Quotes to inspire and reflect

Great men have to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas, or perform their great deeds.

Greatness brings no profit to people. / God indeed, when in anger, brings / greater ruin to great men’s houses.

No great thing is created suddenly.

When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.

Let him be great, and love shall follow him.

The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Desire of greatness is a godlike sin.

Great offices will have great talents.

Men worship the shows of great men; thd most disbelieve that there is any reality of great men to worship.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

He is greatest who is most often in men’s good thoughts.

Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short.

Men in great places are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.

I will be small in small things, great among great.

The great man is too often all of a piece; it is the little man that is a bundle of contradictory elements. He is inexhaustible. You never come to the end of the surprises he has in store for you.

From the height from which the great look down on the world all the rest of mankind seem equal.

The privilege and pleasure / That we treasure beyond measure / Is to run on little errands for the Ministers of State.

A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man.

For all that you have done, I am ever mindful. How can you doubt that I ever forgot it—but don’t remind me of it too much at this time.

When the house of a great one collapses / Many little ones are slain.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted.

Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave. / The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

God give you pardon from gratitude / and other mild forms of servitude.

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

Man is about the same, in the main, whether with despotism, or whether with freedom.

Grace is the absence of everything that indicates pain or difficulty, hesitation or incongruity.

Governments are best classified by considering who are the “somebodies” they are in fact endeavoring to satisfy.

The pleasure of governing must certainly be exquisite, if we may judge from the vast numbers who are eager to be concerned with it.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

History is replete with proofs, from Cato the Elder to Kennedy the Younger, that if you scratch a statesman you find an actor, but it is becoming harder and harder, in our time, to tell government from show business.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries in itself the causes of its destruction.

In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative.

It is the purpose of the government to see that not only the legitimate interests of the few are protected but that the welfare and rights of the many are conserved.

I have always thought of government as a kind of organism with an insatiable appetite for money, whose natural state is to grow forever unless you do something to starve it.

It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.

Virtue alone is not sufficient for the exercise of government; laws alone cannot carry themselves into practice.

It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.

no form of government / matters nearly as much / as the spirit and intelligence / brought to the administration / of any form of government.

It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Chaos and ineptitude are anti-human; but so too is a superlatively efficient government, equipped with all the products of a highly developed technology.

Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It’s the system that functions in the pinches that survives.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Only one in command: that’s the way in the home / And the way in the state when it must find / Measures best for mankind.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details, which must be attended to if rules have to be adapted to different men, instead of indiscriminately subjecting all men to the same rule.

In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.