own wife and children; the rich man is praised even by folk in other countries.
Japanese Proverb

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

Riches


Virtue, glory, honor, all things human and divine, are slaves to riches.
Horace

Riches are not forbidden, but the pride of them is.
St. John Chrysostom

A little house well filled, a little land well tilled, and a little wife well willed, are great riches.
Author unidentified

It takes a kind of genius to make a fortune, and especially a large fortune. It is neither goodness, nor wit, nor talent, nor strength, nor delicacy. I don't know precisely what it is: I am waiting for some one to tell me.
Jean de la Bruyère

Riches are gotten with pain, kept with care, and lost with grief.
Thomas Fuller

Riches ennoble a man's circumstances, but not himself.
Immanuel Kant

I have not observed men's honesty to increase with their riches.
Thomas Jefferson

Many speak the truth when they say that they despise riches, but they mean the riches possessed by other men.
C. C. Colton

Riches do not bring freedom from sorrow and are of no avail for eternal happiness, but rather are obstacles.
Pope Leo XIII

Riches are often abused, never refused.
Danish Proverb

Ridicule


The most effective way of attacking vice is to expose it to public ridicule. People can put up with rebukes but they cannot bear being laughed at: they are prepared to be wicked but they dislike appearing ridiculous.
Molière

How comes it to pass that we appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule?
Anthony A. Cooper

Resort is had to ridicule only when reason is against us.
Thomas Jefferson

No kind of power is more formidable than the power of making men ridiculous.
T. B. Macaulay

There is an infinity of modes of conduct which appear ridiculous, the secret reasons of which are wise and sound.
La Rochefoucauld

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

For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.
Alexander Pope

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.
William Hazlitt

No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
T. B. Macaulay

Right and Might


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

Might overcomes right. (Force passe droit.)
French Proverb

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

It is possible to go wrong in many ways, but right in only one. The former is thus easy and the latter difficult.
Aristotle

We are not satisfied to be right unless we can prove others to be quite wrong.
William Hazlitt

There is always a right and a wrong way, and the wrong way always seems the more reasonable.
George Moore

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)

Rights


The provisions of the Constitution of the United States and of this state apply as well in time of war as in time of peace, and any departure therefrom or violation thereof, under the plea of necessity or any other plea, is subversive of good government, and tends to anarchy and despotism.
Declaration of Rights of Maryland

Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of the domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected only so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged classes. On the day they are launched against privilege they are thrown overboard.
P. A. Kropotkin

We must not be so insistent upon demanding our rights as in discharging our obligations.
Pope Benedict XV

A right sometimes sleeps, but it never dies. (Dormit aliquando jus, moritur nunquam.)
Legal Maxim

Rights are lost by disuse. (Ex desuetudine amittuntur privilegia.)
Legal Maxim

Riposte


Pearls before swine.
Dorothy Parker to Clare Boothe Luce, who had stood aside for her saying, "Age before Beauty"

Rising


If thou art sluggish on arising, let this thought occur: am rising to a man's work.
Marcus Aurelius

Rising, Early


Getting up before daybreak makes for health, wealth and wisdom.
Aristotle

Early to bed and early to rise
Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
John Clarke

Rising, Late


Lying late in the morning is never found in company with longevity. It also tends to make people corpulent.
Leigh Hunt

Rogues are always found out in some way. Whoever is a wolf will act as a wolf; that is the most certain of all things.
Jean de la Fontaine

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

River


Rivers are roads that move.
Blaise Pascal

Robbery


He that is robb'd, not wanting what is stol'n,
Let him not know't, and he's not robb'd at all.
Shakespeare

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 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

All roads lead to Rome.
Latin Proverb

Rome was not built in a day.
P. A. Manzolli

See the wild waste of all-devouring years,
How Rome her own sad sepulchre appears,
With nodding arches, broken temples spread,
The very tombs now vanish'd like their dead.
Alexander Pope

I know not why any one but a school-boy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind.
Samuel Johnson

Rose


No rose without a thorn.
English Proverb

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques


Rousseau knows he is talking nonsense, and laughs at the world for staring at him.
Samuel Johnson

[He] clothed passion in the garb of philosophy, and preached the sweeping away of injustice by the perpetration of further injustice.
T. H. Huxley

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

Ruin


When fortune is determined upon the ruin of a people, she can so blind them as to be insensible to all danger.
Livy

Ruins


Thinkest thou the thousand eyes that shine with rapture on a ruin,
Would have looked with half their wonder on the perfect pile?
M. F. Tupper

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

Ruler


Rulers are men before God and gods before men.
Nathaniel Ames

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

Rumor


Rumor is not always wrong.
Tacitus

Even when it brings some truth with it, rumor is not free from the flaw of falsehood, for it ever takes away from, adds to, and alters the truth.
Tertullian

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

Russia has two generals in whom she can confide-Generals Janvier [January] and Février [February].
Nicholas I

The joy of Russia is getting drunk.
Ascribed to Vladimar the Saint

Russian


It is the Russians’ joy to drink; we cannot do without it.
The Primary Chronicle

Russian, n. A person with a Caucasian body and a Mongolian soul.
Ambrose Bierce

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

If I rest, I rust. (Rast' ich, so rost' ich.)
Ascribed to Martin Luther

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Last updated: February 18, 2025