KGB Report

The future ain't what it used to be.
-Yogi Berra

The future always looks good in the golden land because no one remembers the past.
-Joan Didion

The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.
-Alvin Toffler

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

The future depends on assumptions and assumptions are just stuff you make up. No sense in knocking yourself out.
-Scott Adams

The future destiny of the child is always the work of his mother. Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic towards common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects.
-Robert F. Kennedy

The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave.
-Ronald Reagan

The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
-George F. Will

The future has an ancient heart.
-Carlo Levi

The future holds little hope for any government where the present holds no hope for the people.
-Lyndon B. Johnson

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.
-William Gibson

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.
-Robert A. Heinlein

The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.
-Geoffrey Elton

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
-Jorge Luis Borges

The future is no more uncertain than the present.
-Walt Whitman

The future is not google-able.
-William Gibson

The future is not in the hands of fate but in ours.
-Jules Jusserand

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
-Alan Kay

The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make.
-James Cameron

The future is unwritten. Cyberspace is the funhouse mirror of our own society, reflects our values and our faults, sometimes in terrifying exaggerations. It doesn't matter who you are today, if you don't show up in that mirror you are just not going to matter very much. Our kids have to show up in the mirror.
-Bruce Sterling

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.
-George F. Will

The future will be better tomorrow.
-Dan Quayle

The future will belong to those who have passion and are willing to work hard to make our country better.
-Paul Wellstone

The future will not belong to those who sit on the sidelines. The future will not belong to the cynics. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
-Paul Wellstone

The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past, only far more expensive.
-John Sladek

The future, wave or no wave, seems to me no unified dream but a mince pie, long in the baking, never quite done.
-E.B. White

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Categories: Quotes on a topic, The Future

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The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
-A. Whitney Brown

The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.
-David McCullough

The past always looks better than it was. It's only pleasant because it isn't here.
-Finley Peter Dunne

The past beats inside me like a second heart.
-John Banville

The past can only be known, not changed. The future can only be changed, not known.
-Steward Brand

The past has a terror and fascination and a beauty beyond almost anything else.
-Pauline Kael

The past has meaning as it lights up the present, and the future as it makes the present richer and more profound.
-Rollo May

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
-L.P. Hartley

The past is a guidepost, not a hitching post.
-Thomas Holcroft

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.
-Stephen Ambrose

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.
-Max Beerbohm

The past is always a rebuke to the present.
-Robert Penn Warren

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.
-James Thurber

The past is gone; the present is confusing; and the future scares the hell out of me.
-David L. Stein

The past is just something that's over.
-Christopher Isherwood

The past is never dead. It's not even past.
-William Faulkner

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
-Jessamyn West

The past is so reliable, so delightful and the best place to live.
-Barry Humphries

The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet.
-Cyril Connolly

The past is what makes now like now makes tomorrow.
-Stanley R. Delaney

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.
-Harold Pinter

The past speaks to us in a thousand voices, warning and comforting, animating and stirring to action.
-Felix Adler

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A revolution does the work of a century in two days, and undoes in two years five centuries' achievement.
-Paul Valery

A revolution is coming- a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough- But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.
-Robert F. Kennedy

A revolution is interesting insofar as it avoids like the plague the plague it promised to heal.
-Daniel Berrigan

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.
-Murray Kempton

After a revolution, of course, the successful revolutionists always try to convince doubters that they have achieved great things, and usually they hang any man who denies it.
-H.L. Mencken

All civilization has from time to time become a thin crust over a volcano of revolution.
-Havelock Ellis

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of a revolution is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

And so you ask, 'What about the innocent bystanders?' But we are in a time of revolution. If you are a bystander, you are not innocent.
-Abby Hoffman

Any revolution that goes on for too long is by definition a failure. The idea is to become the establishment.
-Linus Torvalds

Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert ideas.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
-Franz Kafka

Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.
-Barbara Tuchman

He who undertakes to guide men must never lose sight of the fact that they are malicious monkeys.... The folly of the revolution was in aiming to establish virtue on the earth. When you want to make men good and wise, free, moderate, generous, you are led inevitably to the desire of killing them all.
-Anatole France

If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution.
-Emma Goldman

If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile.
-Samuel Eliot Morison

In a revolution, as in a novel. the most difficult part to invent is the end.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.
-Daniel Berrigan

No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution.
-Emma Goldman

Nothing is more American than revolution.
-Jerry Rubin

Owning your own home is America's unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home 'owners' deduct mortgage interest payments.
-Florence King

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
-Aristotle

Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution.
-Vladimir Nabokov

Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering.
-Tom Stoppard

Revolution is but thought carried into action.
-Emma Goldman

Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
-Germaine Greer

'Revolution' today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
-Wyndham Lewis

Revolution only needs good dreamers who remember their dreams.
-Tennessee Williams

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A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

As a rule it is circumstances that make men.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.
-William James

As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class.
-Eugene V. Debs

As a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is obviously true. Common men have less brains, but more sense.
-William T. Stace

As a rule, we find what we look for; we achieve what we get ready for.
-James Cash Penney

Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.
-David Sedaris

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Cats, as a rule, don't like lawyers. They have great insight into human character.
-Kinky Friedman

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
-Umberto Eco

It can be laid down as a rule that those who speak most of liberty are least inclined to use it.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

It is, as a rule, far more important how men pursue their occupation than what the occupation is which they select.
-Louis Brandeis

Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair.
-Primo Levi

Martyrdom, as a rule, establishes the sincerity of the martyr- never the correctness of his thought. Things are true or false in themselves. Truth cannot be affected by opinions; it cannot be changed, established, or affected by martyrdom. An error cannot be believed sincerely enough to make it a truth.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Never speculate. Never buy or sell grain or stocks upon a margin. If you have savings, invest them in solid securities, lands or property. The man who gambles upon the exchanges is in the condition of the man who gambles at the gaming table. He rarely, if ever, makes a permanent success. His judgment goes; his faculties are snapped; and his end, as a rule, is nervous prostration after an unworthy and useless life.
-Andrew Carnegie

Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
-Eric Hoffer

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
-George Orwell

The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness or unhappiness to his beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round.
-Bertrand Russell

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
-Eugene V. Debs

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Quotes about the abyss:

At every moment of our lives, we all have one foot in a fairy tale and the other in the abyss.
-Paulo Coelho

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.
-Lewis Mumford

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men.
-H.L. Mencken

Everything, alas, is an abyss,- actions, desires, dreams, Words!.
-Charles Baudelaire

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

I am tired of my expedition into the dim, the zero abyss of facts.
-Oscar Wilde

I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word.
-George Moore

If you're at the edge of an abyss the only progressive step is backward!.
-William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you.
-Taylor Caldwell

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
-Joseph Campbell

It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children.
-Primo Levi

One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
-Joseph Campbell

Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
-Thomas Huxley

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-Vladimir Nabokov

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.
-Sidonie Gabrielle Colette

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-Honoré de Balzac

There are people who wring their hands and call it an abyss, but do nothing to fill it; there are also those who work to widen it, as if the scientist and literary man belong to two different human subspecies, reciprocally incomprehensible, fated to ignore each other and not apt to engage in cross-fertilization.
-Primo Levi

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves?.
-Thomas Merton

When you see the abyss, and we have looked into it, then what? There isn't much room at the edge- one person, another, not many. If you are there, others cannot be there. If you are there, you become a protective wall. What happens? You become part of the abyss.
-Elie Wiesel

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The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes.
Charles Baudelaire

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.
H.L. Mencken

The more alike men are, the weaker each feels in the face of all.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
May Sarton

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.
Rachel Carson

The more complex the world situation becomes, the more scientific and rational analysis you have to have, the less you can do with simple good will and sentiment.
Reinhold Neibuhr

The more complicated and powerful the job, the more rudimentary the preparation for it.
William F. Buckley, Jr.

The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos.
Frank Herbert

The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
Tacitus

The more data banks record about us, the less we exist.
Marshall McLuhan

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder

The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.
Marquis de Sade

The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
Joseph Priestly

The more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader.
Oliver Goldsmith

The more exquisite any good is, of which a small specimen is afforded us, the sharper is the evil, allied to it; and few exceptions are found to this uniform law of nature.
David Hume

The more extensive a man's knowledge of what has been done, the greater will be his power of knowing what to do.
Isaac Disraeli

The more gold a man wears around his neck, the more worthless he thinks himself to be.
Michael O'Donoghue

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.
Freeman Dyson

The more I learn about the universe, the less convinced I am that there's any sort of benevolent force that has anything to do with it, at all.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

The more I practice the luckier I get.
Arnold Palmer

The more I see of men, the more I admire dogs.
Madame Roland

The more I see of the monied classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
George Bernard Shaw

The more I think about it, the more I agree with the bees: worship the Queen and kill the unemployed.
Arthur Lotti

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
Richard Bach

The more lies are told, the more important it becomes for the liars to justify themselves by deep moral commitments to high-sounding objectives that mask the pursuit of money and power.
Bertram Gross

The more men have to lose, the less willing are they to venture.
Thomas Paine

The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.
Gore Vidal

The more necessary a thing is for living beings, the more easily it is found and the cheaper it is; the less necessary it is, the rarer and dearer it is.
Maimonides

