Quotes · Skopia

171 quotes

Imagination labors best in distant fields. — Mark Twain · 1869 Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it. — Mark Twain · 1897 On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself. — William Least Heat-Moon · 1982 Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. — Mark Twain · 1897 True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god. — Mark Twain · 1897 The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds. — Mark Twain · 1897 All 25 quotes →

Adventure novel11 quotes

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. — Mark Twain · 1876 There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. — Mark Twain · 1884 All kings is mostly rapscallions. — Mark Twain · 1884 It’s lovely to live on a raft. — Mark Twain · 1884 In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. — Mark Twain · 1876 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. — Mark Twain · 1884 All 11 quotes →

Political speech11 quotes

Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima... The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East. — Harry Truman · 1945 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. — Harry Truman · 1947 Having found the bomb we have used it. — Harry Truman · 1945 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. — Harry Truman · 1949 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. — Harry Truman · 1949 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. — Harry Truman · 1949 All 11 quotes →

Children's literature10 quotes

Autobiography and memoir5 quotes

Life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head. — Mark Twain · 1910 In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination. — Mark Twain · 1910 On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself. — William Least Heat-Moon · 1982 The Marshall Plan will go down in history as one of America's greatest contributions to the peace of the world. — Harry Truman · 1955 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." — Chester Himes · 1972

Political literature4 quotes

To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination... After the racist statues are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long. — Michael Harrington · 1962 For the middle class, the police protect property, give directions, and help old ladies. For the urban poor, the police are those who arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order. — Michael Harrington · 1962 Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems. — Reinhold Niebuhr · 1944 Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. — Reinhold Niebuhr · 1944

Science fiction4 quotes

An armed society is a polite society. — Robert A. Heinlein · 1942 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 · 1973 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 · 1973 Does history record any case in which the majority was right? — Robert A. Heinlein · 1973

Sociology3 quotes

To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination... After the racist statues are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long. — Michael Harrington · 1962 For the middle class, the police protect property, give directions, and help old ladies. For the urban poor, the police are those who arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order. — Michael Harrington · 1962 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. — Michael Harrington · 1962

Philosophical literature2 quotes

Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems. — Reinhold Niebuhr · 1944 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. — Mark Twain · 1910

Biography1 quote

If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. — Charlie Parker · 1955

Feminist literature1 quote

Oppressed people are frequently very oppressive when first liberated. And why wouldn't they be? They know best two positions. Somebody's foot on their neck or their foot on somebody's neck. — Florynce Kennedy · 1970

Religious literature1 quote

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. — Mark Twain · 1910

Travel literature1 quote

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! — Mark Twain · 1872

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