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Political theory16 quotes
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787The due administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government. — George Washington · 1789Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched... Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind... We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. — Thomas Jefferson · 1816Every project has been found to be no better than committing the lamb to the custody of the wolf, except that one which is called a balance of power. — John Adams · 1789We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. — John Adams · 1798When the masses get involved in reasoning, everything is lost. — Voltaire · 1766All 16 quotes →Politics15 quotes
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787I agree with you, that in Politicks the Middle Way is none at all. — John Adams · 1776The due administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government. — George Washington · 1789The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. — John Adams · 1818"Wait" has almost always meant "Never." — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963Do get all on fire and be as cross as you please. — Susan B. Anthony · 1856All 15 quotes →Art9 quotes
I've finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied. — Michelangelo · 1512Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess! — Ludwig van Beethoven · 1810All art is but imitation of nature. — Seneca · 65A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. — Paul Gauguin · 1895I cannot help it that my pictures do not sell. Nevertheless the time will come when people will see that they are worth more than the price of the paint. — Vincent van Gogh · 1888All 9 quotes →Freedom8 quotes
The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave. — Thomas Jefferson · 1820The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson · 1791Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. — Edmund Burke · 1777This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, cannot long retain it. — Abraham Lincoln · 1859Liberty, too, must be limited in order to be possessed. — Edmund Burke · 1777All 8 quotes →War8 quotes
I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do. They probably have not seen the bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh...What separates me from the pacifists is that I hate the Nazis more than I hate war. — Dwight D. Eisenhower · 1943Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one, and war is a link in God's world order. In him, the noblest virtues of man, courage and renunciation, devotion to duty and willingness to sacrifice, unfold with the institution of life. Without the war, the world would become bogged down in materialism. — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder · 1880I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. — John Adams · 1780We are mad, not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples? — Seneca · 65You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. — William Tecumseh Sherman · 1864There never was a good War, or a bad Peace. — Benjamin Franklin · 1783All 8 quotes →Love7 quotes
Love is not to be purchased, and affection has no price. — St. Jerome · 374There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. — George Sand · 1862God knows I never sought anything in you except yourself; I wanted simply you, nothing of yours. — Heloise · 1132I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further. — John Keats · 1819Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929My heart was not in me but with you, and now, even more, if it is not with you it is nowhere. — Heloise · 1132All 7 quotes →Progress7 quotes
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. — Isaac Newton · 1676"Wait" has almost always meant "Never." — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. — John Adams · 1780Nothing 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 · 1777To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing a new truth or fact. — Charles Darwin · 1879Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. — Emile Zola · 1897All 7 quotes →Books6 quotes
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kafka · 1904I cannot live without books. — Thomas Jefferson · 1815I look at them as a child looks at a cake,-with glittering eyes and watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him! — Elizabeth Gaskell · 1859If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. — Cicero · 44 BCNo entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu · 1753Oppression of women6 quotes
Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customers, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton · 1860In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. — Abigail Adams · 1776Patriotism in the female Sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honours and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Goverment from having held a place of Eminence...Yet all History and every age exhibit Instances of patriotick virtue in the female Sex; which considering our situation equals the most Heroick of yours. — Abigail Adams · 1782Religion is an all-important matter in a public school for girls. Whatever people say, it is the mother's safeguard, and the husband's. What we ask of education is not that girls should think, but that they should believe. — Napoleon Bonaparte · 1807Whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken-and notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims we have it in our power not only to be free ourselves but to subdue our masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet. — Abigail Adams · 1776It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne. — Abigail Adams · 1778Men and women5 quotes
In the true marriage relation, the independence of the husband and wife is equal, the dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal. — Lucretia Mott · 1880Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customers, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. — Elizabeth Cady Stanton · 1860Men are vile inconstant toads. — Lady Mary Wortley Montagu · 1710In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. — Abigail Adams · 1776It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common share of understanding considers the difference of education between the male and female sex, even in those families where education is attended to... Nay why should your sex wish for such a disparity in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates. Pardon me, sir, if I cannot help sometimes suspecting that this neglect arises in some measure from an ungenerous jealousy of rivals near the throne. — Abigail Adams · 1778Success5 quotes
Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing. — Abraham Lincoln · 1855All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. — Mark Twain · 1887I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took an excuse. — Florence Nightingale · 1861Success is a result; it must not be a goal. — Gustave Flaubert · 1876The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That-with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success-is our national disease. — William James · 1906Writing5 quotes