The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one's appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.
Amelia Earhart

The more one forgets himself- by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love- the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.
Viktor Frankl

The more one is absorbed in fighting evil, the less one is tempted to place the good in question.
Jean-Paul Sartre

The more one judges, the less one loves.
Honoré de Balzac

The more one learns, the more he understands his ignorance.
Louis L'Amour

The more one listens to ordinary conversations the more apparent it becomes that the reasoning faculties of the brain take little part in the direction of the vocal organs.
Edgar Rice Burroughs

The more one produces, the less one gets.
Norman Augustine

The more one suffers, the more, I believe, one has a sense of the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires the authority in the art of the comic.
Søren Kierkegaard

The more one talks, the less the words mean.
Jean-Luc Godard

The more opinions you have, the less you see.
Wim Wenders

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterward.
Arthur Koestler

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
Aldous Huxley

The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa. ('The Uncertainty Principle' of quantum mechanics).
Werner Heisenberg

The more reason we have to pay attention to life, the less we have to pay attention to death.
B.F. Skinner

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.
Anton Chekhov

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.
Jean-Paul Sartre

The more simple we are, the more complete we become.
Auguste Rodin

The more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our buildings and vehicles become, the more vulnerable we are.
Stephen Ambrose

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

The more that people understand about the secret machinery of the universe, the less likely it is that they will be duped and victimized by television and politicians.
Rudy Rucker

The more they know, the more they'll understand. The more they understand, the more they'll care. Once they care, there's no stopping them.
Sam Walton

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
George Bernard Shaw

The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Alphonse Karr

The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The more useless the application, the better the graphics.
Variously attributed

The more virtuous a man is himself, the less does he suspect baseness in others.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

The more wants a man has, the less freedom.
Taylor Caldwell

The more we count the blessings we have, the less we crave the luxuries we haven't.
William Arthur Ward

The more we desire for that which is superfluous, the more we meet with difficulties; our strength and possessions are spent in unnecessary things, and are wanting when required for that which is necessary.
Maimonides

The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have.
William Hazlitt

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
J.B. Priestley

The more we find to love, the more we add to the measure of our hearts.
Lloyd Alexander

The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.
Leo Tolstoy

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them;

It is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

The more we refuse to buy into our inner critics- and our external ones too- the easier it will get to have confidence in our choices, and to feel comfortable with who we are- as women and as mothers.
Arianna Huffington

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.
Arthur C. Clarke

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror.
Gustave Flaubert

The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.
Benjamin Disraeli

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.
Noam Chomsky

The more you know, the harder it is to take decisive action. Once you become informed, you start seeing complexities and shades of gray. You realize that nothing is as clear and simple as it first appears. Ultimately, knowledge is paralyzing.
Bill Watterson

The more you know, the sadder you get.
Stephen Colbert

The more you learn about the dignity of the gorilla, the more you want to avoid people.
Dian Fossey

The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have.
Norman Vincent Peale

The more you make people alike, the more competition you have. Competition is based on the principle of conformity.
Marshall McLuhan

The more you put in your brain, the more it will hold- if you have one.
Rex Stout

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.
Will Rogers

The more you say, the less people remember. The fewer the words, the greater the profit.
Francois Fenelon

The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.
George S. Patton

The more you try to pin a word down, the more you realize that it has its own cape, sword and little hat.
Roy Blount, Jr.

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A clear conscience doesn't mean anything if you haven't any conscience.
-William Feather

A clear conscience needs no public information officer. (from The New York Times)
-Variously attributed

A conscience which has been bought once will be bought twice.
-Norbert Weiner

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
-Benjamin Franklin

A good conscience is a continual feast.
-Robert Burton

A guilty conscience is the mother of invention.
-Carolyn Wells

A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience.
-Doug Larson

A person may sometimes have a clear conscience simply because his head is empty.
-Ralph W. Sockman

A reformer is one who insists on his conscience being your guide.
-Millard Miller

As long as a journalist tells the truth, in conscience and fairness, it is not his job to worry about consequences. The truth is never as dangerous as a lie in the long run. I truly believe the truth sets men free.
-Ben Bradlee

Be more careful of your conscience than of your estate. The latter can be bought and sold; the former never.
-Hosea Ballou

But I think I can sincerely declare that I cheerfully submit myself to every odious name for conscience' sake; and from my soul I despise all those whose guilt, malice, or folly has made them my foes.
-James Otis, Jr.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
-Albert Camus

Confession is good for the conscience, but it usually bypasses the soul.
-Mignon McLaughlin

Conscience and cowardice are really the same things.
-Oscar Wilde

Conscience does make cowards of us all.
-William Shakespeare

Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.
-Oliver Goldsmith

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
-H.L. Mencken

Conscience is a small inner voice that doesn't speak your language.
-Variously attributed

Conscience is better served by a myth.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.
-H.L. Mencken

Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.
-Sigmund Freud

Conscience is the most sacred of all property...
-James Madison

Conscience is the most sacred thing among men.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Conscience is what makes a boy tell his mother before his sister does.
-Evan Esar

Conscience is, in most men, an anticipation of the opinion of others.
-Sir Henry Taylor

Conscience places a bridle upon the tongue.
-Publilius Syrus

Conscience reigns but it does not govern.
-Paul Valery

Conscience: A small, still voice that makes minority reports.
-Franklin P. Adams

Conscious is when you are aware of something, and conscience is when you wish you weren't.
-Variously attributed

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Ah, the gap between expectation and achievement is filled with the screams of good men, still falling.
-Reginald Hill

All good men are Anarchists.
-Elbert Hubbard

Bold knaves thrive without one grain of sense,
But good men starve for want of impudence.
-John Dryden

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness. The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed- while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.
-Vasily Grossman

Good men have the fewest fears. He has but one great fear who fears to do wrong; he has a thousand who has overcome it.
-Christian Bovee

Good men make good rhinoceroses, unfortunately.
-Eugene Ionesco

In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent.
-William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

It is infinitely better to have a few good men than many indifferent ones.
-George Washington

It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.
-Henry Fielding

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
-Henry Adams

None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license.
-John Milton

Now is the time for all good men to come to.
-Walt Kelly

Praise makes good men better and bad men worse.
-Thomas Fuller

Probably all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.
-Demonax

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?
-Patrick Henry

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.
-Leonardo da Vinci

The passions of a revolution are apt to hurry even good men into excesses.
-Alexander Hamilton

The time has come for all good men to rise above principle.
-Huey P. Long

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.
-Hunter S. Thompson

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.
-Brendan Behan

When good men die their goodness does not perish,
But lives though they are gone. As for the bad,
All that was theirs dies and is buried with them.
-Euripides

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
-Aristotle

With bronze as a mirror, one can correct one's apperance; with history as a mirror, one can understand the rise and fall of a state; with good men as a mirror, one can distinguish right from wrong.
-Li Shimin

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Hate is a wasteful emotion, most of the people you hate don't know you hate them and the rest don't care.
-Medgar Evers

Hate is like fire- it makes even light rubbish deadly.
-George Eliot

Hate is more lasting than dislike.
-Adolf Hitler

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
-Rollo May

Hate it when you offer someone a sincere compliment on their mustache and suddenly she's not your friend anymore.
-Olivia Ramsey

Hate must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.
-Karl Kraus

Hate only injustice and not those who commit it.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.
-Milan Kundera

Hate, emotionalism, and frustration are not policies.
-Madeleine Albright

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

We no longer hate people for their vices- we hate them for their virtues.
-Davis M.J. Aurini

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
-John Steinbeck

Why hate someone for the color of their skin when there are much better reasons to hate them?
-Denis Leary

You don't hate history, you hate the way it was taught to you in high school.
-Stephen Ambrose

You know what I hate? Indian givers... no, I take that back.
-Emo Philips

You know why the French hate us so much? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into our croissandwich, thank you very much.
-Denis Leary

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A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
-G.K. Chesterton

A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.
-Thomas Paine

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.
-Theodore Roosevelt

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common.
-W.H. Auden

Early rising may not be a vice... but it is certainly no virtue. The old saw about the early bird just goes to show that the worm should have stayed in bed.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
-Edith Sitwell

Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.
-Marquis de Sade

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.
-David Hume

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.
-Peter Ustinov

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any man can pursue; it needs an unceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit. It cannot, like adultery or gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole-time job.
-W. Somerset Maugham

I find that the best goodness I have has some tincture of vice.
-Michel de Montaigne

I prefer an accommodating vice
To an obstinate virtue.
-Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin)

I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
-Albert Einstein

I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
-Barry M. Goldwater

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.
-W.H. Auden

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.
-James Fenimore Cooper

It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?
-John Quincy Adams

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their color.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.
-Marcel Proust

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.
-Robert Smith Surtees

My only aversion to vice is the price.
-Victor Buono

Nostalgia, the vice of the aged. We watch so many old movies our memories come in monochrome.
-Angela Carter

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.
-Thornton Wilder

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.
-Ira Gershwin

Our age is an age of moderate virtue
And moderate vice.
-T.S. Eliot

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

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality. (1742)
-Henry Fielding

Religions which deprive the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
-Bertrand Russell

