Quotes to inspire and reflect

When the reality of power has been surrendered, it’s playing a dangerous game to seek to retain the appearance of it; the external aspect of vigor can sometimes support a debilitated body, but most often it manages to deal it the final blow.

To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.

The central opposition between magic and science is the opposition between power and knowledge.

For the mighty even to give way is grace.

There is no evidence to support the belief that [Soviet Premier Nikita] Khrushchev ever questioned

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

Bankruptcy is a sacred state, a condition beyond conditions, as theologians might say, and attempts to investigate it are necessarily obscene, like spiritualism.

Security, the chief pretence of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone’s head.

The poor don’t know that their function in life is to exercise our generosity.

Poverty with joy isn’t poverty at all. The poor man is not one who has little, but one who hankers after more.

The more humanity owes him [the poor man], the more society denies him. Every door is shut against him, even when he has a right to its being opened: and if he ever obtains justice, it is with much greater difficulty than others obtain favours.

In a change of government, the poor change nothing beyond the change of their master.

Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure—above all, it means loneliness.

Short of genius, a rich man cannot imagine poverty.

We have two American flags always; one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy.

Political sovereignty is but a mockery without the means of meeting poverty and illiteracy and disease. Self-determination is but a slogan if the future holds no hope.

Of the woes / Of unhappy poverty, none is more difficult to bear/Than that it heaps men with ridicule.

Seldom do people discern / Eloquence under a threadbare cloak.

Poverty has, in large cities, very different appearances; it is often concealed in splendour, and often in extravagance.

Slow rises worth by poverty depressed.

Poor men’s reasons are not heard.

This growing poverty in the midst of growing population constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty. For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom.

Those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, / Ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues.

Is there not yet oppression in the country? A starving of men and pampering of dogs?

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

I didn’t feel poor, I just felt that I didn’t have any money.

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

Man is not the sum of what he has already, but rather the sum of what he does not yet have, of what he could have.

To possess, is past the instant / We achieve the Joy—/ Immortality contented / Were Anomaly.

When we desire or solicit any thing, our minds run wholly on the good side or circumstances of it; when it is obtained, our minds run wholly on the bad ones.

Though both erotica and pornography refer to verbal or pictorial representations of sexual behavior, they are as different as a room with doors open and one with doors locked. The first might be a home, but the second could only be a prison.

One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one fine day.

Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiological, and will occur in one way or another whatever the state of the law may be.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn’t be so grossly over-populated as it is now.

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

What is popular is not necessarily vulgar; and that which we try to rescue from fatal obscurity had in general much better remain where it is.

There must be something good in a thing that pleases so many; even if it cannot be explained, it is certainly enjoyed.

The man with a host of friends who slaps on the back everybody he meets is regarded as the friend of nobody.

One of the most fascinating aspects of politicianwatching is trying to determine to what extent any politician believes what he says.

In a society like ours, politics is improvisation. To the artful dodger rather than the true believer goes the prize.

Why is it that when political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is always wheeled into action?

A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

[Wjomen are never again going to be mindless coffee-makers or mindless policy-makers in politics.

[Tjhe state Republican chairman, Gaylord Parkinson, postulated what he called the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.

The future lies with those wise political leaders who realize that the great public is interested more in government than in politics.

There are men who desire power simply for the sake of the happiness it will bring; these belong chiefly to political parties.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.