Sourced and curated.

The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.

They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

1920

★ 1.1

Interview · Magazine

Charlie Parker

Downbeat Magazine · 1949

★ 1.1

Almost a year ago, in company with 16 free nations of Europe, we launched the greatest cooperative economic program in history. The purpose of that unprecedented effort is to invigorate and strengthen democracy in Europe, so that the free people of that continent can resume their rightful place in the forefront of civilization and can contribute once more to the security and welfare of the world.

1949

★ 1.1

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

1908

★ 1.2

Essay · Philosophical literature

The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want.

1910

★ 1.2

Dale Carnegie

How to Win Friends and Influence People · 1936

★ 1.2

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 1.3

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 1.3

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is Left out of it.

We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.

1897

★ 1.3

Speech

1900

★ 1.3

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

The Mysterious Stranger · 1910

★ 1.3

No man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad.

1910

★ 1.3

The chances are that a man cannot get into congress now without resorting to arts and means that should render him unfit to go there.

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today · 1873

★ 1.3

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

1876

★ 1.3

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 1.3

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 1.3

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 1.3

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 1.4

When in doubt, tell the truth.

The other America, the America of poverty, is hidden today in a way that it never was before. Its millions are socially invisible to the rest of us... The very development of American society is creating a new kind of blindness about poverty. The poor are increasingly slipping out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 1.4

Sociology

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 1.7

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

Omar Bradley

1948

★ 1.8

Lecture

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

My feelings are too intense. I hate bitterly, I love too exaltingly, I pity to extravagantly, I hurt too painfully. We American blacks call that "soul."

1952

★ 1.8

Autobiography and memoir

Chester Himes

1972

★ 1.8

Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer.

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here for long.

1946

★ 1.9

Walker Evans

1966

★ 1.9

I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.

Martha Gellhorn

1969

★ 1.9

Interview · Magazine

I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power, of the aesthetically rejected subject.

Walker Evans

1974

★ 1.9

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

Melvin Kranzberg

1986

★ 1.9

Speech

Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old, and weary, and broken of heart, whose burdens be heavy upon them, and who would lie down and be at rest.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe- Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew.

1883

★ 1.9

Poem · Children's literature

Eugene Field

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod · 1889

★ 1.9

Letter · Religious literature

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history...and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

1910

★ 1.9

Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Four Quartets · 1940

★ 1.9

The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses It hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreigh dead men. The sea has many voices.

The release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.

Four Quartets · 1941

★ 1.9

1945

★ 1.9

The first half of this century has been marked by unprecedented and brutal attacks on the rights of man, and by the two most frightful wars in history. The supreme need of our time is for men to learn to live together in peace and harmony.

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters. Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

Communism subjects the individual to arrest without lawful cause, punishment without trial, and forced labor as the chattel of the state. It decrees what information he shall receive, what art he shall produce, what leaders he shall follow, and what thoughts he shall think.

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

We believe that all men have a right to equal justice under law and equal opportunity to share in the common good. We believe that all men have a right to freedom of thought and expression. We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God.

Second Inaugural Address of Harry Truman · 1949

★ 1.9

Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from our Government a fair deal.

1949 State of the Union · 1949

★ 1.9

What we are doing in Korea is this: we are trying to prevent a third world war.

The Marshall Plan will go down in history as one of America's greatest contributions to the peace of the world.

1951

★ 1.9

Autobiography and memoir

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

1955

★ 1.9

Newspaper

Observer · 1958

★ 1.9

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

A Tramp Abroad · 1880

★ 2.0

1906

★ 2.0

There's a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody. You'll be a long time finding it, sometimes.

1910

★ 2.0

Having found the bomb we have used it.

Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix.

1945

★ 2.0

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

1972

★ 2.0

Magazine

Florynce Kennedy

1973

★ 2.0

What a good thing Adam had—when he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

1867

★ 2.1

Unexpected money is a delight. The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more.

1878

★ 2.1

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little by way of example.

A Tramp Abroad · 1880

★ 2.1

The book of nature tells us distinctly that God cares not a rap for us—nor for any living creature.

1898

★ 2.1

One never ceases to make a hero of one's self (in private).

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today · 1873

★ 2.2

We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 2.2

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

1895

★ 2.2

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 2.2

There is no such thing as "the Queen's English." The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 2.2

Be good and you will be lonesome.

The Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government of the de facto authority of the new state of Israel.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 2.3

1948

★ 2.7

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men was impaneled—a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the Indians in the sage-brush and the stones in the streets were cognizant of!

1894

★ 2.9

Travel literature

1872

★ 2.9

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness! Morning by morning new mercies I see; All I have needed thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 2.9

Hymn · Song

Thomas O. Chisholm

Great is Thy Faithfulness · 1923

★ 3.5

The years that are gone seem like dreams—if one might go on sleeping and dreaming—but to wake up and find—oh! well! Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.

Kate Chopin

The Awakening · 1899

★ 3.5

Political literature · Philosophical literature

Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.

1944

★ 3.5

Political literature

I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt? What would Jesus Christ have preached if He had taken a poll in the land of Israel?

1944

★ 3.5

1954

★ 3.5

Our gadget-filled paradise suspended in a hell of international insecurity.

New York is the greatest city in the world-especially for my people. Where else, in this grand and glorious land of ours, can I get on the subway, sit in any part of the train I please, get off at any station above 110th street, and know I'll be welcome?

1957

★ 3.5

Dick Gregory

From the Back of the Bus · 1962

★ 3.5

Novel · Science fiction

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love · 1973

★ 3.5

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections · 2001

★ 3.5

How wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been so gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes.

Jonathan Franzen

The Corrections · 2001

★ 3.5

Interview

If it's legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.

Todd Akin

2012

★ 3.5

She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

Kate Chopin

The Awakening · 1899

★ 3.6

Magazine

The modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.

1905

★ 3.6

God made man, without man's consent, and made his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can't get around that fact. There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

1910

★ 3.6

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

The Mysterious Stranger · 1910

★ 3.6

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.

1942

★ 3.6

Charlie Parker

1955

★ 3.6

Interview

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want, and then advise them to do it.

1955

★ 3.6

Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the Damnable. More than a hundred years ago, somebody asked Quin, "Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?" "Yes," said he, "last summer." I judge he spent his summer in Paris.

1880

★ 3.7

The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods; it remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime.

The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, “Where is the best place to go to?” He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages—heaven for climate, and hell for society.

1888

★ 3.7

Speech

1901

★ 3.7

There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par.

1904

★ 3.7

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

1904

★ 3.7

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

1907

★ 3.7

Eternal Rest sounds comforting in the pulpit, too. Well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.

Yet we have gone on living, Living and partly living.

1908

★ 3.7

Play

1935

★ 3.7

Human kind Cannot bear very much reality.

Burnt Norton · 1936

★ 3.7

At the still point, there the dance is.

1936

★ 3.7

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else—these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 3.8

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

1887

★ 3.8

No people in the world ever did achieve freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed must begin in blood.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court · 1889

★ 3.8

Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.

1893

★ 3.8

No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

1894

★ 3.8

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 3.8

Novel · Adventure novel

Tom Sawyer Abroad · 1894

★ 3.8

Each race determines for itself what indecencies are. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

1896

★ 3.8

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc · 1896

★ 3.8

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

1897

★ 3.8

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

1903

★ 3.8

Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired.

1904

★ 3.8

An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

1904

★ 3.8

Everything has its limit—iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

1906

★ 3.8

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

The Waste Land · 1922

★ 3.8

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 3.9

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 3.9

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 3.9

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court · 1889

★ 3.9

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.

1889

★ 3.9

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1893

★ 3.9

Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

1894

★ 3.9

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says: "Yes, the little ones does."

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 3.9

Novel · Adventure novel

Tom Sawyer Abroad · 1894

★ 3.9

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 3.9

The timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 3.9

The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 3.9

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 3.9

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 3.9

Necessity knows no law.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 4.0

In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer · 1876

★ 4.0

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 4.0

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear.

Pudd'nhead Wilson · 1894

★ 4.0

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 4.0

All kings is mostly rapscallions.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 4.0

It’s lovely to live on a raft.

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval... The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · 1884

★ 4.0

J.C.R. Licklider

1960

★ 4.2

Novel · Science fiction

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.

Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love · 1973

★ 4.2

Novel · Science fiction

Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth-but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three.

Robert A. Heinlein

Time Enough for Love · 1973

★ 4.3

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.

I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. That's the answer to that. I didn't fire him 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.

1947

★ 4.4

1974

★ 4.4

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.

Burnt Norton · 1936

★ 4.5

Cheer up—the worst is yet to come.

1894

★ 4.7

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