Quotes to inspire and reflect

They shut the road through the woods

A fool there was and he made his prayer

One man in a thousand, Solomon says,

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie.

If blood be the price of admiralty,

How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz?

Five and twenty ponies,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Such boasting as the Gentiles use,

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

The tumult and the shouting dies—

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,

Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware

On the road to Mandalay,

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls

For the Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady

If you can keep your head when all about you

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made

God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,

It’s clever, but is it Art?

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

If any question why we died,

Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin’ over Africa—

He’s an absent-minded beggar and his weaknesses are great.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land … So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

Cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood …

If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

The Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Judicial decrees may not change the heart; but they can restrain the heartless.

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

Nothing to do but work,

Poems are made by fools like me,

I think that I shall never see

In the long run we are all dead.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Lenin was right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.

I work for a Government I despise for ends I think criminal.