Quotes to inspire and reflect

The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.

Liberty, n. One of Imagination’s most precious possessions.

A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest—at the command—of his head.

Leisure and curiosity might soon make great advances in useful knowledge, were they not diverted by minute emulation and laborious trifles.

To be at ease is better than to be at business. Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else.

Friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command.

A man, though wise, should never be ashamed / of learning more, and must unbend his mind.

When a man’s busy, why leisure / Strikes him as wonderful pleasure: / ’Faith, and at leisure once is he? / Straightway he wants to be busy.

Trees and fields tell me nothing; men are my teachers.

Freedom to learn is the first necessity of guaranteeing that man himself shall be self-reliant enough to be free.

A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.

As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so change of studies a dull brain.

Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so study without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

Make your friends your teachers and mingle the pleasures of conversation with the advantages of instruction.

Learn as though you would never be able to master it; hold it as though you would be in fear of losing it.

Never believe on faith, / see for yourself! / What you yourself don't learn / you don't know.

The great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself recreates them.

To learn is a natural pleasure, not confined to philosophers, but common to all men.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

We cannot all be masters, nor all masters / Cannot be truly followed.

The leader, mingling with the vulgar host, / Is in the common mass of matter lost.

A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says, “I was beaten.” He does not say, “My men were beaten.” Thus speaks a real man.

There are men, who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.

If you command wisely you’ll be obeyed cheerfully.

Men are of no importance. What counts is who commands.

The superior man is easy to serve and difficult to please.

The man who commands efficiently must have obeyed others in the past, and the man who obeys dutifully is worthy of being some day a commander.

It is the just doom of laziness and gluttony to be inactive without ease and drowsy without tranquility.

Don’t yield to that alluring witch, Laziness, or else be prepared to surrender all that you have won in your better moments.

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

Flee laziness, which, while it produces an immediate delight, ends in the sorrow of repentance. And know that nature without exercise is a see 1 shut up in the pod, and art without practice is nothing.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.

The world is shocked, or amused, by the sight of saintly old people hindering in the name of morality the removal of obvious brutalities from a legal system.

It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.

Let all the laws be clear, uniform, and precise; to interpret laws is almost always to corrupt them.

The opinion of all lawyers, the unanimous cry of the nation, and the good of the state, are in themselves a law.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calligraphically bewigged.

It never occurred to any Enlightenment figure in the eighteenth century that law was not preferable to man.

Good laws lead to the making of better ones; bad ones bring about worse.

Law was once introduced without reason, and has become reasonable.

Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.

Our nation is founded on the principle that observance of the law is the eternal safeguard of liberty and defiance of the law is the surest road to tyranny.

Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the laws. Others sense their own laws within them.

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.

Every new time will give its law.

The people should fight for their law as for their city wall.