Quotes to inspire and reflect

In case of a forced retreat of Red Army units, all rolling stock must be evacuated; to the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or a gallon of fuel. . . . In occupied regions conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices. They must be hounded and annihilated at every step and all their measures frustrated.

History shows that there are no invincible armies.

You are engineers of human souls.

I have taken great care not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

To bring aid to everyone in need far surpasses the powers and advantage of a private person. . . . So the case of the poor falls upon society as a whole.

Of Human Bondage.

Deus, sive Natura .

The law is the survival of the fittest . . . . The law is not the survival of the “better” or the “stronger,” if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect.

But the skin of progress

Progress . . . is not an accident, but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a part of nature.

Someone asked Sophocles, “How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?” He replied, “Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.”

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, “social justice.”

The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room, they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize over their pedagogues.

[ “Last words” :] Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.

The rest of the world lives to eat, while I eat to live.

[ On looking at an expensive shop :] How many things I can do without!

With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eyes is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.

It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers, to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expence either by sumptuary laws, or by prohibiting the importation of foreign luxuries. They are themselves always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society. Let them look well after their own expence, and they may safely trust private people with theirs. If their own extravagance does not ruin the state, that of their subjects never will.

A lady asked me why, on most occasions, I wore black.

The rich . . . divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal proportions among all its inhabitants.

Jane, Jane,

[ Of Richard Porson :] There were moments when his memory failed him; and he would forget to eat dinner, though he never forgot a quotation.

The greater philosopher a man is, the more difficult it is for him to answer the foolish questions of common people.

Buildings will collapse, power plants will stop generating electricity. Generals will drop atomic bombs on their own populations. Mad revolutionaries will run in the streets, crying fantastic slogans. I have often thought it would begin in New York. This metropolis has all the symptoms of a mind gone berserk.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Near them, on the sand,

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert.

[ Of Archibald Primrose, Fifth Earl of Rosebery :] [A] man who never missed a chance of missing an opportunity.

[ When Isadora Duncan regretted that they could not have a child together, saying, “Think what a child it would be, with my body and your brain” :] I know, but suppose the child was so unlucky as to have my body and your brain?

We speak of war gods, but not of mathematician gods, poet or painter gods, or inventor gods. Nobody has ever called me a god; I am at best a sage. We worship all the conquerors, but have only one Prince of Peace, who was horribly put to death, and if he lived in these islands, would have some difficulty in getting exempted from military service as a conscientious objector.

[ Referring to film producer Samuel Goldwyn :] Well, Mr. Goldwyn, there is not much use in going on. There is this difference between you and me: You are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.

In Hampshire, Hereford, and Hertford, Hurricanes hardly ever happen.

[ Henry Higgins, played by Leslie Howard, speaking :] Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?

If you don’t begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you are a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

Democracy, then, cannot be government by the people: it can only be government by consent of the governed. Unfortunately, when democratic statesmen propose to govern us by our own consent, they find that we don’t want to be governed at all, and that we regard rates and taxes and rents and death duties as intolerable burdens. What we want to know is how little government we can get along with without being murdered in our beds.

I am the sort of man who devotes his life to the salvation of humanity in the abstract, and can’t bear to give a penny to a starving widow.

I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.

[ Referring to World War I :] When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

We all profess the deepest regard for liberty; but no sooner does anyone claim to exercise it than we declare with horror that we are in favor of liberty but not of licence, and demand indignantly whether true freedom can ever mean freedom to do wrong, to preach sedition and immorality, to utter blasphemy. Yet this is exactly what liberty does mean.

I’ve got a soul: don’t tell me I haven’t. Cut me up and you can’t find it. Cut up a steam engine and you can’t find the steam. But, by George, it makes the engine go.

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns as [Samuel] Johnson did when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit.

If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

On Christmas Day it is proclaimed that Christianity established peace on earth and good will towards men. Next day the Christian, with refreshed soul, goes back to the manufacture of submarines and torpedoes.

It’s usually pointed out that women are not fit for political power, and ought not to be trusted with a vote because they are politically ignorant, socially prejudiced, narrow-minded, and selfish. True enough, but precisely the same is true of men!