Quotes to inspire and reflect

[ On General Douglas MacArthur :] I fired himbecause he wouldn’t respect the authority ofthe President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the lawfor generals. If it was, half to three-quarters ofthem would be in jail.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

I’ve just read your lousy review [of a concert by Truman’s daughter, Margaret]. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” It seems to me that you are afrustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppycock as was in the back section of the paperyou work for it shows conclusively that you’reoff the beam and at least four of your ulcersare at work. Some day I hope to meet you.When that happens you’ll need a new nose, alot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps asupporter below!

Now they accuse me of going up and down the Nation on a whistlestop train, and the slogansthat they hurl at me most of the time are “Give’em hell, Harry.” That reputation I did not earn. All I do is to tell them [the Republicans] thetruth, and that hurts a lot worse than giving them hell.

Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from ourGovernment a fair deal.

The Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government of the de facto authority of the new state of Israel.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities orby outside pressures.

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima. . . . It is a harnessing of the basic powers of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its powers has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.

[ After the death of President Franklin D.Roosevelt :] When they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

It was the supreme expression of themediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himselfrose to his position.

The Literary “Fellow Travelers” of the Revolution.

If men were equal to-morrow and all wore thesame coats, they would wear different coats thenext day.

[ Concluding words of the Barsetshire novels :] To meBarset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are knownto my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps. . . . I have been induced to wander among them too long by my love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces.

What was it the French Minister said. If it issimply difficult it is done. If it is impossible, it shall be done.

Not until I went into the churches of Americaand heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius andpower. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good America will cease to be great.

It is not the prize that can make us happy; it is not even the winning of the prize. . . . [It is] the struggle, the long hot hour of the honest fight. . . . There is no human bliss equal to twelvehours of work with only six hours in which todo it.

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.

All those who seek to destroy the liberties of ademocratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and the shortest means to accomplish it.

In no country in the world is the love of property more active and more anxious than in the United States; nowhere does the majority display less inclination for those principles which threaten to alter, in whatever manner, the laws of property.

The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, as either a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do; this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness.

I believe that [in the United States] the socialchanges that bring nearer to the same level the father and son, the master and servant, and, in general, superiors and inferiors will raise woman and make her more and more the equal of man.

If I were asked . . . to what the singularprosperity and growing strength of that people[the Americans] ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.

Democratic nations care but little for whathas been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. . . . Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man ofrank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The time will therefore come when onehundred and fifty millions of men will be living in North America, equal in condition, the progeny of one race, owing their origin to the same cause, and preserving the same civilization, the same language, the same religion, the same habits, the same manners, and imbued with the same opinions, propagated under the same forms.

There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans. . . . Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

The jury . . . may be regarded as a gratuitous public school, ever open, in which every juror learns to exercise his rights, enters into daily communication with the most learned and enlightened members of the upper classes, and becomes practically acquainted with the laws of his country.

Scarcely any question arises in the UnitedStates which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate; hence all parties are obliged to borrow the ideas, and even the language usual in judicial proceedings, in their daily controversies. . . . The language of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of the law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, gradually penetrates beyond their walls into the bosom of society, where it descends to the lowest classes, so that the whole people contracts the habits and the tastes of the magistrate.

In America there are no nobles or literarymen, and the people is apt to mistrust thewealthy; lawyers consequently form the highest political class, and the most cultivated circle ofsociety. They have therefore nothing to gain by innovation, which adds a conservative interest to their natural taste for public order. If I were asked where I place the American aristocracy, I should reply without hesitation, that it is notcomposed of the rich, who are united together by no common tie, but that it occupies the judicial bench and the bar.

The more we reflect upon all that occursin the United States, the more shall we be persuaded that the lawyers as a body, form the most powerful, if not the only counterpoise to the democratic element. In that country we perceive how eminently the legal profession is qualified by its powers, and even by its defects, to neutralize the vices which are inherent in popular government.

I cannot believe that a republic could subsist at the present time, if the influence of lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.

[ Section title :] Tyranny of the Majority.

In countries where associations are free, secret societies are unknown. In America there are numerous factions, but no conspiracies.

There is no medium between servitudeand extreme licence; in order to enjoy theinestimable benefits which the liberty of the press ensures, it is necessary to submit to the inevitable evils which it engenders.

I have never been more struck by the goodsense and the practical judgment of the Americans than in the ingenious devices by which they elude the numberless difficulties resulting from their Federal Constitution.

The power vested in the American courtsof justice of pronouncing a statute to be unconstitutional, forms one of the most powerful barriers which has ever beendevised against the tyranny of political assemblies.

I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men, and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property.

How is it possible, woman, in the awful andmagnificent times we live in, to be preoccupied exclusively with the piddling?

You Could Look It Up.

He knows all about art, but he doesn’t knowwhat he likes.

Then, with that faint fleeting smile playingabout his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

He doesn’t know anything except facts.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio was the night the bed fellon my father.

The War Between Men and Women.

Revolution . . . ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, fromhaving heard what had been done beforecarried to a still greater excess the refinementof their inventions, as manifested to thecunning of their enterprises and the atrocityof their reprisals. Words had to change theirordinary meaning and to take that which wasnow given them.

All right, have it your way—you heard a sealbark!