Sourced and curated.

Read my lips: no new taxes.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.

1988 Republican convention speech · 1988

★ 5.4

Sermon · Religious literature

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God · 1741

★ 5.3

The men, women, and children who compose a society at any time are the unconscious depositaries and transmitters of the mores. They inherited them without knowing it; they are molding them unconsciously; they will transmit them involuntarily. The people cannot make the mores. They are made by them.

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

Folkways · 1906

★ 5.0

Novel

Annie Proulx

The Shipping News · 1993

★ 4.4

The advancement of the arts from year to year taxes our credulity, and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.

Henry L. Ellsworth

1843

★ 4.3

Essay · Sociology

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

Sociology · 1881

★ 4.3

A differentiation arises between ourselves, the we-group, or in-group, and everybody else, or the others-groups, out-groups.

He said not "Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shall not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased"; but he said, "Thou shalt not be overcome."

Folkways · 1906

★ 4.3

Julian of Norwich

1413

★ 3.9

Novel

May the odds be ever in your favor!

Suzanne Collins

2008

★ 3.8

Look before you leap.

Robert Greene

1590

★ 3.7

Clearly, mistakes were made.

This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.

Speech to the American Enterprise Institute, December 3, 1986 · 1986

★ 3.7

Press conference

Press Conference, August 5, 1990 · 1990

★ 3.7

A line has been drawn in the sand.

The bodies of those that made such a noise and tumult when alive, when dead, lie as quietly among the graves of their neighbors as any others.

1990

★ 3.7

Sermon

1834

★ 3.6

I have spoken of a Thousand Points of Light, of all the community organizations that are spread like stars throughout the Nation, doing good. We will work hand in hand, encouraging, sometimes leading, sometimes being led.

Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush · 1989

★ 3.6

The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this: By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.

A little, wretched, despicable creature; a worm, a mere nothing, and less than nothing; a vile insect that has risen up in contempt against the majesty of heaven and earth?

1992 State of the Union Address · 1992

★ 3.6

Sermon · Religious literature

The labour of women in the house, certainly enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.

The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners · 1734

★ 3.5

Economic literature

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1898

★ 3.5

Newspaper

Gratitude, like love, is never a dependable international emotion.

Joseph Alsop

1952

★ 3.5

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Walt Kelly

1970

★ 3.5

We're a nation of community, of thousands and tens of thousands of ethnic, religious, social, business, labor union, neighborhood, regional and other organizations, all of them varied, voluntary, and unique... A brillant diversity spread like stars, like a thousand points of light in a broad and peaceful sky.

1988

★ 3.5

We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order-a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.

A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

1991

★ 3.5

Newspaper

Al Capp

1963

★ 3.5

The mores come down to us from the past. Each individual is born into them as he is born into the atmosphere, and he does not reflect on them, or criticise them any more than a baby analyzes the atmosphere before he begins to breathe it.

Folkways · 1906

★ 3.4

If we put together all that we have learned from anthropology and ethnography about primitive men and primitive society, we perceive that the first task of life is to live. Men begin with acts, not with thoughts.

That woman's physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her... As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical wellbeing of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race.

Folkways · 1906

★ 3.4

Supreme Court opinion · Legal opinion · Legal writing

David J. Brewer

Muller v. Oregon · 1908

★ 3.4

We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth: through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.

Inaugural Address of George H. W. Bush · 1989

★ 2.8

Robert P. Porter

1891

★ 2.6

Religious literature

All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

Julian of Norwich

Revelatons of Divine Love · 1395

★ 2.1

Sermon · Religious literature

The heart is like a viper, hissing, and spitting poison at God.

Life is what we make of it. Always has been, always will be.

Men Naturally God's Enemies · 1736

★ 2.0

Autobiography and memoir

Grandma Moses

1951

★ 2.0

To learning & law, there's no greater foe than they that nothing know.

Robert Greene

1592

★ 1.9

Poem

The people people choose for friends Your common sense appall, But the people people marry Are the queerest folk of all.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1899

★ 1.9

Psychological literature

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

Benjamin Spock

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care · 1946

★ 1.9

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn. For in man's heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like the leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

Inaugural Address of George H.W. Bush · 1989

★ 1.9

And now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order.

Does capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; and it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that property is of greater value than life.

1991

★ 1.9

Elizabeth Fry

1848

★ 1.9

A man always has two reasons for what he does-a good one, and the real one.

J.P. Morgan

1930

★ 1.9

The more people have studied different methods of bringing up children, the more they have come to the conclusion that what good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best, after all.

Benjamin Spock

The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care · 1946

★ 1.9

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.

Dean Acheson

The Guardian · 1962

★ 1.9

Press conference

I do not like broccoli. And I haven't liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it. And I'm president of the United States, and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli!

Press Conference, March 22, 1990 · 1990

★ 1.9

What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind-peace and security, freedom and the rule of law.

Where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

1991 State of the Union Address · 1991

★ 1.9

Sociology · Historical literature

1906

★ 1.8

Ethnocentrism is the...view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it...Each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.

You will be damned if you do-And you will be damned if you don't.

Folkways · 1906

★ 1.7

Religious literature

Lorenzo Dow

Reflections on the Love of God · 1833

★ 1.1

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Elizabeth Fry

1848

★ 1.1

Lecture

The Forgotten Man... Delving away in patient industry, supporting his family, paying his taxes, casting his vote, supporting the church and the school... But he is the only one for whom there is no provision in the great scramble and the big divide. Such is the Forgotten Man. He works, he votes, generally he prays-but his chief business in life is to pay... Who and where is the Forgotten Man in this case, who will have to pay for it all?