Quotes to inspire and reflect

Following each divorce, he discovered anew that unmarried a man had to take women places: out to restaurants, for walks in the park, to museums and the opera and the movies—not only had to go to the movies but afterwards had to discuss them.

[Romance] was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards. Like bridge you had to pretend you were playing for money or playing for some stakes.

Why one man rather than another? It was odd. You find yourself involved with a fellow for life just because he was the one you met when you were nineteen.

Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part.

The Hudson River is like old October and tawny Indians in their camping places long ago; it is like long pipes and old tobacco; it is like cool depths and opulence; it is like the shimmer of liquid green on summer days.

Play out the game, act well your part, and if the gods have blundered, we will not.

The rights which a man arrogates to himself are relative to the duties which he sets himself, and to the tasks which he feels capable of performing.

Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.

This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of eveiy man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.

1 am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as a self-governing people to hear everything relevant.

In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves and to our country.

If the government can set aside some spot for a elk to be a elk without being bothered, or a buffalo to be a buffalo without being shot down, there ought to be some place where a Negro can be a Negro without being Jim Crowed.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it—when unpopular.

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Right is right only when entire.

We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.

Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

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

Mockery is often the result of a poverty of wit.

The talent of turning men into ridicule, and exposing to laughter those one converses with, is the qualification of little ungenerous tempers.

In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel.

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.

To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations—though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

We live in a hemisphere whose own revolution has given birth to the most powerful force of the modern age—the search for the freedom and self-fulfillment of man.

The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

Everywhere revolutions are painful yet fruitful gestations of a people: they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.

Though a revolution may call itself “national,” it always marks the victory of a single party.

A non-violent revolution is not a program of seizure of power. It is a program of transformation of relationships, ending in a peaceful transfer of power.

The Keynesian Revolution occurred at the moment in history when other change had made it indispensable

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.

Plots, true or false, are necessary things, / To raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.

If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.

Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him- self'and to lose himself in his ideas.

Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.