Sadness is a vice.
-Gustave Flaubert

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.
-Henry Adams

Some faults are so closely allied to qualities that it is difficult to weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.
-Oliver Goldsmith

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.
-Samuel Butler (Novelist, 1835-1902)

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.
-Winston Churchill

The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
-William Hazlitt

The vice that underlies all vices is that we are held cheap by others, and far worse, that in our innermost soul we think cheaply of ourselves.
-Felix Adler

The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.
-Oscar Wilde

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
-Henry Fielding

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
-Theodore Dalrymple

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.
-Edgar Quinet

Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.
-Daniel Defoe

Vice is a creature of such hideous mien... that the more you see it the better you like it.
-Finley Peter Dunne

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen.
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
-Alexander Pope

Vice is its own reward.
-Quentin Crisp

Vice is nice
But a little virtue
Won't hurt you.
-Felicia Lamport

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
-George Bernard Shaw

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
-Adam Smith

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?
-Edgar Rice Burroughs

What does labor want? We want more school houses and less jails. More books and less guns. More learning and less vice. More leisure and less greed. More justice and less revenge.
-Samuel Gompers

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
-Benjamin Disraeli

What maintains one vice would bring up two children.
-Benjamin Franklin

Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and poverty.
-Voltaire (François Marie Arouet)

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A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.
-Arthur Miller

A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.
-John Jay Chapman

A newspaper consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not.
-Henry Fielding

Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, except that a newspaper can always print a retraction.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat.
-Leo Tolstoy

An honest newspaper publishes corrections on the front page. There are no honest newspapers.
-Ray Newton

Dad, as a good American, believed his newspapers.
-Upton Sinclair

Editor: a person employed on a newspaper whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed.
-Elbert Hubbard

Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That's just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.
-Ben Bradlee

Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true, except for that rare story of which you happen to have first-hand knowledge.
-Erwin Knoll

Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President- the same half?
-Gore Vidal

Have a good time. The newspaper will be great if you're having a good time.
-Ben Bradlee

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
-Jean Anouilh

I am unable to understand how a man of honor can take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
-Charles Baudelaire

I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
-Christopher Hitchens

I do worry about how newspapers respond to falling circulation figures. I'm not sure that the answer is for newspapers to try to cater to whatever seems to be the fad of the day.
-Ben Bradlee

I shall never tolerate the newspapers to say or do anything against my interests; they may publish a few little articles with just a little poison in them, but one fine morning somebody will shut their mouths.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

I used to love the newspaper business because if you had an idea, you could get it into the paper immediately, in a matter of hours. Now you have to watch out and worry about who you are offending and blah blah blah. So it's changed.
-Ben Bradlee

If Moses had been paid newspaper rates for the Ten Commandments, he might have written the Two Thousand Commandments.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

If the newspapers of a country are filled with good news, the jails of that country will be filled with good people.
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

If you lose your temper at a newspaper columnist, he'll get rich or famous or both.
-James C. Hagerty

It is a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell.
-William Storey

Large newspapers are routinely censored by legal costs. It is time this stopped. It is time a country said, enough is enough, justice must be seen, history must be preserved, and we will give shelter from the storm.
-Julian Assange

Never believe in mirrors or newspapers.
-Tom Stoppard

Newspaper strikes are a relief.
-Princess Anne

Newspapermen meet many interesting people, most of them other newspapermen.
-Frederick C. Klein

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.
-Charles Lamb

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

Newspapers are unable, seemingly to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.
-George Bernard Shaw

Newspapers will run a headline: 'Shark kills human.' You never see a headline from the other perspective: 'Man swims in shark-infested water, forgets he's shark food.'
-Gary Larson

Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
-Edward Abbey

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.
-Bob Schieffer

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists.
-Norman Mailer

One newspaper a day ought to be enough for anyone who still prefers to retain a little mental balance.
-Clifton Fadiman

People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.
-A.J. Liebling

Reading the morning newspaper is the realist's morning prayer.
-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The average newspaper, especially of the better sort, has the intelligence of a hillbilly evangelist, the courage of a rat, the fairness of a prohibitionist boob-jumper, the information of a high-school janitor, the taste of a designer of celluloid valentines, and the honor of a police-station lawyer.
-H.L. Mencken

The business of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.
-Finley Peter Dunne

The editor of a newspaper is like the ringmaster of a circus. He can book the acts, but he can't tell the acrobats which way to jump.
-Sir Humphrey Appleby

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside.
-Brooks Atkinson

The hell with the newspapers. Nobody reads the letters to the editor column except the nuts. It's enough to get you down.
-Philip K. Dick

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehood and errors.
-Thomas Jefferson

The newspaper is in all its literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
-Walter Lippmann

The newspapers still talk about glory but the average man, thank God, has got rid of that illusion.
-E.M. Forster

The nicest thing is to open the newspapers and not to find yourself in them.
-George Harrison

The relationship between truth and a newspaper is like the relationship between the color green and the number seven. Occasionally you will see the number seven written in green, but you learn not to expect this.
-Garrison Keillor

There is but one way for a newspaperman to look at a politician and that is down.
-Frank H. Simonds

Things that appear on the front page of the newspaper as 'fact' are far more dangerous than the games played by a novelist, and can lead to wars.
-E.L. Doctorow

Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.
-Ben Bagdikian

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand on a clock.
-Ben Hecht

Vanity in a newspaper man is like perfume on a whore; they use it to fend off a dark whiff of themselves.
-Julian Assange

We live under a government of men and morning newspapers.
-Wendell Phillips

We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation- to make a point- than to further the cause of truth.
-Edgar Allan Poe

Well, sure, the government lies, and the newspapers lie. But in a democracy, they aren't the same lies.
-Alexis A. Gilliland

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.
-Thomas Jefferson

You should always believe all you read in newspapers, as this makes them more interesting.
-Rose Macaulay

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A different language is a different vision of life.
-Frederico Fellini

A mind, lean in its own language. In others, it gets fat.
-Elias Cannetti

All words, in every language, are metaphors.
-Marshall McLuhan

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
-George F. Will

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.
-Gore Vidal

Bad language is a stage all children go through, and it dies with time when they learn they're not attracting attention with it, hotheadedness isn't.
-Harper Lee

Because language is the carrier of ideas, it is easy to believe that it should be very little else than such a carrier.
-Louise Bogan

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.
-Abraham Maslow

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
-George Orwell

By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.
-George Carlin

By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide.
-Jean Genet

Clarity in language depends on clarity in thought.
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Conscience is a small inner voice that doesn't speak your language.
-Variously attributed

Do not disturb signs should be written in the language of the hotel maid.
-Tim Bedore

Don't worry about what your mother thinks of your language.
-Elmore Leonard

Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.
-Robert Benchley

English becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
-George Orwell

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
-Aldous Huxley

For last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning.
-T.S. Eliot

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.
-Stephen King

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
-Ezra Pound

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
-Ezra Pound

I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
-Roland Barthes

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.
-Frantz Fanon

I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.
-Emile Cioran

I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet. That may be, but I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vacuum cleaners.
-Jeff Stilson

I hate political correctness because it's founded on the idea that by means of language you can escape truth- that if you simply give a different name to something you've somehow changed it. It is a very childlike idea.
-P.J. O'Rourke

I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education.
-Huey P. Long

I know ours is a world made by men for men, their dictatorship is so ancient it even extends to language.
-Oriana Fallaci

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another where the best fruit is.
-Terry Pratchett

I want a language that speaks the truth.
-Studs Terkel

I'm so far gone that I'm telling the truth. It sounds like a foreign language.
-Richard Peck

Ideas do not exist separately from language.
-Karl Marx

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.
-Doug Larson

If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.
-Doug Larson

If we like to assume the rise of language as a given fact, then it is not going too far to say that the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind. The account of the sixth day should be written: He gave them speech, and they became souls.
-Alfred North Whitehead

In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.
-David Mamet

It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.
-Thomas Hardy

It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' appear.
-Douglas Adams

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.
-M.H. Abrams

It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.
-Jane Wagner

It's not the verbing that weirds the language, it's the renounification.
-Marc LeBlanc

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.
-Toni Morrison

Language exerts hidden power, like the moon on the tides.
-Rita Mae Brown

Language fits over experience like a straitjacket.
-William Golding

Language has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone, and the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
-Paul Tillich

Language is a form of organized stutter.
-Marshall McLuhan

Language is a virus from outer space.
-William S. Burroughs

Language is froth on the surface of thought.
-John McCarthy

Language is the dress of thoughts.
-Samuel Johnson

Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.
-William Gibson

Language seems to me intrinsically comic- noises of the tongue, lips, larynx, and palate rendered in ink on paper with the deepest and airiest thoughts in mind and the harshest and tenderest feelings at heart.
-Roy Blount, Jr.

