“In Russia a man is a called reactionary if he objects to having his property stolen and his wife and children murdered.”

“Moral Action is that great and only experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves. Who so understands it, and in rigid sequence of thought can lay it open, is forever master of nature.”

“If a cat gets hold of a German irregular verb – goodbye cat”.

“I realize the tragic significance of the atom bomb … we thank God it has come to us instead of our enemies.”

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

“The whole race … is war-mad, high-spirited and quick to battle.”

‘Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.’

‘Without democracy there is no freedom. Violence, no matter who is using it, is always reactionary.’

‘It’s not what you look at the matters, it’s what you see.’

‘The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.’

‘Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring?’

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

“I have enjoyed the veneration of my country, and the riches of the world. There is no object I do not have, nothing I have not experienced. But now that I have reached old age, I cannot rest easy for a moment.”

“The harshest and cruelest Tsars were the best. The Russian people are submissive when sternly mastered, otherwise there is anarchy; they need an unlimited master; they walk a straight path only when they feel an iron fist over their head.”

‘A gentleman will blithely do in politics what he would kick a man downstairs for doing in ordinary life.’

“I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think, my mind only works with my legs.”

“As I look back upon the labors of the last forty or fifty years, it seems to me that everything has been utterly ruined, utterly destroyed, as by some irresistible force.”

“I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.”

“We have severely underestimated the Russians, the extent of the country and the treachery of the climate. This is the revenge of reality.”

“I could as easily bail out the Potomac River with a teaspoon as attend to all the details of the army.”

“It seems that nature, which has so wisely disposed our bodily organs with a view to our happiness, has also bestowed on us pride, to spare us the pain of being aware of our imperfections.”

“When will the war be finished? When Hitler is no longer victorious, when Goring no longer flies and when Goebbels no longer lies.”

“Beyond this region … at the northernmost post, where the sea ends somewhere on the outer fringe, there is a very great inland city called Thina from which silk floss, yarn and clothes are shipped by land.”

‘He has introduced Caesarism into corporate life.’

‘The causes of events are even more interesting than the events themselves.’

“I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”

“Elijah was reputed to be the patron saint of aviators, but as he went to Heaven in a chariot of fire, this was something we weren’t too keen about.”

“Bobby hates like me.”

“In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm … in the real world all rests on perseverance.”

“Why, oh why, may not men of different races inhabit in peace and happiness this vast and wealthy country?”

“The woes and unpleasantness we are experiencing is because the Communist Party consists of 10% convinced idealists ready to die for the idea, and 90% hangers-on without consciences, who have joined the party to get a position.”

‘This whipped jackal is frisking by the side of the German tiger.’

‘The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.’

‘There is only one proof of ability – action.’

“Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

“Life is work, and everything you do is so much more experience.”

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

“Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.”

“If a cat gets hold of a German irregular verb – goodbye cat”.

“The magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbour, so that to the Athenian the fruits of other’s countries are as familiar a luxury as those of his own.”

“My religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me.”

“I don’t know what it’s like to lose a battle, but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

“An assegai (spear) has been thrust into the belly of the nation, there are not enough tears to mourn for the dead”.

“Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this; one dog does not change a bone with another.”

“My having been ill these days with some leg pain means I have not written you; though the feet and tongue are far apart, one can still get in the way of the other.”

‘Her old Granny and subject must be the first to kiss her hand.’

‘All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.’

“The newspaper’s function is not to instruct, but to startle.”

‘With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.’

“Being an artist means not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient.”

“Give me two hundred Neapolitans armed with daggers, and only a muff on their left arms for a buckler, and with them I will overrun France, and accomplish the Revolution.”

“When I am commander in chief I shall do as I will. If anyone does anything else, I shall have them all shot.”

“To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by God.”

‘To every subject of this land, however powerful, I would use Thomas Fuller’s words over three hundred years ago, ‘Be ye never so high, the law is above you.’

‘I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people and take away their freedom of choice and religion.’

“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

‘This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.’

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. ‘Now, I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

“The people are the most important element in a nation; the land spirits and grain are next; the sovereign is the least.”

“The men who place implicit faith in their own common sense are, without any exception, the most wrong-headed and impracticable persons with whom [one] has ever had to deal.”

“On the day when brute force gains ascendency in India, all distinctions of East and West, of ancient and modern, will have disappeared. That will be the day of my test.”

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune – civil war.”

