The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Martin Luther King, Jr.4 quotes
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low; the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1968"Wait" has almost always meant "Never." — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man. — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1961Barack Obama3 quotes
The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. — Barack Obama · 1965It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes, we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes, we can. It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land. — Barack Obama · 2008We are the change that we seek. — Barack Obama · 2008Mark Twain3 quotes
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. — Mark Twain · 1884The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds. — Mark Twain · 1897The 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. — Mark Twain · 1897Alfred North Whitehead2 quotes
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle-they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1911Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. — Alfred North Whitehead · 1911Alfred Tennyson2 quotes
Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns. — Alfred Tennyson · 1842Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true. — Alfred Tennyson · 1850Benjamin Disraeli2 quotes
The age of chivalry is past. Bores have succeeded to dragons. — Benjamin Disraeli · 1831Finality, Sir, is not the language of politics. — Benjamin Disraeli · 1859Bob Dylan2 quotes
Come mothers and fathers,
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand. — Bob Dylan · 1964Come Senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall. — Bob Dylan · 1963Frederick Douglass2 quotes
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass · 1857If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. — Frederick Douglass · 1857John Adams2 quotes
I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. — John Adams · 1780Can authority be more amiable and respectable when it descends from accidents or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people? — John Adams · 1797Nathaniel Hawthorne2 quotes
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1851She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. — Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850Oscar Wilde2 quotes
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation. — Oscar Wilde · 1893It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way. — Oscar Wilde · 1891Sinclair Lewis2 quotes
I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever. — Sinclair Lewis · 1935I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation. We're tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers...coax us, "Be calm! Be patient! Wait! We have the plans for a Utopia already made; just give us a bit more time and we’ll produce it; trust us; we're wiser than you." For ten thousand years they've said that. We want our Utopia now-and we're going to try our hands at it. — Sinclair Lewis · 1920Aldous Huxley1 quote
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards. — Aldous Huxley · 1937Anthony Trollope1 quote
A desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combined with honesty and they cannot take you astray. — Anthony Trollope · 1864Arthur C. Clarke1 quote
When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. — Arthur C. Clarke · 1962Bernard of Chartres1 quote
We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size. — Bernard of Chartres · 1159Bruce Cockburn1 quote
Got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight. — Bruce Cockburn · 1984Camille Paglia1 quote
If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts. — Camille Paglia · 1990Carl Jung1 quote
Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche. — Carl Jung · 1933Carl Sagan1 quote
For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders, undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation? — Carl Sagan · 1994Carrie Chapman Catt1 quote
When a just cause reaches its flood-tide... Whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power. — Carrie Chapman Catt · 1911Cesar Chavez1 quote
You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. — Cesar Chavez · 1984Charles Babbage1 quote
Improvements succeeded each other so rapidly, that machines which had never been finished were abandoned in the hands of their makers, because new improvements had superseded their utility. — Charles Babbage · 1832Charles Baudelaire1 quote
There can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself. — Charles Baudelaire · 1867Charles Darwin1 quote
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing a new truth or fact. — Charles Darwin · 1879Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie1 quote
I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2014Cornel West1 quote
Justice is love on legs, spilling over into the public sphere. — Cornel West · 2009Derek Parfit1 quote
Life can be wonderful as well as terrible, and we shall increasingly have the power to make life good. Since human history may be only just beginning, we can expect that future humans, or supra-humans, may achieve some great goods that we cannot now even imagine. In Nietzsche’s words, there has never been such a new dawn and clear horizon, and such an open sea. — Derek Parfit · 2017Dwight D. Eisenhower1 quote
How far have we come in man's long pilgrimage from darkness toward the light? Are we nearing the light—a day of freedom and of peace for all mankind? Or are the shadows of another night are closing in upon us? — Dwight D. Eisenhower · 1953Edmund Burke1 quote
Nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. — Edmund Burke · 1777