Quotes to inspire and reflect

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

All kings is mostly rapscallions.

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.

Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four.

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.

I didn’t fire him [General MacArthur] because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail.

It’s a recession when your neighbour loses his job; it’s a depression when you lose yours.

Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

I never give them [the public] hell. I just tell the truth, and they think it is hell.

A statesman is a politician who’s been dead 10 or 15 years.

If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

All the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

You [the Mensheviks] are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!

to reporters the day after his accession to the Presidency on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt:

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.

Never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.

Their starting point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems to be marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

Experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform.

Humour is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity.

Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?

It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.

Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.

Her own mother lived the latter years of her life in the horrible suspicion that electricity was dripping invisibly all over the house.

You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.

Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.

Happiness depends on being free, and freedom depends on being courageous.

I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another to hear.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.

Our life is frittered away by detail …

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulette I could have worn.

I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience.

Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society.

The three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.