“All goes well here, we have requisitioned 1200 masons to demolish and raze the city. Every day since our entry we have had two hundred heads cut off.”

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

“Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women.”

“There is dignity in serenity, there is dignity in clenched teeth and flashing eyes.”

“I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster.”

“For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.”

“Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.”

“It is not necessary to hope in order to succeed, nor to succeed in order to persevere.”

“Much as war attracts me and fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations, I feel more deeply every year – and can measure the feeling in the midst of arms – what vile and wicked folly and barbarism it all is”.

“Before us were thousands of men preparing to die. Nine miles to the rear of us were steam vessels ready to carry our dispatches to the cable station in Jamaica. And in New York were great multitudes, waiting to know the result of the battle.”

“Those who are of God … thrive to oppose the multitude of the infidels, who rejoice in a victory gained over us, and defend the oriental church freed from their tyranny by so great an outpouring of your fathers.”

“We have set eyes on regions far away.”

“History is philosophy, teaching by example.”

“I met a dead corpse of the plague, in the narrow alley just bringing down a little pair of stairs. But I thank God I was not much disturbed at it.”

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

“The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”

“The civilized world was shocked when on May 10, 1933, books displeasing to the Nazis were solemnly burned on Berlin’s Franz Josef Platz. Nazis had gone into public and private libraries, throwing on to the streets books Dr Goebbels said were unfit for Nazi Germany.”

“In religion, I do not see the mystery of the Incarnation but the mystery of the social order.”

“In the hospitality of war, we left them their dead as a gift to remember us by.”

“This war is really the greatest insanity in which white races have ever been engaged.”

‘Anything that looks like fighting is delicious to an Englishman.’

‘I shall govern you as a father his children.’

“A train that would span a continent, running on a continuous ribbon of metal for more than 1,500 miles.”

“We owe respect to the living; to the dead, we owe only the truth.”

“In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organised robbery?”

“We have hammered home our idea and forced our name on this city … It has become a struggle for Berlin that has lasted eight years and cost rivers of blood and tears.”

“The character and spirit of these people is entirely misunderstood and undervalued by the learned in England, and the degraded position in the scale of the human species into which they have been placed, has, I feel assured, been in consequence of the little intercourse that has taken place between the first navigators and the aborigines.”

“Do not seek illumination unless you seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks a pond.”

“Listen to me, Rome, most lovely queen of all your world, most welcome in the star-filled heavens! Listen, nurse of men, and mother of the gods! Thanks to your temples we are close to heaven!”

“Students in surgery should not only be furnished with strength of body, but constancy of mind also, that they may remain unmolested and unmoved by the stench, blood, pus and nastiness that will naturally occur to them in their practice.”

“It was easier to get a VC in the war than get a job afterwards.”

“Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.”

“Women hold up half the sky”.

“Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.”

“Duty is heavier than a mountain, death as light as a feather.”

“No other major source of revenue enters the Treasury so regularly, punctually and easily as the revenue from the liquor tax … indeed its regular receipt greatly eases the task of finding case for other expenditures.”

“Under every stone lurks a politician.”

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”

“I immediately sent one of our men to unfurl the tricolour flag on this land, which no human had seen or stepped on before. Following the ancient custom, faithfully kept up by the English, we took possession of it in the name of France.”

“Thus began sorrow upon sorrow, and death for death.”

“Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.”

“I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole”.

“Luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity.”

“If the Sahara took up socialism, there would soon be a shortage of sand.”

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”

“The Supreme Emperor of China . . . worthy to live tens of thousands and tens of thousands thousand years – our ardent wish has been to become acquainted with those celebrated institutions of your Majesty’s populous and extensive empire which have carried its prosperity to such a height as to be the admiration of all surrounding nations.”

“You have chosen dishonour and you will have war.”

“It struck me as an odd thing that here, alone of all the cities in America, there was no plausible answer to the question, ‘Why did a town spring up here and why has it grown so big?’”

“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.”

“The vastness of Russia devours us.”

“No biography has any value unless it is written with warts and all”.

“I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as close to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

“My religious belief teaches me to feel as safe in battle as in bed. God has fixed the time for my death. I do not concern myself about that, but to be always ready, no matter when it may overtake me.”

“How can the same nation pursue two lines of policy so radically different without bewilderment. Be despotic in Asia and democratic in Australia … be the foremost champion off free thought and religions [and also] stand out in great military imperialism?”

“[America] goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy”.

