Quotes to inspire and reflect

Some have meat and cannot eat,

Man’s inhumanity to man

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,

John Anderson my jo, John,

A man’s a man for a’ that.

Green grow the rashes, O,

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,

Gie me ae spark o’ Nature’s fire,

Gin a body meet a body

O saw ye bonnie Lesley,

Freedom and Whisky gang thegither!

Ye banks and braes o’ bonny Doon,

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,

Then gently scan your brother man,

Address to the unco guid.

It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.

An event has happened, upon which it is difficult to speak, and impossible to be silent.

The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.

Not merely a chip of the old ‘block’, but the old block itself.

Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny.

The people are the masters.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.

Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatsoever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.

Of this stamp is the cant of Not men, but measures; a sort of charm by which many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

Laws, like houses, lean on one another.

Ambition can creep as well as soar.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

We begin our public affections in our families. No cold relation is a zealous citizen.

Our patience will achieve more than our force.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.

Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field.

Society is indeed a contract … it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.

In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

The age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

This barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Custom reconciles us to everything.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.