Quotes to inspire and reflect

Make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation. Thomas H.

I was so naive as a kid I used to sneak behind the barn and do nothing.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

War is just to those to whom war is necessary.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

If we had less statesmanship we could get along with fewer battleships.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. . . But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming-- and a little mad.

There is an astonishing imagination, even in the science of mathematics... We repeat, there was far more imagination in the head of Archimedes than in that of Homer.

Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.

God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.

We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

The only completely consistent people are the dead.

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

It is fatal to be right when the rest of the world is wrong.

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.

Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth.

Political language - and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.

I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it.

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

It might be said that Lord Rosebery outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty.

[On recognizing China] But if you recognize anyone it does not mean you like them. For instance, we all recognize the right honorable gentleman the member for Ebbw Vale.

If heaven is going to be full of people like Hardie, well, the Almighty can have them to himself.

There but for the grace of God goes God.

I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue.

[He] looks at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being.

Your motivation? Your motivation is your pay packet on Friday. Now get on with it.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.

I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.

Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls.

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.

What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

I think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

no man of genuinely superior intelligence has ever been an actor. Even supposing a young man of appreciable mental powers to be lured upon the stage, as philosophers are occasionally lured into bordellos, his mind would be inevitably and almost immediately destroyed by the gaudy nonsense issuing from his mouth every night