“When the last flicker of the last picture in a reel had faded away … nobody was there to be applauded, to be called before the curtain and thanked for the rendition. The actors who had assembled to present the scenes they had just enjoyed were scattered to the winds; only their shadows had been here.”

“I see it is said that leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.”

“Britain’s position must be viewed in terms of internal political conditions…The difference between 1914 and now is in the recognition that a wealthy nation must pay with blood; and that, even with a victorious war to his credit, the victor emerges diminished in strength… Britain is overburdened with commitments in all parts of the world. Fight Germany? Yes. Fight for Allies? Open question. Fight for others? No.”

“Dissatisfaction with oneself is one of the fundamental qualities of every true talent.”

“The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.”

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”

“A total lack of work brought me nothing but boredom, restlessness and a sense of futility”.

“It is a terrible disappointment and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Many thoughts come, and much discussion have we had. Tomorrow we must march on to the Pole and then hasten home with all the speed we can compass.”

“Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilisation is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanises, makes slaves ripe for freedom.”

“It was the most fantastic side of civilian life in wartime. Make no mistake. It cost Britain millions of pounds. I didn’t make use of the black market, I fed it.”

“A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.”

“Only dial 999 if the matter is urgent; if, for instance, the man in the flat next to yours is murdering his wife or you have seen a heavily masked cat burglar peering around the stack pipe of the local bank building… If the matter is less urgent, if you have merely lost little Towser or a lorry has come to rest in your front garden, just call up the local police.”

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.”

“Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.”

“I shall be an autocrat, that’s my trade; and the good Lord will forgive me, that’s his.”

“A calm and humble life will bring more happiness than the pursuit of success and constant restlessness that comes with it.”

“Upon arriving at foreign countries, capture those barbarian kings who resist civilization and are disrespectful, and exterminate those bandit soldiers that indulge in violence and plunder. The ocean route will be safe thanks to this.”

“History … is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

“After two thousand years of Mass (the religious service), we’ve got as far as poison gas.”

“Fear will be synonymous with flight.”

“They are not for you, but for a later age.”

“His thirst for blood was so unprecedented in recent times that those who are themselves thought cruel seem milder when slaughtering animals than he did when killing people.”

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

“I awoke one morning and discovered I was famous.”

“I am unable to write anything … Everything has been banned. I am ruined, persecuted and totally alone.”

“Events control me. I cannot control events.”

“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand.”

“I have had the misfortune of all great men – which is to be put into the hands of doctors.”

“In every sphere, economic and political, antagonisms and conflicts are advancing to bursting-point. On all sides the world is felt to be drifting to catastrophe without control; yet the majority of political leaders and statesmen have no answer.”

“You know when I was young I was always talking about my conscience. But I thought it over and I came to the conclusion that what I called my conscience was just my own bloody conceit.”

“Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”

“Man shooting is the finest sport of all; there is a certain amount of infatuation about it, the more you kill the more you wish to kill.”

“The character of a man is never very striking nor makes any deep impression: It is a dull and lifeless thing, taken merely by itself. It then only appears in perfection when it is called out into action.”

“Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised beings are.”

“It has often happened that people have talked happily with me, because of my work among the sick, but when they discover that I am also an expert mathematician, they avoid me.”

“Most people fear Greek philosophy the way children fear bogeymen”.

“To consider oneself different from ordinary men is wrong, but it is right to hope that one will not remain like ordinary men.”

“A ship is a very narrow and stout prison from which no one can escape.”

“I will not become responsible for a monstrous slaughter”.

‘At one end of Whitehall (the metonym for the British civil service and government in London) you will find a statue of one of our kings who was beheaded; at the other a monument to the man who did it. This is just an example of our attempts to be fair to everybody.’

“I like fresh air and royalty cheques”.

“The king is such a blockhead nobody minds what he says”.

“Those Greeks and Romans, they are so over-rated. They only said everything first. I’ve said just as good as things myself. But they got in before me.”

“An assegai (spear) has been thrust into the belly of the nation, there are not enough tears to mourn for the dead”.

“Be polite; write diplomatically; even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.”

“We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.”

“I’m finished with the earth. From now on our place is the sky!”

“The greatest joy is to conquer one’s enemies, to pursue them, to seize their belongings, to see their families in tears [and] to ride their horses.”

“Our grand machine has at length begun to work. If any form of government is capable of making a nation happy, ours I think bids fair now for producing that effect.”

“Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perceptions of some things which no one else has … an intuitive perception of hidden things.”

