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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Benjamin Franklin81 quotes
Remember that Time is Money. — Benjamin Franklin · 1748Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God. — Benjamin Franklin · 1775Diligence is the mother of good luck. — Benjamin Franklin · 1736Early to Bed and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise. — Benjamin Franklin · 1735Fish and Visitors stink after three days. — Benjamin Franklin · 1736Haste makes Waste. — Benjamin Franklin · 1753All 81 quotes →Ralph Waldo Emerson45 quotes
Always do what you are afraid to do. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1841This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1837Come out of your warm, angular house, resounding with few voices, into the chill, grand, instantaneous night, with such a Presence as a full moon in the clouds. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1838Men are what their mothers made them. — Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1860All 45 quotes →Henry Adams16 quotes
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds. — Henry Adams · 1907Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces. — Henry Adams · 1907All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres. — Henry Adams · 1907Practical politics consists in ignoring facts. — Henry Adams · 1907At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter. — Henry Adams · 1907All experience is an arch, to build upon. — Henry Adams · 1907All 16 quotes →Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.16 quotes
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1927If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought—not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1929Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1911The truth is, that the law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1880It is revolting to have no better reason for a rule of law than that so it was laid down in the time of Henry IV. It is still more revolting if the grounds upon which it was laid down have vanished long since, and the rule simply persists from blind imitation of the past. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1897It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. · 1923All 16 quotes →George Santayana13 quotes
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana · 1905Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. — George Santayana · 1923Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome. — George Santayana · 1910Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. — George Santayana · 1910The Bible is literature, not dogma. — George Santayana · 1910There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. — George Santayana · 1922All 13 quotes →Charles Sanders Peirce3 quotes
Every man is fully satisfied that there is such a thing as truth, or he would not ask any question. — Charles Sanders Peirce · 1903When I communicate my thought and my sentiments to a friend with whom I am in full sympathy, so that my feelings pass into him and I am conscious of what he feels, do I not live in his brain as well as in my own-most literally! — Charles Sanders Peirce · 1966Our whole past experience is continually in our consciousness, though most of it sunk to a great depth of dimness. I think of consciousness as a bottomless lake, whose waters seem transparent, yet into which we can clearly see but a little way. — Charles Sanders Peirce · 1966James Russell Lowell3 quotes
And what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days. — James Russell Lowell · 1848Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side. — James Russell Lowell · 1845And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak. — James Russell Lowell · 1848Chris Burden2 quotes
The first time you do something only happens once. — Chris Burden · 2008To trust your intuition is exactly the opposite of any sort of formal education. — Chris Burden · 1993Louisa May Alcott2 quotes
I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning how to sail my ship. — Louisa May Alcott · 1868Women have been called queens a long time, but the kingdom given them isn't worth ruling. — Louisa May Alcott · 1869Samuel Adams2 quotes
Freedom of thought and the right of private judgment, in matters of conscience, driven from every other corner of the earth, direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. — Samuel Adams · 1776What a glorious morning is this. — Samuel Adams · 1775Samuel Eliot Morison2 quotes
A tough but nervous, tenacious but restless race; materially ambitious, yet prone to introspection, and subject to waves of religious emotion... A race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world. — Samuel Eliot Morison · 1921America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy. — Samuel Eliot Morison · 1965Wendell Phillips2 quotes
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind. — Wendell Phillips · 1864Revolutions are not made; they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back. — Wendell Phillips · 1852Charles Sumner1 quote
Where Slavery is, there Liberty cannot be; and where Liberty is, there Slavery cannot be. — Charles Sumner · 1864Cotton Mather1 quote
That there is a Devil, is a Thing Doubted by none but such as are under the Influence of the Devil. For any to Deny the Being of a Devil must be from an Ignorance or Profaneness, worse than diabolical. — Cotton Mather · 1693Edward Everett1 quote
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. — Edward Everett · 1837Ellen Sturgis Hooper1 quote
I slept and dreamed that life was beauty.
I woke-and found that life was duty. — Ellen Sturgis Hooper · 1840Fisher Ames1 quote
A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom; a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in the water. — Fisher Ames · 1795Frederick Goddard Tuckerman1 quote
His heart was in his garden; but his brain
Wandered at will among the fiery stars. — Frederick Goddard Tuckerman · 1860Henry Cabot Lodge1 quote
Let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans... If a man is going to be an American at all let him be so without any qualifying adjectives; and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description. — Henry Cabot Lodge · 1888Increase Mather1 quote
Thunder is the voice of God, and, therefore, to be dreaded. — Increase Mather · 1684Isaac Goldberg1 quote
Diplomacy is to do and say
The nastiest thing in the nicest way. — Isaac Goldberg · 1927Louis Henri Sullivan1 quote
Form ever follows function. — Louis Henri Sullivan · 1896Louise Imogen Guiney1 quote
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire. — Louise Imogen Guiney · 1893Paul Revere1 quote
If the British went out by water, to show two lanterns in the North Church steeple; and if by land, one as a signal, for we were apprehensive it would be difficult to cross the Charles River or get over Boston Neck. — Paul Revere · 1775Robert M. Cover1 quote
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution, there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. — Robert M. Cover · 1983Samuel Francis Smith1 quote
My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing:
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims' pride,
From ev'ry mountain-side
Let freedom ring. — Samuel Francis Smith · 1832Sarah Sze1 quote
The idea of knowing exactly where you're going is overrated. — Sarah Sze · 2012The Magnetic Fields1 quote
You got strange powers. — The Magnetic Fields · 1994Theodore H. White1 quote
America is a nation created by all the hopeful wanderers of Europe, not out of geography and genetics, but out of purpose. — Theodore H. White · 1961