What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in. — Gustave Flaubert · 1851It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts. — Gustave Flaubert · 1851When the grim reaper comes to get me, he'll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words. — Flannery O'Connor · 1959I will write until my knuckles are worn and my brain bewildered, but I will write on and on. — William Styron · 1951A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is Left out of it. — Mark Twain · 1897American Civil War4 quotes
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. — William Tecumseh Sherman · 1864My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destory slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. — Abraham Lincoln · 1862We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war. — William Tecumseh Sherman · 1864War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want. — William Tecumseh Sherman · 1864Creativity4 quotes
A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. But intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience. — Albert Einstein · 1949I am happier when I have something to compose, for that, after all, is my sole delight and passion. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · 1777The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. — Sylvia Plath · 1953A great deal of my poetry has been written while I have been out walking. — Wallace Stevens · 1954Death4 quotes
Death is the side of life which is turned away from us. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1925How often are we to die before we go quite off this stage? In every friend we lose a part of ourselves, and the best part. — Alexander Pope · 1732We are continually dying; I while I am writing these words, you while you are reading them, others when they hear them or fail to hear them. I shall be dying when you read this, you die while I write, we both are dying, we all are dying, we are dying forever. — Petrarch · 1360When the grim reaper comes to get me, he'll have to give me a few extra hours to revise my last words. — Flannery O'Connor · 1959Life4 quotes
What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? — Vincent van Gogh · 1881Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving. — Albert Einstein · 1930O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! — John Keats · 1817Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and bitterness. — Gustave Flaubert · 1864Man and animals4 quotes
Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice. — St. Jerome · 394Man is a reasoning animal. — Seneca · 65Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787Histories are more full of Examples of the Fidelity of dogs than of Friends. — Alexander Pope · 1709Marriage4 quotes
In the true marriage relation, the independence of the husband and wife is equal, the dependence mutual and their obligations reciprocal. — Lucretia Mott · 1880In matters of religion and matrimony I never give any advice; because I will not have anybody's torments in this world or the next laid to my charge. — Lord Chesterfield · 1765A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1901I shall never marry; I regard that now as an established fact, and on the whole a very respectable one; I am both happy enough and miserable enough, as it is, and don't wish to add to either side of the account. — Henry James · 1884Music4 quotes
I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · 1777I am happier when I have something to compose, for that, after all, is my sole delight and passion. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · 1777Truly, I think I should go mad if it weren't for music. — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · 1877The symphony must be like the world; it must embrace everything. — Gustav Mahler · 1907Nature4 quotes
What a book a Devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, & horridly cruel works of nature! — Charles Darwin · 1856You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters. — St. Bernard of Clairvaux · 1147The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. — William Blake · 1799In disputes about natural phenomena one must begin not with the authority of Scriptural passage but with sensory experience and necessary demonstrations. For the Holy Scripture and nature derive equally from the Godhead, the former as the dictation of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the most obedient executrix of God's orders. — Galileo Galilei · 1615Newspapers4 quotes
Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson · 1787All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat. — Leo Tolstoy · 1871Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. — Thomas Jefferson · 1807The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them. — Thomas Jefferson · 1807Reason and emotion4 quotes
O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! — John Keats · 1817The only business of the head in the world is to bow a ceaseless obeisance to the heart. — W.B. Yeats · 1886The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still. — Alexander Pope · 1733This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. — Horace Walpole · 1776American Revolution3 quotes
The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People. — John Adams · 1818In Politicks the Middle Way is none at all. — John Adams · 1776We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm? — John Page · 1776Business3 quotes
You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. — Cornelius Vanderbilt · 1853In the business world... The rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield. — Warren Buffett · 1992It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price. — Warren Buffett · 1990Civil disobedience3 quotes
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law. — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. — Martin Luther King, Jr. · 1963Connecting with others3 quotes
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1901There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. — George Sand · 1862Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. — Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929Custom and convention3 quotes
When you are at Rome live in the Roman style: when you are elsewhere live as they live elsewhere. — St. Ambrose · 397The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. 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. — Edmund Burke · 1796Manners 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. — Edmund Burke · 1796Declaration of Independence3 quotes
Yesterday, the greatest question was decided, which ever was debated in America, and a greater, perhaps, never was nor will be decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." — John Adams · 1776The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forevermore. — John Adams · 1776And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them. In short, the flames kindled on the fourth of July, 1776, have spread over too much of the globe to be extinguished by the feeble engines of despotism; on the contrary, they will consume these engines and all who work them. — Thomas Jefferson · 1821Democracy3 quotes
When the masses get involved in reasoning, everything is lost. — Voltaire · 1766Among a people generally corrupt liberty cannot long exist. — Edmund Burke · 1777Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. — John Adams · 1814Doubt and skepticism3 quotes
Doubt is not a pleasant condition. But certainty is an absurd one. — Voltaire · 1770I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything. — T.H. Huxley · 1886If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance. — Orville Wright · 1908