“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”

“Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance.”

‘War is the only proper school of the surgeon.’

“Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offence.”

“Everyone who arouses the slightest suspicion should be removed.”

“He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news.”

“My plans are perfect. May God have mercy on General Lee, for I will have none.”

“If it is art, it is not for all. And if it is for all, it is not art.”

“All the armies of the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

“I may seem to enjoy life rapturously when I am in company. But when I am alone I am so often so overcome by mental depression that I never dare carry a penknife.”

“The most popular constitution that could ever be devised for France would have as its first and only article that all Frenchmen are civil servants and are paid for by the State.”

“It may well be that 1914 proves a very fateful year in the history of our land.”

“We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box. Spain has no foolish dreams.”

“This war is not the end but the beginning of violence. It is the forge in which the world will be hammered into new borders and new communities. New molds want to be filled with blood, and power will be wielded with a hard fist.”

“They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name empire, and where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.”

“A new era begins. What will it bring the French? New battles? Murder and the guillotine? A short epoch of peace and then new tyranny? I cannot believe that … I believe in mankind, in the future, in the survival of the Republic.”

“Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war”.

“I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book I sent you are crap.”

“To bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, so that the strong should not harm the weak.”

“The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles, all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen, would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance.”

“I often sang this, and even from the grave I shout: drink, for soon you must put on this garment of dust.”

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe…In place of old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations”.

“Men of their senses learn from their enemies. It is from their foes not their friends that cities learn the lesson of building high walls and ships of war.”

“How I envy maple leafage which turns beautiful then falls.”

‘Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.’

‘No man’s spirits were ever hurt by doing his duty; on the contrary, one good action, one temptation resisted and overcome, one sacrifice of desire or interest, purely for conscience’ sake, will prove a cordial for weak and low spirits, far beyond what either indulgence or diversion or company can do for them.’

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.”

“We have severely underestimated the Russians, the extent of the country and the treachery of the climate. This is the revenge of reality.”

“No truly natural or religious reason [justifies] the distinction of men into kings and subjects.”

“It is not difficult to govern Italians, just useless.”

“History is more or less bunk … We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.”

“A good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub.”

“An army of deer led by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions led by a deer.”

“The whole Celtic race is obsessed with war, high-spirited and quick to battle, but otherwise straightforward and not uncouth. They are also boastful and fond of decorating themselves. Not only do they wear golden chains and bracelets, but their leaders wear clothes sprinkled and dyed with gold.”

“Wars produce many stories of fiction, some of which are told until they are believed to be true.”

“While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end, your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.”

“Walk into the Rhine or the nearest river, and take a cold bath!”

“Whoever becomes imbued with a noble idea kindles a flame from which other torches are lit, and influences those with whom he comes in contact, be they few or many. How far that influence, thus perpetuated, may extend, it is not given to him here to see.”

“Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.”

“We have experienced the truth of this prophecy, for England has become the habitation of outsiders and the dominion of foreigners. Today, no Englishman is earl, bishop, or abbott, and newcomers gnaw away at the riches and very innards of England; nor is there any hope for an end of this misery.”

“I was born a slave, but nature gave me a soul of a free man.”

“The capital which we believed would flourish for ten thousand years has now become a lair for the wolves.”

“If my hat knew my counsel, I’d throw it in the fire.”

“War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

“Why, oh why, may not men of different races inhabit in peace and happiness this vast and wealthy country?”

“Your Majesty will not hear words, so we must come to cannon, and see if you will hear them.”

“We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

“I do not mean to exclude altogether the Idea of patriotism. I know it exists… But I venture to assess, that a great and lasting War can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward.”

“It is not I who commands the army but flour and forage [that] are the masters.”

“I was naturally very excited, for I had no idea what it would be like. It was a glorious feeling to be so high above the Earth.”

“I can never have enough children. In this I am insatiable.”

“For a man, life means work and hard work, if you mean to succeed.”

“If you prefer an ‘academic life’ as a retreat from reality, do not go into biology. This field is for a man or woman who wishes to get even closer to life.”

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

“To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by God.”

“The realm of England is an empire … governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown.”

“Elijah was reputed to be the patron saint of aviators, but as he went to Heaven in a chariot of fire, this was something we weren’t too keen about.”

“Through renouncement of wine bewildered am I;
How to work know I not, so distracted am I;
While others repent and make vow to abstain,
I have vowed to abstain, and repentant am I.”

