Quotes to inspire and reflect

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

All reactionaries are paper tigers.

In the conventional wisdom of conservatives, the modern search for security is regularly billed as the greatest single threat to economic progress.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

All conservatives are such from personal defects. They have been effeminated by position or nature ... and can only, like invalids, act on the defensive.

Conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow, disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism.

In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.

Everything is perfect coming from the hands of the Creator; everything degenerates in the hands of man.

A.mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.

The sower may mistake and sow his peas crookedly: the peas make no mistake, but come up and show his line.

I do not know the man so bold / He dare in lonely Place / That awful stranger Consciousness / Deliberately face—.

Quite often good things have hurtful consequences. There are instances of men who have been ruined by their money or killed by their courage.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

The more estimable the offender, the greater the torment.

It is only because man believes himself to be free, not because he is free, that he experiences remorse and pricks of conscience.

The bite of conscience teaches men to bite.

Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature, proceed from custom.

A state of conscience is higher than a state of innocence.

Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

If we cannot be powerful and happy and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.

Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent it seldom has justice enough to accuse.

A good conscience is the best divinity.

Conscience is a just but a weak judge. Weakness leaves it powerless to execute its judgment.

God has delegated himself to a million deputies.

Nothing but man of all invenomed things / Doth work upon itself, with inborne stings.

Minds are conquered not by arms, but by love and magnanimity.

The right of conquest has no foundation other than the right of the strongest.

In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.

Triumph cannot help being cruel.

Dead men have no victory.

’Tis man’s to fight, but Heaven’s to give success.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

Of representative assemblies may not this good be said: That contending parties in a country do thereby ascertain one another’s strength? They fight there, since fight they must, by petition, parliamentary eloquence, not by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon-.

We arrange our lives—even the best and boldest men and women that exist, just as much as the most limited—with reference to what society conventionally rules and makes right.

Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

Try not to beat back the current, yet be not drowned in its waters; / Speak with the speech of the world, think with the thoughts of the few.

No man on earth is truly free, / All are slaves of money or necessity. / Public opinion or fear of prosecution / forces each one, against his conscience, to conform.

Conformity is the ape of harmony.

The great majority of men grow up and grow old in seeming and following.

Shyness has laws: you can only give yourself, tragically, to those who least understand.

Abnormal, adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested.

No receipt [recipe] openeth the heart, but a true friend, to whom you may impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes, suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever lieth upon the heart to oppress it.

It is not the criminal things which are hardest to confess, but the ridiculous and shameful.

Blessed are the peacemakers, / For they have freed themselves from sinful wrath.

The confession of one man humbles all.

Whenever Nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self- conceit.

Conceit is vanity driven from all other shifts, and forced to appeal to itself for admiration.