Quotes to inspire and reflect

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

The man of business . . . goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.

We do not seek for truth in the abstract. . . .

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

[ Question asked by Shaw to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis regarding his wife :] Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

But this invites the occult mind,

Backwardly tolerant, Faustus was expelled

California love!

Our throats were tight as tourniquets.

O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know,

O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts

For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,

As for me, I am a watercolor.

You all did see, that on the Lupercal

You, Doctor Martin, walk

Set forth three children under the moon, three cherubs drawn by Michelangelo, done this with her legs spread out in the terrible months in the chapel.

If we cannot eschew hatred, at least let us eschew group hatred.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;

Only rhythm brings about a poetic short-circuit and transforms the copper into gold, the words into life.

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,

Tanta stultitia mortalium est!

I chose my black people struggling, my country people, all country people, in the world.

[ Of his need to raise money to pay huge debts by writing :] My own right hand shall do it.

When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: “Man.” That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus.

Tell that to the marines—the sailors won’t believe it.

Rouse the lion from his lair.

The criminals came in so fast that they were fain to execute them first and afterwards try them at leisure.

Sea of upturned faces.

“That sounds like nonsense, my dear.”

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

And dar’st thou, then,

Your Lordship will probably recollect where the Oriental tale occurs, of a Sultan who consulted Solomon on the proper inscription for a signet-ring, requiring that the maxim which it conveyed should be at once proper for moderating the presumption of prosperity and tempering the pressure of adversity. The apophthegm supplied by the Jewish sage was, I think, admirably adapted for both purposes, being comprehended in the words “And this also shall pass away.”

In peace, Love tunes the shepherd’s reed;

For him no Minstrel raptures swell;

May memory restore again and again

The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation . . . that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within , incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.

Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indication of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved.

The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history, stripped of all phrases. He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.

Whatever is not forbidden is permitted.

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens .

As years come in and years go out

Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht .

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word “daffy-down-dilly.” It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a “daffy-down-dilly.” Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you never to do it.