“It is necessary to look for the origin of a crusading ideal in the struggle between Christians and Muslims in Spain and consider how the idea of a holy war emerged into this background.”

“Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents. It was loaned to you by your children.”

“Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.”

“Comrade workers! Have you forgotten for what you struggled and spilled your blood? For freedom, for improvement of workers’ living conditions in a whole world!… But now authorities turn back to the old order, to serfdom, they do not allow us to say the truth, they do not give workers basic necessities.”

“In England crime is infamous; in Ireland it is popular.”

“One must work long and hard to arrive at the truthful. What I want and set as my goal is damned difficult, and yet I don’t believe I’m aiming too high.”

“In no school can a man be taught a better lesson of human life than at a contested Westminster election; there he can view human nature in her basest attire; riot, murder, and drunkenness are the order of the day.”

“As I look back upon the labors of the last forty or fifty years, it seems to me that everything has been utterly ruined, utterly destroyed, as by some irresistible force.”

“Modern man has lost the feeling of being at home in the world.”

“Disgraced by the stink of Revolution, baked of dirt and mud.”

“We have set eyes on regions … far away.”

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.”

“Alas … we are a race deserving of pity, even from the French.”

“Beyond this region … at the northernmost post, where the sea ends somewhere on the outer fringe, there is a very great inland city called Thina from which silk floss, yarn and clothes are shipped by land … It is not easy to get to this Thina; for rarely to people come from it, and only a few.”

“Knowledge without practice is like a tree without fruit.”

“The men who place implicit faith in their own common sense are, without any exception, the most wrong-headed and impracticable persons with whom [one] has ever had to deal.”

“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders.”

“When will the war be finished? When Hitler is no longer victorious, when Goring no longer flies and when Goebbels no longer lies.”

“To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs”.

“If a cat gets hold of a German irregular verb – goodbye cat”.

“I realise the tragic significance of the atom bomb … we thank God it has come to us instead of our enemies.”

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

“The whole race … is war-mad, high-spirited and quick to battle.”

“You cannot force ideas. Successful ideas are the result of slow growth. Ideas do not reach perfection in a day, no matter how much study is put upon them.”

“I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop I cease to think, my mind only works with my legs.”

“There are so many marvelous things, and nothing more so than man.”

“Give me six lines written by the hand of an honorable man, and I will find in them something to make him hang.”

“I have enjoyed the veneration of my country, and the riches of the world. There is no object I do not have, nothing I have not experienced. But now that I have reached old age, I cannot rest easy for a moment.”

“I have been sweating blood over the question what is right and feasible to do in Russia. It goes to pieces like quicksilver under my touch.”

“Not all Democrats are horse thieves. But all horse thieves are Democrats.”

“A young virtuoso has fallen from the clouds”.

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.”

“The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.”

“A life based on reason will always need to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for the instinctual drives must be satisfied”.

“There is a passion for hunting something deeply implanted in the human breast.”

“Castles in the air – they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build too.”

“Every advantage has its tax.”

“Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”

“The magnitude of our city draws the produce of the world into our harbour, so that to the Athenian the fruits of others countries are as familiar a luxury of those of his own.”

“One must be a God to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake.”

“I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.”

“Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.”

“What is Europe? A rubble-heap, a charnel house (a building or vault in which corpses or bones are piled), a breeding ground for pestilence and hate.”

“We shall not have a commotion, we shall not have blood, but we shall be plundered by forms of law.”

“I don’t dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.”

“I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.”

“The necessity of war, which among human actions is the most lawless, hath some kind of affinity with the necessity of law.”

“Power exercised with violence has seldom been of long duration, but temper and moderation generally produce permanence in all things.”

“The human form and human mind attainted to a perfection in Greece.”

“Pity poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States!”

“That is a truly evil man.”

“Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient.”

“The pope, once the wonder of the world, has fallen. Then came the age of clay. Could aught be worse? Aye, dung, and in dung sits the papal court.”

“The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years.”

“The chess players are no longer waiting so infernally long between their moves. And the patient pawns are all in movement, hourly expecting further advances – whether to be taken or to reach the back lines and be queened. ’Tis sweet, this pawn-being: there are no cares, no doubts, wherefore no regrets.”

“Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.”

‘I am MacWonder one moment and MacBlunder the next.’

“Five enemies of peace live with us – avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should enjoy perpetual peace.”

“All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.”

“Whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is so powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise. The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything: so that the desire being always greater than the acquisition, there results discontent with the possession and little satisfaction to themselves from it.”

