Quotes to inspire and reflect

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?

States like these [Iraq, Iran, and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

We have seen their kind before. They’re the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.

I want justice. And there’s an old poster out West, that I recall, that said, “Wanted, Dead or Alive.”

[ After a person in the crowd yelled “I can’t hear you” :] I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

It is time for us to win the first war of the 21st century.

Now, some say it is unfair to hold disadvantaged children to rigorous standards. I say it is discrimination to require anything less—the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?

What is a ship but a prison?

Hinc quam sit calamus saevior ense patet .

His locked, lettered, braw brass collar,

Why doth one man’s yawning make another yawn?

[ On the younger William Pitt’s maiden speech in Parliament, Feb. 1781 :] Not merely a chip of the old “block,” but the old block itself.

Manners are of more importance than laws. . . . Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives.

To innovate is not to reform . The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything, and they left nothing, no, nothing at all, unchanged .

Old religious factions are volcanoes burnt out.

It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over two hundred thousand. True, if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem of arithmetic.

To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than subtle disputants.

[ Of the American colonies :] In no country, perhaps, in the world is the law so general a study.

This study [of law] renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defense, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences; a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding, than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion.

Here this extraordinary man [Charles Townsend], then Chancellor of the Exchequer, found himself in great straits. To please universally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men. However he attempted it.

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

I was cured all right.

But, gentlemen, enough of words. Actions speak louder than. Action now.

Then I looked at its top sheet, and there was the name—A CLOCKWORK ORANGE . . . “—The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen—.”

In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves For a bright manhood, there is no such word As— fail .

In other countries poverty is a misfortune—with us it is a crime.

[ Opening line of book :] It was a dark and stormy night.

I’d be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.

He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns, not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.

People should be taught what is, not what should be. All my humor is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I’d be standing in the breadline—right back of J. Edgar Hoover.

[ On his drug addiction :] I’ll die young but it’s like kissing God.

Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Well, less is more, Lucrezia.

She thanked men,—good! but thanked

Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

She had

Then owls and bats

What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river?

Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said.

[ King Louis XVI, played by Mel Brooks, speaking :] It’s good to be the king.

[ Lili von Shtupp, played by Madeline Kahn, speaking to black cowboy Bart, played by Cleavon Little :] Is it true how zey say zat you people are . . . gifted? Oh! It’s twue! It’s twue!