Language, n. The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another's treasure.
-Ambrose Bierce

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.
-Christopher Morley

Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.
-Werner Heisenberg

Loose language suggests loose thought.
-Theodore Dalrymple

Man has sold his soul for time, language, tools, weapons, and dominance.
-William S. Burroughs

Man's ultimate concern must be expressed symbolically, because symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.
-Paul Tillich

Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.
-Alexandre Dumas

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.
-Frantz Fanon

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Never use the word, 'very.' It is the weakest word in the English language; doesn't mean anything. If you feel the urge of 'very' coming on, just write the word, 'damn,' in the place of 'very.' The editor will strike out the word, 'damn,' and you will have a good sentence.
-William Allen White

No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut.
-Sam Rayburn

Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.
-Eddy Peters

Numbers constitute the only universal language.
-Nathanael West

Of course, contrary to what other kids said, we did know the difference between fantasy and reality. But we also knew the most precious gift secret of all: that reality matters not if you cannot dream; and that all dreams are rooted in truth and speak the language of truth as they unfold in all their splendor.
-Anne Rice

One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they'll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
-Anton Chekhov

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.
-Paul Tillich

Ours is the age of substitutes: Instead of language we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; and instead of genuine ideas, bright suggestions.
-Eric Bentley

Own only what you can carry with you: know language, know countries, know people, let your memory be your travel bag.
-Aleksandr Solzhnitsyn

Parrots never learn a language, but are smart enough to know, like people involved in marketing, that one or two catch phrases will satisfy most.
-Don Watson

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Political language- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-George Orwell

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
-Carl Sandburg

That woman speaks eighteen languages, and can't say No in any of them.
-Dorothy Parker

The appeal of political correctness is that it attempts to change men's souls by altering how they speak. If one sufficiently reforms language, certain thoughts become unthinkable, and the world moves in the approved direction.
-Theodore Dalrymple

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.
-Frantz Fanon

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
-James Fenimore Cooper

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
-George Orwell

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.
-James Reston

The language denotes the man. A coarse or refined character finds its expression naturally in a coarse or refined phraseology.
-Christian Bovee

The language of science- and especially of a science of man- is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
-Thomas Szasz

The language of the law must not be foreign to the ears of those who are to obey it.
-Learned Hand

The learned Fool writes his Nonsense in better Language than the unlearned, but still 'tis Nonsense.
-Benjamin Franklin

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein

The mentality of mankind and the language of mankind created each other.
-Alfred North Whitehead

The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else.
-Richard Burton

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
-James Nicoll

The three greatest words in the English language are not: I love you. That's second. The first are: Leave me alone.
-Larry King

The three most beautiful words in the English language are not 'I love you.' They are, 'It is benign.'
-Woody Allen

The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed.'
-Dorothy Parker

The two universal languages on earth are music and silence. They are also the two primary languages of heaven.
-Peter Kreeft

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
-Joyce Carol Oates

There is in a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
-Charles Baudelaire

Too many women in too many countries speak the same language- of silence.
-Hillary Rodham Clinton

True creativity often starts where language ends.
-Arthur Koestler

Verbing weirds language. (From the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes)
-Bill Watterson

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
-Joyce Carol Oates

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
-Toni Morrison

We need a president who's fluent in at least one language.
-Buck Henry

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
-Niels Bohr

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.
-Roy Blount, Jr.

When speech is divorced from speaker and word from meaning, what is left is just ritual, language as ritual.
-Ellen Goodman

When the English language gets in my way, I walk over it.
-Billy Sunday

Writing is just a man alone in a room with the English language, trying to make it come out right.
-John Berryman

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A Bill of Rights that means what the majority wants it to mean is worthless.
-Antonin Scalia

A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority.
-Henry David Thoreau

All politics are based on the indifference of the majority.
-James Reston

As my father once explained to me, our 'rights' are only as strong as the democracy that protects them. Because we are a people's democracy here in America, as great as the people of this country can be, but also as fallible, we must stay ever vigilant in the face of any 'tyranny' of the majority, no matter the stated objective.
-George Takei

Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against 'society,' that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
-Emma Goldman

Democracy encourages the majority to decide things about which the majority is ignorant.
-John Simon

Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right.
-William Allen White

Every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass.
-Emma Goldman

Henotheism is the view that there are other gods, but there is only one God who is to be worshipped. The Ten Commandments express a henotheistic view, as does the majority of the Hebrew Bible.
-Bart D. Ehrman

I believe that it should be perfectly lawful to print even things that outrage the pruderies and prejudices of the general, so long as any honest minority, however small, wants to read them. The remedy of the majority is not prohibition, but avoidance.
-H.L. Mencken

I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism. If we go over the whole history of ancient and modern republics, we shall find their destruction to have generally resulted from those causes.
-James Madison

I'm used to being in the minority. I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.
-Barney Frank

If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.
-Barbara Jordan

If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.
-Charlotte Brontë

In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, the majority is always wrong.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

In making the great experiment of governing people by consent rather than by coercion, it is not sufficient that the party in power should have a majority. It is just as necessary that the party in power should never outrage the minority.
-Walter Lippmann

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.
-John Dalberg-Acton

It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority. By definition, there are already enough people to do that.
-G.H. Hardy

It is safe to wager that every public idea and every accepted convention is sheer foolishness, because it has suited the majority.
-Nicolas Chamfort

It takes fifty years for the majority to be right. The majority is never right until it does right.
-Henrik Ibsen

It taught me, at an early age, that being wrong can be dangerous, but being right, when society regards the majority's falsehood as truth, could be fatal.
-Thomas Szasz

Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief but assume that their own needs none.
-Herbert Spencer

Long ago I ceased to count heads. Truth is usually in the minority in this evil world.
-Charles H. Spurgeon

Machines have no political opinions, but they have profound political effects. They demand a strict regimentation of time, and, by abolishing the need for manual skill, have transformed the majority of the population from workers into laborers.
-W.H. Auden

Mad, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech, and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane.
-Ambrose Bierce

Never be afraid to stand with the minority when the minority is right, for the minority which is right will one day be the majority.
-William Jennings Bryan

Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement.
-Fiorello LaGuardia

Schooling, which we engage in and which supposedly creates equal opportunities, has become the unique, never-before-attempted way of dividing the whole society into classes. Everybody knows at which level of his twelve or sixteen years of schooling he has dropped out, and in addition knows what price tag is attached to the higher schooling he has gotten. It's a history of degrading the majority of people.
-Ivan Illich

Shall we judge the country by the majority or by the minority? Certainly, by the minority. The mass are animal, in state of pupilage, and nearer the chimpanzee.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The country was founded on the principle that the primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains.
-Noam Chomsky

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.
-Bertrand Russell

The Jews are the living embodiment of the minority, the constant reminder of what duties societies owe their minorities, whoever they might be.
-Abba Eban

The majority is always wrong. The minority is rarely right.
-Henrik Ibsen

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
-Honoré de Balzac

The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a skeptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.
-T.S. Eliot

The majority of the American people still believe that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual.
-Barbara Jordan

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to be insane in such a useful way that they can't commit you.
-Mark Edwards

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
-John Dalberg-Acton

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
-A.A. Milne

The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.
-Pope John Paul II

The truth must essentially be regarded as in conflict with this world; the world has never been so good, and will never become so good that the majority will desire the truth.
-Søren Kierkegaard

The voice of the majority is no proof of justice.
-Johann von Schiller

Was there ever a time when the majority was right?
-Robert A. Heinlein

We are so concerned to flatter the majority that we lose sight of how every so often it is necessary in order to preserve freedom for the minority, let alone for the individual, to face that majority down.
-William F. Buckley, Jr.

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.
-Thomas Jefferson

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.
-Alfred North Whitehead

What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.
-Walter Lippmann

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
-Eugene V. Debs

When I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.
-Alexis de Tocqueville

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
-Mark Twain

Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.
-Leo Tolstoy

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Categories: Quotes of the day, Quotes on a topic, The majority and the minority

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Against stupidity, the very gods themselves contend in vain.
-Friedrich von Schiller

Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into arrogant conceit.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
-Variously attributed

Brilliance is typically the act of an individual, but incredible stupidity can usually be traced to an organization.
-Jon Bentley

Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.
-Edwin H. Land

Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.
-Frank Leahy

From stupidity there is always something to be learned, but it's always the same thing: don't be stupid.
-Robert M. Adams

Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
-Elbert Hubbard

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.
-Edith Sitwell

If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be.
-Lois McMaster Bujold

In nature, stupidity gets you killed. In the workplace, it gets you fired. In politics, it gets you re-elected.
-Bill VanRemmen

In view of the fact that God limited the intelligence of man, it seems unfair that He did not also limit his stupidity.
-Konrad Adenauer

It is an obvious and blatant stupidity beyond my ability to articulate how dumb it is for us not to teach our children how to run the government.
-Richard Dreyfuss

It seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.
-Karl Popper

It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful.
-Anton Szandor LaVey

Let us say that I despise stupidity. Especially when it masquerades as virtue.
-Miguel de Cervantes

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.
-Vladimir Nabokov

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But remember, any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
-Variously attributed

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Don't assign to stupidity what might be due to ignorance. And try not to assume your opponent is the ignorant one- until you can show it isn't you.
-M.N. Plano

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
-Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
-Edward Abbey

Optimism and stupidity are nearly synonymous.
-Hyman Rickover

Public opinion reigns in society because stupidity reigns amongst the stupid.
-Nicolas Chamfort

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
-Stephen Vizinczey

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.
-Louise Bogan

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
-Albert Camus

Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn't misuse it.
-Pope John Paul II

Stupidity is always a capital crime.
-Larry Niven

Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. But you still don't want to get any on you.
-Scott Adams

Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere.
-Variously attributed

Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Stupidity's the deliberate cultivation of ignorance.
-William Gaddis

The American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
-Will Rogers

The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.
-A. Kindsvater

The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?
-Variously attributed

The simplest form of stupidity- the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension- can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion.
-Robertson Davies

The stupidity of the average man will permit the oligarch, whether economic or political, to hide his real purposes from the scrutiny of his fellows and to withdraw his activities from effective control.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
-Harlan Ellison

The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen, and quotes about hydrogen and stupidity.
-John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
-Gustave Flaubert

The world is just filling up with more and more idiots! And the computer is giving them access to the world! They're spreading their stupidity! At least they were contained before- now they're on the loose everywhere!
-Harlan Ellison

There are only two ways by which to rise in this world, either by one's own industry or by the stupidity of others.
-Jean de la Bruyere

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
-Edward Abbey

There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
-Gene Wolfe

There is no sin except stupidity.
-Oscar Wilde

There's much more stupidity than there is malice in the world.
-William Gaddis

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
-Gustave Flaubert

To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
-Charles Baudelaire

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.
-Thomas Carlyle

You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, drunkenness sobered, but stupidity lasts forever.
-Aristophanes

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Categories: Quotes on a topic, Stupidity

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Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
-Joseph Conrad

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
-Arthur Miller

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
-Ernest Hemingway

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
-Mark Twain

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
-Joseph Conrad

Fear best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions.
-H.P. Lovecraft

Freedom from worries and surcease from strain are illusions that always inhabit the distance.
-Edwin Way Teale

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
-Virginia Woolf

History has no laws, and all patterns that we find there are useful illusions.
-Orson Scott Card

I believe that illusions are necessary to man, yet live without illusion; I believe that the passions are more profitable than reason, and yet no longer know what passion is.
-Nicolas Chamfort

I believe that the fundamental alternative for man is the choice between 'life' and 'death;' between creativity and destructive violence; between reality and illusions; between objectivity and intolerance; between brotherhood-independence and dominance-submission.
-Erich Fromm

I have had four happy days in my life, and three of them turned out to be illusions.
-Taylor Caldwell

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.
-Virginia Woolf

In spite of ferocious differences of opinion about other moral issues, there seems to be something approaching consensus that it is cruel and malicious to interfere with the life-enhancing illusions of others- unless those illusions are themselves the cause of of even greater ills.
-Daniel Dennett

Life is full of obstacle illusions.
-Grant Frazier

Men will clutch at illusions when they have nothing else to hold to.
-Czeslaw Milosz

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.
-Albert Einstein

Reason may cure illusions, but not suffering.
-Alfred de Musset

Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is 'Thou shalt not question.'
-Sigmund Freud

Show me a man who claims he is objective and I'll show you a man with illusions.
-Henry R. Luce

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.
-Robert Lynd

The biggest lesson you can learn in life, or teach your children, is that life is not castles in the skies, happily ever after. The biggest lesson we have to give our children is truth. And that's what I'm saying: that we're all built with illusions. And they break.
-Goldie Hawn

The skeptic has no illusions about life, nor a vain belief in the promise of immortality. Since this life here and now is all we can know, our most reasonable option is to live it fully.
-Paul Kurtz

The worst thing about depression isn't the sense that you're accentuating the negative, it's that you're seeing things the way they really are, stripped of the illusions you use every day to divert yourself from the Yawning Maw of Futility. It's the wind that blows off the snow and reveals the stone.
-James Lileks

We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.
-Bill Hicks

We have built illusions round us and see no way out of the glass forest.
-Brian Aldiss

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.
-Daniel J. Boorstin

When one has had all his conceit taken out of him, when he has lost all his illusions, his feathers will soon soak through, and he will fly no more.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

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Categories: Illusions, Quotes on a topic

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A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
-Moss Hart

A taste for irony has kept more hearts from breaking than a sense of humor, for it takes irony to appreciate the joke which is on oneself.
-Jessamyn West

And irony, oh the goddamed irony, that courses through the popular culture like a cancer. If nothing is serious anymore, then there's nothing to satirize.
-Berkeley Breathed

Britain and America are separated by the Irony Curtain.
-Dave Black

Clap an extinguisher upon your irony if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
-Charles Lamb

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
-H.P. Lovecraft

I hate corporations and I'm not happy that they have taken over the film business but on the same hand I find myself being the head of a corporation. There's a certain irony there.
-George Lucas

If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort that it values more, it will lose that too.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Irony is a clear consciousness of an eternal agility, of the infinitely abundant chaos.
-Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Irony is a qualification of subjectivity.
-Søren Kierkegaard

Irony is the form of paradox. Paradox is what is good and great at the same time.
-Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.
-Anatole France

Irony is the glory of slaves.
-Czeslaw Milosz

It was announced Gloria Steinem was recently married at the home of a lady friend named Wilma Mankiller, presumably in a bid by Ms. Steinem to see if she could get The Guinness Book of Irony to implode.
-Norman Liebmann

Men who retain irony are not to be trusted. They can't always resist an impulse to tickle themselves.
-Taylor Caldwell

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch.
-Jack Nicholson

Our universities are so determined to impose tolerance that they'll expel you for saying what you think and never notice the irony.
-John Perry Barlow

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.
-Karl Kraus

Sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable from irony.
-Erik Naggum

The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.
-Paul Goodman

The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
-Ernest Becker

The main business of a lawyer is to take the romance, the mystery, the irony, the ambiguity out of everything he touches.
-Antonin Scalia

The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humor or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances on any subject cross like interarching searchlights.
-Edith Wharton

To dread irony is to fear reason.
-Sacha Guitry

We didn't need light and shade, irony or humor. An iconic Daltrey bellow could convey an extrodinary range of human emotion; withering sadness, self pity, loneliness, abandonment, spiritual desperation, the loss of childhood, as well as the more obvious rage and frustration, joy and triumph.
-Pete Townshend

When the government gives things names, you should keep your sense of irony handy.
-Joseph Sobran

White Americans have a very unusual sense of history. They make it up as they go along, constantly revising to suit their tastes in a manner that would make Stalin blush. Very few of them saw any irony in the fact that during a recent nasty Balkans conflict, when Uncle Sam intervened to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Bosnians, the military action was performed using Apache helicopter gunships. Helicopters named after a people that had been ethnically cleansed in the United States less than one hundred years previously. Sixteen lane highways across the sacred burial grounds. Yee-hah.
-Craig Ferguson

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Categories: Irony, Quotes on a topic

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Luck can't last a lifetime, unless you die young.
-Larry Kersten, PhD

Luck enters into every contingency. You are a fool if you forget it- and a greater fool if you count upon it.
-Phyllis Bottome

Luck is always the last refuge of laziness and incompetence.
-James Cash Penney

Luck is believing you're lucky, that's all...
-Tennessee Williams

Luck is for suckers.
-John Green

Luck is not a factor. Hope is not a strategy. Fear is not an option.
-James Cameron

Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men.
-E.B. White

Luck is the residue of design.
-Branch Rickey

Luck was a joke. Even good luck was just bad luck with its hair combed.
-Stephen King

Luck, bad if not good, will always be with us. But it has a way of favoring the intelligent and showing its back to the stupid.
-John Dewey

Luck, be a lady tonight.
-Frank Loesser

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Categories: Luck, Quotes on a topic

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Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff?
-Tina Fey

Politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
-Edmund Burke

Politics and the shape of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't concern themselves with politics.
-Albert Camus

Politics are a lousy way for a free man to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.
-P.J. O'Rourke

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

Politics are not the task of a Christian.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Politics are nothing but sand and gravel: it is art and life that feed us until we die. Everything else is ambition, hysteria or hatred.
-Louise Bogan

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
-Vera Brittain

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
-W.H. Auden

Politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth.
-Paul Krugman

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.
-Will Rogers

Politics have no relation to morals.
-Niccolò Machiavelli

Politics in a democracy is, at the end, an educational process.
-Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
-Theodore H. White

Politics is a matter of choices, and a man doesn't set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice. You know that. You've made a choice, and you know how much it cost you. There is always a price.
-Robert Penn Warren

Politics is a pendulum whose swings between anarchy and tyranny are fueled by perpetually rejuvenated illusions.
-Albert Einstein

Politics is a process which should slowly bring to public all the private worries and hopes of the individual.
-Theodore H. White

Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.
-Max Weber

Politics is about compromises... really stupid compromises.
-Bill Maher

Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.
-Sean Wilentz

Politics is an act of faith; you have to show some kind of confidence in the intellectual and moral capacity of the public.
-George McGovern

Politics is applied biology.
-Ernst Haeckel

Politics is developing more comedians than radio ever did.
-Jimmy Durante

Politics is how you live your life, not whom you vote for.
-Jerry Rubin

Politics is just like show business, you have a hell of an opening, coast for a while and then have a hell of a close.
-Ronald Reagan

Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger.
-Variously attributed

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.
-Edouard Herriot

Politics is like navigation in a sea without charts, and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.
-Joyce Carey

Politics is like the bumper cars at the amusement park. It's a delusion to think that by refusing to move, you can protect yourself from being hit. (From The Weekly Standard)
-Variously attributed