“The typical Westerner wishes to be the cause of as many changes as possible in his environment; the typical Chinese person wishes to enjoy as much and as delicately as possible.”

“Of all those arts in which the wise excel, nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.”

“Even better than making the world, God makes the world make itself!”

“Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women.”

“We do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”

“Worldly renown is naught but a breath of wind, which now comes this way and now comes that, and changes name because it changes quarter.”

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

“To win the war, to overcome the enemy upon the fields cannot alone ensure the victory in peace.”

“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it? This question, which at first sight might not seem difficult, is really one of the most difficult that can be asked.”

“We must constantly remind ourselves that whatever our religion or creed, we are all one people.”

“Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence.”

“More rogues than honest men find shelter under habeas corpus.”

‘A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?’

“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”

“Let the Chinese dragon sleep, for when she awakes she will astonish the world.”

“If and when the war starts, wherever you are, North or South, young or old, whoever you are, you all have the responsibility of protecting our home and repelling the enemy, you all must have the will to achieve ultimate sacrifice.”

“In zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that the district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.”

“ls there no one who will rid me of this turbulent priest?”

“Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”

“Your task, Roman, and do not forget it, will be to govern the peoples of the world in your empire. These will be your arts – to impose a settled pattern upon peace, to pardon the defeated and war down the proud.”

“It is one thing to show a man in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.”

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue!”

“[Victory] is to make proper preparations in the enemy’s camp so that the result is decided beforehand.”

“He didn’t create the situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’”

“Let the entire system of government be strengthened, and let the balance of power be drawn up in such a manner that it will be permanent and incapable of decay because of its own tenuity.”

“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.”

“No age is wanting in able men; it is the duty of wise masters to find them out, win them over, and get work done by means of them, without listening to the calumnies of selfish men against them.”

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

“We do not believe in government through the voting booth. The Spanish national will was never freely expressed through the ballot box. Spain has no foolish dreams.”

“The source of the woes and unpleasantness we are experiencing is the fact that the Communist Party consists of 10% convinced idealists who are ready to die for the idea, and 90% hangers-on without consciences, who have joined the party to get a position.”

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

“I am sure that it will give rise to valuable critical observations which will both inspire me to future creative work and provide insights enabling me to review that which I have created in the past. Rather than take a step backward I shall thus succeed in taking one forward.”

“There is no art which one government sooner learns from another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”

“Heroing is one of the shortest-lived professions there is.”

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”

“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if we seek them with our eyes open.”

“The man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies”.

“The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment.”

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

“Gird your hearts with silent fortitude, suffering, yet hoping all things.”

“To do an evil action is base; to do a good action without incurring danger is common enough; but it is the part of a good man to do great and noble deeds, though he risks everything.”

“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship.”

“You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.”

“The reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is that we may listen the more and talk the less.”

“It is easy to kill someone with a slash of a sword. It is hard to be impossible for others to cut down.”

“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land, to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.”

“Few men are brave by nature, but good discipline and experience make many so. Good order and discipline in an army are more to be depended upon than ferocity.”

“The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.”

“Don’t tax you. Don’t tax me. Tax the guy behind the tree.”

“It should be repugnant to the vital principles of our government, to exclude from public trusts talents and virtue that are accompanied by wealth.”

“You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

“Every man a king but no man wears a crown.”

“Raise less corn and more hell!”

“If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.”

“Doubt is the origin of wisdom.”

“Know, first, who you are, and then adorn yourself accordingly.”

“In Russia a man is a called reactionary if he objects to having his property stolen and his wife and children murdered.”

“Moral Action is that great and only experiment, in which all riddles of the most manifold appearances explain themselves. Who so understands it, and in rigid sequence of thought can lay it open, is forever master of nature.”

“Virtue in action immediately takes such a hold of a man that he sooner admires a deed than he sets out to follow in the steps of the doer.”

“All citizens must place the common good before the private good.”

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.”

“When I am commander in chief I shall do as I will. If anyone does anything else, I shall have them all shot.”

“The finest eloquence is that which gets things done; the worst is that which delays them.”

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

“Too much knowing is misery.”

“A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. You must act as you breathe.”

“Diplomats were invented simply to waste time.”

“Advertisers treat the public like swine”.

“Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.”

“Wisdom begins in wonder.”

“Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.”

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”

“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”

“Learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountain-heads.”

