Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

When the Presidential virus attacks the system there is a tendency for the patient in his fever to move from the Right or the Left to the Center where the curative votes are.

[President George] Bush talked to us like we were a bunch of morons and we ate it up. Can you imagine, the Pledge of Allegiance, read my lips—can you imagine such crap in this day and age?

The President is the representative of the whole nation and he’s the only lobbyist that all the 160 million people in this country have.

I don’t know what I expected, but my first morning in the Oval Office had a surprising ring of familiarity to it. It reminded me a lot of my job as governor.

The function and responsibility of the President is to set before the American people the unfinished business, the things we must do if we are going to succeed as a nation.

Whatever the political affiliation of our next President, whatever his views may be on all the issues and problems that rush in upon us, he must above all be the chief executive in every sense of the word.

Presidency, n. The greased pig in the field game of American politics.

Do not say, “It is morning,” and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.

The present offers itself to our touch for only an instant of time and then eludes the senses.

The passing moment is all we can be sure of; it is only common sense to extract its utmost value from it; the future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

Each day the world is born anew / For him who takes it rightly.

With the Past, as past, 1 have nothing to do; nor with the Future as future. I live now, and will verify all past history in my own moments.

Today is yesterday's pupil.

The vanishing, volatile froth of the Present which any shadow will alter, any thought blow away, any event annihilate, is every' moment converted into the Adamantine Record of the Past.

We can see well into the past; we can guess shrewdly into the future; but that which is rolled up and muffled in impenetrable folds is today.

It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis.

I would not fear nor wish my fate, / But boldly say each night, / To-morrow let my sun his beams display, / Or in clouds hide them; I have lived today.

The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we are more tender towards children and old people than to those who are in the prime of life.

Remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment.

Count no mortal happy till / he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.

It is not the weight of the future or the past that is pressing upon you, but ever that of the present alone. Even this burden, too, can be lessened if you confine it strictly to its own limits.

Knowledge humanizes mankind, and reason inclines to mildness; but prejudices eradicate every tender disposition.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudices, eradicate virtue, honesty, and religion.

There is no prejudice so strong as that which arises from a fancied exemption from all prejudice.

Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.

Prejudice is never easy unless it can pass itself off for reason.

As in political so in literary action a man wins Iriends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

There are as many preferences as there are men.

The preaching of divines helps to preserve well- inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or never reclaims the vicious.

There is no banquet but some dislike something in it.

Go into one of our cool churches, and begin to count the words that might be spared, and in most places the entire sermon will go.

The sermon which I write inquisitive of truth is good a year after, but that which is written because a sermon must be writ is musty the next day.

We offer up prayers to God only because we have made Him after our own image. We treat Him like a pasha, or a sultan, who is capable of being exasperated and appeased.

Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives, and the sincerest part of our devotion.

There are few men who durst publish to the world the prayers they make to Almighty God.

Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, ‘‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!”

How ready is heaven to those that pray!

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.

Men have prayed in prison, men have prayed in slums and concentration camps. It's only the middle class who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.

Affliction teacheth a wicked person sometime to pray; prosperity never.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood arid applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Prayer should be the key of the day and the lock of the night.

Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

None can pray well but he that lives well.