Quotes to inspire and reflect

Life is a toy made of glass; it appears to be of inestimable price, but in reality it is very cheap.

When we demand liberty of a person as a constitutional right, we are taking away from the officials their liberty to chop off people's heads.

The true charter of liberty is independence, maintained by force.

The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.

Liberty plucks justice by the nose; / The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart / Goes all decorum.

It must be admitted that liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

People demand freedom only when they have no power.

Our government is based on the belief that a people can be both strong and free, that civilized men need no restraint but that imposed by themselves against abuse of freedom.

Martyred many times must be / Who would keep his country free.

Liberty is the right to do what the laws permit.

Liberation is not deliverance.

The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act, as the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep was a black one.

Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Learning is its own exceeding great reward.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

If you command wisely you’ll be obeyed cheerfully.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him.

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.