“Harold’s weakness was his desire for everyone to love him”.

“My having been ill these days with some leg pain means I have not written you; though the feet and tongue are far apart, one can still get in the way of the other.”

“Nothing can convey the awfulness of the trenches”.

“I have been all my life trying to make someone love me.”

“Liberty is not merely a privilege to be conferred; it is a habit to be acquired.”

“Everything I know I learned after I was thirty.”

“To have another language is to possess a second soul”.

“Ability is nothing without opportunity.” 

‘The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.’

“If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap, whence every one must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.”

“Liberalism is trust of the people, tempered by prudence; Conservatism, distrust of the people, tempered by fear.”

“I am for equality. I think that men are entitled to equal rights, but to equal rights to unequal things.”

“Give me two hundred Neapolitans armed with daggers, and only a muff on their left arms for a buckler, and with them I will overrun France, and accomplish the Revolution.”

“Any man may get a reputation for benevolence by judiciously laying out five pounds a year.”

“No man was ever written down except by himself.”

“You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately… Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”

“Whenever two people meet there are six present. There is the man as he see’s himself, each other as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”

“Hope is patience with the lamp lit.”

“At fifteen, I aspired to learning. At thirty, I established my stand. At forty, I had no delusions. At fifty, I knew my destiny. At sixty, I knew truth in all I heard. At seventy, I could follow the wishes of my heart without doing wrong.”

“History repeats itself; historians repeat one another.”

“I am not arguing with you – I am telling you.”

“Nothing new here, except that people are dying of hunger.”

“The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.”

“It seems that nature, which has so wisely disposed our bodily organs with a view to our happiness, has also bestowed on us pride, to spare us the pain of being aware of our imperfections.”

“Great men are they who see that spiritual is stronger than any material force, that thoughts rule the world.”

“Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this, one dog does not change a bone with another.”

“And so it happens oft in many instances; more good is done without our knowledge than by us intended.”

“When we discover that the truth is already in us, we are all at once our original selves.”

“If an ass goes travelling, he’ll not come back a horse.”

“There is only one important man in the Empire besides myself … and that is the man to whom I am speaking. And he is only important man while I am speaking with him.”

“What we need to hold Russia back from revolution is a small victorious war.”

“How much courage is needed to be a coward. We must go on being cowards up to our limit, but not beyond.”

“Nothing can be more hurtful to the service, than the neglect of discipline; for that discipline, more than numbers, gives one army the superiority over another.”

“I could as easily bail out the Potomac River with a teaspoon as attend to all the details of the army.”

“[The US] Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens – and then everybody disagrees.”

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

“If all else fails, retreat.”

“Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”

“I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”

“The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to his memory for his jests, and to his imagination for his facts.”

“Nature has given to men one tongue, but two ears, that we may hear from others twice as much as we speak.”

“Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.”

“One who fears failure limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.”

“Woe to the land that’s governed by a child.”

“I guess Dad has decided that he’s going to be the ventriloquist, so that leaves me the role of dummy.”

“I started at the top, and worked my way downwards.”

“To be a successful criminal, you have to be as unnoticed as wallpaper”.

“A perfected modern battle plan is like nothing so much as a score for an orchestral composition, where the various arms and units are the instruments, and the tasks they perform are their respective musical phrases. Every individual unit must make its entry precisely at the proper moment and play its phrase in the general harmony.”

“If Daddy is cross with me I just pick him up, for he is very little”.

“There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before”.

“To travel is to live.”

“Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art”.

“I look forward to the abolition of all hospitals”.

“I should rather that my spark should burn out in brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot”.

“A wise interrogation is half the battle”.

“If I were not Alexander, I would have liked to have been Diogenes”.

“There is no true sovereign except the nation. There is no true legislator except the people.”

“Total liberty for wolves, is death to the lambs”.

“I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul”.

“Speakers before the United States Chamber of Commerce rarely denigrate the businessman as an economic force.”

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

“The presidency is unceasing drudgery and daily loss of friends”.

“We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.”

“Power is poison.”

“Life is that long and cruel malady.”

“I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should seem a fool, but be wise.”

“Useless laws weaken the necessary laws.”

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.”

“If you are prepared to trust my leadership, you must be prepared to trust my judgement”.

“The firmness that the least writing brings about in me is ungainsayable and wonderful. [Writing] is my struggle for the preservation of myself.”

“As favour and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.”

“It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our doom. It is in the “dark shade of courage” alone that the spell can be broken.”