Politics is like the stock market: it's a bad business for people who can't afford to lose.
-Richard M. Nixon

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.
-Dalton Camp

Politics is my hobby. Smut is my vocation.
-Larry Flynt

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
-Ronald Reagan

Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning.
-Paul Wellstone

Politics is not an exact science.
-Otto von Bismarck

Politics is not just about power and money games, politics can be about the improvement of people's lives, about lessening human suffering in our world and bringing about more peace and more justice.
-Paul Wellstone

Politics is not predictions and politics is not observations. Politics is what we do. Politics is what we do, politics is what we create, by what we work for, by what we hope for and what we dare to imagine.
-Paul Wellstone

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.
-John Jay Chapman

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

Politics is show business for ugly people.
-Sonny Bono

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

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.
-Hunter S. Thompson

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
-Ernest Benn

Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant.
-Henri Queuille

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
-Paul Valery

Politics is the art of the possible.
-Otto von Bismarck

Politics is the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics is the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
-Ambrose Bierce

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
-Oscar Ameringer

Politics is the only field of human endeavor where the more experience you have, the worse you get.
-Kinky Friedman

Politics is the pursuit of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
-George Jean Nathan

Politics is the science of urgencies.
-Theodore Parker

Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why.
-Sidney Hillman

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
-Lester B. Pearson

Politics is too partisan, and sometimes patriotism is cast aside. Patriotism is honor and love of your country and your brothers and sisters. With politics I get the impression that it's all about what's good for the party and not necessarily what's good for the country.
-Ricardo Montalbán

Politics is very much like taxes- everybody is against them, or everybody is for them as long as they don't apply to him.
-Fiorello LaGuardia

Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.
-Mao Tse-tung

Politics isn't about left versus right; it's about top versus bottom.
-Jim Hightower

Politics makes estranged bedfellows.
-Goodman Ace

Politics makes me uptight; I have so little control over it. It's like forever being in high school with rah-rah idiots in charge.
-Rudy Rucker

Politics means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
-Max Weber

Politics ruins the character.
-Otto von Bismarck

Politics should be limited in scope to war, protection of property, and the occasional precautionary beheading of a member of the ruling class.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.
-George F. Will

Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people.
-Richard M. Nixon

Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
-Henry Adams

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
-Richard Armour

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-Ambrose Bierce

Politics: a Trojan horse race.
-Stanislaw J. Lec

Politics: the art of keeping as many balls as possible up in the air at one time- while protecting your own.
-Sam Attlesey

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.
-Jimmy Breslin

Practical politics consists of ignoring facts.

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A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.
-Henry Kissinger

Americans used to roar like lions for liberty. Now we bleat like sheep for security.
-Norman Vincent Peale

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
-Louis Brandeis

Distrust and caution are the parents of security.
-Benjamin Franklin

Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of all anxiety.
-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Even in the common affairs of life, in love, friendship, and marriage, how little security have we when we trust our happiness in the hands of others!
-William Hazlitt

I believe that in our constant search for security we can never gain any peace of mind until we are secure in our own soul.
-Margaret Chase Smith

I used to think that one of the great signs of security was the ability to just walk away.
-Jack Nicholson

If your heart is full of fear, you won't seek truth; you'll seek security.
-William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

In matters of national security emotion is no substitute for intelligence, nor rigidity for prudence. To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man- and also a nation.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

It is inevitable, that eventually the people will demand absolute security from the state... And absolute security is absolute slavery.
-Taylor Caldwell

It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth.
-Ben Bradlee

Most people want security in this world, not liberty.
-H.L. Mencken

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
-Willa Cather

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Only the insecure strive for security.
-Wayne Dyer

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
-Helen Keller

Security is when everything is settled. When nothing can happen to you. Security is the denial of life.
-Germaine Greer

The confidence and security of a people can be measured by their attitude toward laxatives.
-Florence King

The key to security is public information.
-Margaret Chase Smith

The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
-John Dalberg-Acton

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The spiritualist and the politician are magicians, one offering diversion, the other security, in exchange for a suspension of common sense.
-David Mamet

The system, though it may not be perfect in every part, is, upon the whole, a good one; is the best that the present views and circumstances of the country will permit; and is such an one as promises every species of security which a reasonable people can desire.
-Alexander Hamilton

The thirst for liberty does not seem to be natural to man. Most people want security in this world, not liberty. Liberty puts them on their own, and so exposes them to the natural consequences of their congenital stupidity and incompetence.
-H.L. Mencken

The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security...
-Hugo Black

There are one hundred men seeking security to one able man who is willing to risk his fortune.
-J. Paul Getty

There is no inverse relationship between freedom and security. Less of one does not lead to more of the other. People with no rights are not safe from terrorist attack.
-Molly Ivins

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.
-Douglas MacArthur

There never has been security. No man has ever known what he would meet around the next corner; if life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life then of death.
-James F. Byrnes

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, through the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.
-William Congreve

We must plan for freedom, and not only for security, if for no other reason than that only freedom can make security secure.
-Karl Popper

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.
-John Steinbeck

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
-John Quincy Adams

Courage applies when one has a choice.
-Katharine Graham

Courage cannot be counterfeited. It is one virtue that escapes hypocrisy.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Courage enlarges, cowardice diminishes resources. In desperate straits the fears of the timid aggravate the dangers that imperil the brave.
-Christian Bovee

Courage has you say in a defiant spirit you can take everything from me, you could cut me deep, you could render me in shame but you will never ever stop me from loving those who mock me, from loving those that hate me, from loving those who don't forgive me, from loving the cynics, from loving the darkness so much that I myself through my small acts of consistent unyielding love may bring on the light.
-Cory Booker

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
-G.K. Chesterton

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
-Diane de Poitiers

Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.
-John Wayne

Courage is being the only one who knows how terrified you are.
-Tom Clancy

Courage is contagious. If a leader shows courage, others get the idea.
-David McCullough

Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened.
-Rev. Billy Graham

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.
-Eddie Rickenbacker

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
-George S. Patton, Jr.

Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.
-Benjamin Disraeli

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
-Arthur Koestler

Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values.
-Rollo May

Courage is often lack of insight, whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.
-Peter Ustinov

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
-Mark Twain

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.
-Winston Churchill

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.
-Harold Wilson

Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount.
-Clare Boothe Luce

Courage is the most important of all virtues, because without it we can't practice any other virtue with consistency. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
-Maya Angelou

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
-Amelia Earhart

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
-Winston Churchill

Courage may be virtue, where the daring act is extreme; and extreme fear no vice, when the danger is extreme.
-Thomas Hobbes

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.
-Robert G. Ingersoll

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Failure can get to be a rather comfortable old friend.
-Mignon McLaughlin

Failure comes only when we forget our ideals and objectives and principles.
-Jawaharlal Nehru

Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.
-Jon Sinclair

Failure is an event, never a person.
-William D. Brown

Failure is inevitable, so the key to success is to be good at learning from it.
-Robert I. Sutton

Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.
-John Dewey

Failure is just part of the culture of innovation. Accept it and become stronger.
-Albert Yu

Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
-Ferenc Mantfeld

Failure is not disgrace. It's just a pitch that you missed, and you'd better get ready for the next one. The next one might be the shot heard round the world. My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don't.
-Craig Ferguson

Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be.
-John Wooden

Failure is not the only punishment for laziness; there is also the success of others.
-Jules Renard

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
-Henry Ford

Failure is success if we learn from it.
-William Gladstone

Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.
-Truman Capote

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.
-E.M. Forster

Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.
-Jack Lemmon

Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.
-Denis Waitley

Failure to understand reality is not reality's fault.
-Bill Henneman

Failure's a natural part of life.
-John Malkovich

Failures are like skinned knees, painful but superficial.
-H. Ross Perot

Failures are what deliver us to ourselves.
-Jane Fonda

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A boy's best friend is his mother.
-Robert Bloch (author of Psycho)

A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother.
-Variously attributed

A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.-Sigmund Freud

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.
-Walter Bagehot

A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
-Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.
-Washington Irving

A mother who is not everything for her children: a friend, a teacher, a confidant, a source of joy and founded pride, inducement and soothing, reconciliator, judge and forgiver, that mother obviously chose the wrong job.
-Joseph Goebbels

A mother, who is really a mother, is never free.
-Honoré de Balzac

A suburban mother's role is to deliver children obstetrically once, and by car forever after.
-Peter De Vries

Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.
-Henrik Ibsen

An ounce of mother is worth a ton of priest.
-Variously attributed (Spanish Proverb)

Anything that makes your mother cry is fun.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begin.
-Mitch Albom

Behind every man who achieves success, Stands a mother, a wife and the IRS.
-Ethel Jacobson

Being a king, emperor, or president is mighty small potatoes compared to being a mother.
-Billy Sunday

Being a mom is no picnic. Raising the kids is the mother's responsibility. It's a thankless, solitary job, like sheriff or Pope.
-Stephen Colbert

Being a mother is a noble status, right? So why does it change when you put 'unwed' or 'welfare' in front of it?
-Florynce Kennedy

Being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Being a pundit is very similar to being my mother-in-law; just without the rapid weight gain and chin hair growth.
-Sean Carter

Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either.
-Garrison Keillor

Cognitive dissonance is watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff in your new Mercedes.
-Variously attributed

Consult a real expert: call your mother.
-Variously attributed

Delusions are often functional. A mother's opinions about her children's beauty, intelligence, goodness, et cetera ad nauseam, keep her from drowning them at birth.
-Robert A. Heinlein

Don't worry about what your mother thinks of your language.
-Elmore Leonard

Every father says the same thing: 'Where's your mother?'
-Bill Cosby

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.
-Pope Paul VI

Every time I find a girl who can cook like my mother, she looks like my father.
-Tony Randall

Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.
-W. Somerset Maugham

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork.
-Mae West

I don't always enjoy being a mother. At those times my husband and I hop up somewhere in the wine country, eat, drink, make mad love and pretend we were born sterile and raised poodles.
-Dorothy DeBolt

I doubt if a charging elephant, or a rhino, is as determined, or hard to check, as a socially ambitious mother.
-Will Rogers

I have always admired the Esquimaux. One fine day a delicious meal is cooked for dear old mother, and then she goes walking away over the ice, and doesn't come back.
-Agatha Christie

I have always detested any departure from reality, an attitude which I relate to my mother's poor mental health.
-Jean Piaget

I should warn you that while Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there'll be no blaming Mother today.(From the TV series Frasier)
-Variously attributed

I spent my whole life helping my mother carry around her psychic trunks like a bitter bellhop. So a great load was lifted when she died, and my life was much easier.
-Anne Lamott

I would have gone home to my mother, but I'm not that crazy about my mother.
-Cher

If you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human being can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby 'it.'
-Jerome K. Jerome

Mary was an unwed teenage mother.
-Variously attributed

Mother is a verb, not a noun.
-Shonda Rhimes

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.
-Anne Lamott

My father warned me never to date a girl who called her mother Mummy. So I dated her brother and lived happily ever after.
-Gore Vidal

My father's a proctologist. My mother is an abstract artist. That's how I view the world.
-Sandra Bernhard

My grandmother gave me five dollars and said, 'Don't tell your mother.' I told her, 'It's going to cost you more than that.'
-Steven Wright

My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six.
-Alan Alda

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son of a bitch.
-Jack Nicholson

My mother said, 'You won't amount to anything because you procrastinate.' I said, 'Just wait.'
-Judy Tenuta

My mother used to say that there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet. She's now in a maximum security twilight home in Australia.
-Barry Humphries

My mother wanted us to understand that the tragedies of your life one day have to potential to be the comic stories the next.
-Nora Ephron

My mother's menu consisted of two choices: take it or leave it.
-Buddy Hackett

My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.
-Tony Martin

My old mother always used to say, my lord, that facts are like cows. If you stare them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.
-Dorothy L. Sayers

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them.
-Rita Rudner

Never trust a journalist unless she's your mother.
-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

No man is responsible for his father. That is entirely his mother's affair.
-Margaret Turnbull

No one is more sentimentalized in America than mothers on Mother's Day, but no one is more often blamed for the culture's bad people and behavior.
-Anne Lamott

Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.
-Marge Piercy

Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.
-Dan Quayle

Sometimes the news from Washington forces me to the conclusion that your mother and your brother Ed are in charge. (cartoon caption)
-James Thurber

Sometimes you need a B-2 bomber and sometimes you need your mother.
-P.J. O'Rourke

The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly- indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.
-Arianna Huffington

The future destiny of the child is always the work of his mother. Let France have good mothers, and she will have good sons.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
-Honoré de Balzac

The love of a mother is never exhausted; it never changes, it never tires. A father may turn his back on his child, brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands: but a mother's love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world's condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still she remembers the infant smiles that once filled her bosom with rapture, the merry laugh, the joyful shout of his childhood, the opening promise of his youth; and she can never be brought to think him all unworthy.
-Washington Irving

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
-Theodore Hesburgh

The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served us nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found.
-Calvin Trillin

The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty... From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The mother is the most precious possessions of the nation, so precious that society advances its highest well-being when it protects the functions of the mother.
-Ellen Key

The mother- poor invaded soul- finds even the bathroom door no bar to hammering little hands.
-Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There are only two things a child will share willingly- communicable diseases and his mother's age.
-Dr. Benjamin Spock

There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman; and, of all loving women, there is no such slave as a mother.
-Henry Ward Beecher

There's a lot more to being a woman than being a mother, but there's a hell of a lot more to being a mother than most people suspect.
-Roseanne Barr

There's no way to repay a mother's love, or lack of it.
-Mignon McLaughlin

To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother. There's something a little unhealthy about it.
-Barry Humphries

What are we at the park for except to win? I'd trip my mother. I'd help her up, brush her off, tell her I'm sorry. But mother don't make it to third.
-Leo Durocher

Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.
-James Joyce

When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of 'disaster,' I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers- so many caring people in this world.
-Fred Rogers

When my old man wanted sex, my mother would show him a picture of me.
-Rodney Dangerfield

Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
-Alice Walker

You never get over being a child, long as you have a mother to go to.
-Sarah Orne Jewett

You're not famous until my mother has heard of you.
-Jay Leno

Your mother knows how to push your buttons because she installed them.
-Variously attributed

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A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
Bernard Berenson

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Franz Kafka

A man doesn't say I will starve myself to death to keep from starving, or that he'd spend all of his money to save money. Why should he be willing to die for the privilege of living?
Dalton Trumbo

All this talk about equality. The only thing people really have in common is that they are all going to die.
Bob Dylan

And how much better to die in all the happy period of undisillusioned youth, to go out in a blaze of light, than to have your body worn out and old and illusions shattered.
Ernest Hemingway

And sure, I know if you eat this way you'll die. So? If you don't eat this way you're still going to die. Why not die happy?
Robert Fulghum

Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann

Better to suffer than to die: that is mankind's motto.
Jean de la Fontaine

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
G.K. Chesterton

Death is not the ultimate tragedy in life. The ultimate tragedy is to die without discovering the possibilities of full growth.
Norman Cousins

Don't tell me to get ready to die. I know not what shall be. The only preparation I can make is by fulfilling my present duties. This is the everlasting life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?
William Saroyan

Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
Umberto Eco

Good God! how often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part.
Alexander Pope

Good health is simply the slowest way to die.
Variously attributed

Government, today, is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world; there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters; they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less.
H.L. Mencken

Hello. My name is Oedipus. You are my father. Prepare to die.
Nancy Lebovitz

How do you ask a man to be last man to die for a mistake?
John F. Kerry

I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
Arnold J. Toynbee

I don't know what more to say. I mean, we're all going to die in a world that is worse than when we entered it.
Daniel Berrigan

I guess I have a kind of war thing in me, but is better to die fighting for yar freedom than to be a prisoner all the days of your life.
Bob Marley

I have a lifetime appointment and I intend to serve it. I expect to die at 110, shot by a jealous husband.
Thurgood Marshall

I hold that it is permissible for each one of us to die for his faith, but not to kill for his faith.
Hermann Hesse

I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to die in a fire of suspicious origin.
Variously attributed

I quit flying years ago. I don't want to die with tourists.
Billy Bob Thornton

I think God designed our mouths to die first to help us slowly transition to the grave.
Tina Fey

I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
Michael Aulfrey

I was lying in bed with my girlfriend and she asked, 'If you could know how and when you were going to die, would you want to know?' I said no. She said 'Forget it, then.'
Steven Wright

I was no longer, if I had ever been, afraid to die: I was now afraid not to die.
Joan Didion

I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring.
Richard P. Feynman

I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
Woody Allen

I'm the one who has to die when it's time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.

Jimi Hendrix

I've always been prepared to stand up and fight for my beliefs. I'm prepared to die for them. Of course, the risk always is that someone will come along and kill you.
J.P. Donleavy

If being a kid is about learning how to live, then being a grown-up is about learning how to die.
Stephen King

If it's not growing, it's going to die.
Michael Eisner

In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.
Idi Amin Dada

It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die- and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy- and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light.
Stephen Jay Gould

It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.
Steven Biko

It is better to live rich than to die rich.
Samuel Johnson

It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
Julius Caesar

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
Horace Mann

It is my wish to die of unique causes, perhaps in a high-speed tricycle crash, a bizarre stapling incident, or as a result of inadvertently sucking my brains out through my ear while trying to untwist the vacuum hose.
Paula Poundstone

It's a proven fact that married men live longer than single guys. It's also a proven fact that married men are more willing to die.
Johnny Carson

It's a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It's the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for.
Ricky Gervais

It's better to die laughing than to live each moment in fear.
Michael Crichton

It's easier to die if others around you are dying.
Annie Proulx

It's redundant to die in Los Angeles.
Truman Capote

It's terrible to realize that you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die; and, then it's too late.
Edna Ferber

Learn as if you were to live forever; live as if you were to die tomorrow
John Wooden

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.
Paul Eldridge

Married men live longer than single men. But married men are a lot more willing to die.
Johnny Carson

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.
Samuel Butler (Novelist, 1835-1902)

Men are always ready to die for us, but not to make our lives worth having. Cheap sentiment and bad logic.
Louisa May Alcott

Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.
Lenny Bruce

No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources.
Margaret Sanger

No one wants to die. Even people who wanna go to heaven don't wanna die to get there.
Steve Jobs

Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
Hunter S. Thompson

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso

Only those are fit to live who are not afraid to die.
Douglas MacArthur

People are always dying in the Times who don't seem to die in other papers, and they die at greater length and maybe even with a little more grace.
James Reston

Pioneering basically amounts to finding new and more horrible ways to die.
John W. Campbell

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Steve Jobs

Resentment is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die.
Carrie Fisher

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.
Albert Camus

Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.
Margaret Mead

Tell me how you want to die, and I'll tell you who you are.
Emile Cioran

The crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to a flag, a leader, a religious faith or a political conviction. Man has always been prepared not only to kill but also to die for good, bad or completely futile causes. And what can be a more valid proof of the reality of the self-transcending urge than this readiness to die for an ideal?
Arthur Koestler

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain

The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.
Raymond Chandler

The idea is to die young as late as possible.
Ashley Montagu

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.
J.D. Salinger

The obligation to die must carry with it the right to live. If every citizen owes it to society that he must fight for it in case of need, then society owes to every citizen the opportunity of a livelihood. 'Unemployment,' in the case of the willing and able becomes henceforth a social crime. Every democratic Government must henceforth take as the starting point of its industrial policy, that there shall be no such thing as able bodied men and women 'out of work,' looking for occupation and unable to find it.
Stephen Leacock

The Senate seems like the place where smart people go to die.
Jon Stewart

There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.
Salvador Dali

They don't want to live; they want you to die. (re: terrorists)
Ayn Rand

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Ernest Hemingway

Those who deserve to die, die the death they deserve.
Ian Fleming

Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it.
T.H. White

To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.
Marquis de Vauvenargues

To die and part is a less evil; but to part and live, there, there is the torment.
George Lansdowne

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
Jorge Luis Borges

To die will be an awfully big adventure.
J.M. Barrie

To die with a witticism on one's lips, that is a proud victory, that is paganism's triumph; and it is also the ultimate in human relationships.
Søren Kierkegaard

To retire is to begin to die.
Pablo Casals

We all, in the end, have the freedom to die in a ditch. It's the only inalienable right we have.
Brian J. Goggin

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.
Che Guevara

We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.
Charles Bukowski

When it comes time to die, make sure that all you have to do is die.
Jim Elliot

When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.
Leonardo da Vinci

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
Joan Baez

You have to die a few times before you can really live.
Charles Bukowski

You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die.
Frank Herbert

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A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients: protocol, Geritol and alcohol.
-Adlai E. Stevenson II

Alcohol and marijuana, if used in moderation, plus loud, usually low-class music, make stress and boredom infinitely more bearable.
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity.
-Sammy Davis, Jr.

Alcohol is a very necessary article... it enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
-George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.
-Raymond Chandler

Alcohol is necessary for a man so that he can have a good opinion of himself, undisturbed be the facts.
-Finley Peter Dunne

Alcohol is really just the liquid version of Photoshop.
-Bill Murray

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
-George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.
-Frank Sinatra

Alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alcoholism isn't a spectator sport. Eventually the whole family gets to play.
-Joyce Rebeta-Burditt

Americans are a broad-minded people. They'll accept the fact that a person can be alcoholic, a dope fiend or a wife-beater, but if a man doesn't drive a car, everybody thinks that something is wrong with him.
-Art Buchwald

An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do.
-Dylan Thomas

Being a functioning alcoholic is kind of like being a paraplegic lap dancer- you can do it, just not as well as the others, really.
-Robin Williams

Coleridge was a drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire, then wrote the piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer? And if so, why?
-Bennett Cerf

Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
-Carl Jung

I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics. I break out in handcuffs.
-Robert Downey, Jr.

I am more afraid of King Alcohol than of all the bullets of the enemy.
-Thomas J. ('Stonewall') Jackson

I get little enjoyment out of women, more out of alcohol, most out of ideas.
-H.L. Mencken

I got my dog three years ago because I was drunk in a pet store. We had nine cats at the time. The cats started hiding the alcohol after that.
-Paula Poundstone

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
-Hunter S. Thompson

I just wrote one song at a time. Kinda like an alcoholic. One day at a time.
-Neil Young

I went to rehab (for alcoholism) in wine country, just to keep my options open.
-Robin Williams

I'm just saying if you're gonna have a war against drugs, have 'em against all drugs, including alcohol.
-Bill Hicks

I'm not an alcoholic, I only drink two times a year. When it's my birthday, and when it's not my birthday.
-Bill Murray

If there was a pill that allowed you to drink and not get drunk, an alcoholic would go 'What happens if you take two?'
-Robin Williams

If they took all the drugs, nicotine, alcohol and caffeine off the market for six days, they'd have to bring out the tanks to control you.
-Dick Gregory

Instead of warning pregnant women not to drink, I think female alcoholics should be told not to f*ck.
-George Carlin

It is no defense of superstition and pseudoscience to say that it brings solace and comfort to people... If solace and comfort are how we judge the worth of something, then consider that tobacco brings solace and comfort to smokers; alcohol brings it to drinkers; drugs of all kinds bring it to addicts; the fall of cards and the run of horses bring it to gamblers; cruelty and violence bring it to sociopaths. Judge by solace and comfort only and there is no behavior we ought to interfere with.
-Isaac Asimov

It's hard to argue with the government. Remember, they run the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, so they must know a thing or two about satisfying women.
-Scott Adams

Just as natural selection weeds out the weak and infirm making a stronger herd, so does alcohol improve your brain's capabilities by destroying the weaker cells.
-Variously attributed

Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
-Anton Chekhov

Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
-Roy Blount, Jr.

Milk without fat is like nonalcoholic Scotch.
-Andy Rooney

My dad was the town drunk. Most of the time that's not so bad; but New York City?
-Henny Youngman

Never refuse wine. It is an odd but universally held opinion that anyone who doesn't drink must be an alcoholic.
-P.J. O'Rourke

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.
-Alex Levine

Our national drug is alcohol. We tend to regard the use of any other drug with special horror.
-William S. Burroughs

Sanity is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.
-N.F. Simpson

Terrible climate, centuries of oppression, and the gene for alcoholism. Or as I call it, 'The luck of the Irish.'
-Conan O'Brien

The chief reason for drinking is the desire to behave in a certain way, and to be able to blame it on alcohol.
-Mignon McLaughlin

The first, indeed the only, requirement of a diet is that it should lose you weight without reducing your alcoholic intake by the smallest degree.
-Kingsley Amis

The intermediate stage between socialism and capitalism is alcoholism.
-Norman Brenner

There are essentially only two drugs that Western civilization tolerates: Caffeine from Monday to Friday to energize you enough to make you a productive member of society, and alcohol from Friday to Monday to keep you too stupid to figure out the prison that you are living in.
-Bill Hicks

There is a terrible sameness to the euphoria of alcohol and the euphoria of metaphor.
-John Cheever

Three most deleterious things of modern life in their present order of importance are: tobacco, alcohol and intemperate eating. Both alcohol and tobacco are taboo in plants.
-Henry Ford

To alcohol, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.

(From the TV series The Simpsons)
-Variously attributed

Two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity.
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Where are the reporters of yesteryear? The nail biting, acerbic, alcoholic nighthawk bastards who truly knew how to write?
-Annie Proulx

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Categories: Alcohol, Quotes on a topic

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No man is a hero to his valet.
-Jonathan Yardley

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.
-Marvin Kitman

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
-G.K. Chesterton

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A villain who shares one's guilt is inevitably more attractive than a hero convinced of one's innocence.
-Kenneth Tynan

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
-Nora Ephron

Ah. Columbus Day. Guy had no idea where he was going. Couldn't figure out where he was. Did it all on borrowed money. He is an American hero.
-Will Durst

All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired.
-G.K. Chesterton

All our heroes, all our great stories are about failure.
-Peter Carey

Canadians do not like heroes, and so they do not have them.
-George Woodcock

Chance and intrigue have produced more heroes than genius and virtue.
-Maximilien Robespierre

Children respond to heroes by thinking creatively and sometimes in breaking beyond the bounds of the impossible in their turn, and so becoming heroes themselves.
-Madeleine L'Engle

Don't ever make the mistake with people like me thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren't any and if there were, they would be killed immediately. I'm never surprised by bad behavior. I expect it.
-Gore Vidal

Eventually, somebody is going to be a hero, and somebody's going to be president. Not necessarily the same person.
-Howard Baker, Jr.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every religious tradition has gangsters and thugs. We also have humans and heroes in those same traditions. Some simple truths need to be said over and over again.
-Cornel West

Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it's be brave or else be killed.
-Margaret Mitchell

Heroes and winners aren't the same thing.
-Kevin Farrell

Heroes are sometimes created out of the scantiest materials, such as the apple William Tell never shot or the the flag Barbara Fritchie never waved.
-Gerald W. Johnson

Heroes come along when you need them.
-Ronald Steel

Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
-Kenneth Clark

Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.
-Will Rogers

History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.
-Ian Fleming

I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. They are the real heroes, and so are the families and friends who have stood by them.
-Christopher Reeve

I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.
-William S. Burroughs

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Categories: Heroes, Quotes on a topic

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