Quotes to inspire and reflect

I could not dig: I dared not rob:

It’s clever, but is it Art?

If any question why we died,

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

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

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

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?’

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

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 …

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.

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

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

It was involuntary. They sank my boat.

The beat generation.

Ich bin ein Berliner.

In free society art is not a weapon … Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

All this will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier.

Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free! The Story of My Life (1902) ch. 4

‘Load every rift’ of your subject with ore.

The only means of strengthening one’s intellect is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts. Not a select party.

Call the world if you please ‘The vale of soul-making’.

Fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

The Wordsworthian or egotistical sublime.

It is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches … Rain! Rain! Rain!

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.