“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.”

“Manifold subsequent experience has led to a truer appreciation and a more moderate estimate of the importance of the dependence of one living being upon another.”

“Theoretical approaches have their place and are, I suppose, essential but a theory must be tempered with reality.”

“The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.”

“The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the communists are a disease of the heart.”

“I don’t know what it’s like to lose a battle, but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.”

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

“The crowd is the worst of tyrants.”

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one”

“The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

“What is at a peak is certain to decline. He who shows his hand will surely be defeated. He who can prevail in battle by taking advantage of his enemy’s doubts is invincible.”

“We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.”

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

“Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”

“What seems to me to be driving our whole civilization toward the abyss at present is a one-sided conception of liberty, a conception that is purely centrifugal, that would get rid of all outer control and then evade or deny openly the need of achieving inner control.”

“In this world I would rather live two days like a tiger, than two hundred years like a sheep.”

“We must find our voice to be able to say to the West; ‘You may force your things into our homes, you may obstruct our prospects of life – but we judge you!’”

“Success is relative: it is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.”

“Veracity is the heart of morality”.

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

“Make it your creed to equip yourself for life, not solely for your own benefit but for the benefit of the whole community”.

“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.”

“Be happy, drink, think each day your own as you live it and leave the rest to fortune.’

“When one is at ease with himself, one is near Tao.”

“Dictators ride to and fro upon tigers which they dare not dismount. And the tigers are getting hungry.”

“The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain are the next; the sovereign is the least.”

“There is but one step from triumph to downfall. I have seen, in the most significant of circumstances, that some little thing always decides great events.”

“It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it.”

“To be suspicious is not a fault. To be suspicious all the time without coming to a conclusion is the defect.”

“I don’t make jokes. I just watch the Government and report the facts.”

“In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence; the second, listening; the third, remembering; the fourth practicing; the fifth, teaching others.”

“Drive out prejudices through the door, and they will return through the window.”

“I do think we have entered upon a period of revolution which may last fifty years before the revolution is at last victorious in all Europe and finally the world.”

“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”

“I have been all my life trying to make someone love me.”

‘I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.’

‘We have had to learn that history is neither a God nor a redeemer.’

“The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.”

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing”.

“Thinkers are soldiers in the army of intellectual liberty.”

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.”

“Democracy is an aristocracy of blackguards.”

“Poverty is nothing but gloom and melancholy.”

“Sin writes histories, goodness is silent”.

“Life is work, and everything you do is so much more experience.”

“In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.”

“I count life just a stuff to try the soul’s strength on.”

“The newspaper’s function is not to instruct, but to startle.”

“Those who love wisdom must investigate many things.”

“I cannot understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.”

“Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.”

“I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best”

“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”

“On the day when brute force gains ascendency in India, all distinctions of East and West, of ancient and modern, will have disappeared. That will be the day of my test.”

“Outside history man is nothing.”

“Don’t ask me who’s influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested, and I’ve been reading all my life.”

“Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity?”

“History is the sum total of all the things that could have been avoided.”

“To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.”

“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.”

“Join the union, girls, and together say, ‘Equal Pay for Equal Work!’”

“Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.”

“An archeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

“To most people nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.”

“It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not “pay,” to use an American expression – at least, not in the beginning – and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.”

“Diversity in counsel, unity in command”.

“Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.”

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“We repeat again: strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one’s balance in spite of them. Even with the violence of emotion, judgment and principle must still function like a ship’s compass, which records the slightest variations however rough the sea.”

“When thoughts arise, then do all things arise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.”

“All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.”

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

“The United States brags about its political system, but the [U.S.] President says one thing during the election; something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.”

“When war is declared, truth is the first casualty”

“Who should succeed me but a king?”

“You hold in your hands the future of the world.”

“You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.”

“The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them.”

“Every daring attempt to make a great change in existing conditions, every lofty vision of new possibilities for the human race, has been labelled Utopian.”

“We are convinced that liberty without socialism is privilege, injustice; and that socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality.”

“The truth is that you cannot be memorably funny without at some point raising topics which the rich, the powerful and the complacent would prefer to see left alone.”

“We shall not achieve socialism without a struggle. But we are ready to fight, we have started it and we shall finish it with the aid of the apparatus called the Soviets.”

“To the heroic, desperate life flings a challenge.”

“It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.”

“Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul.”

‘You cannot be buried in obscurity: you are exposed upon a grand theatre to the view of the world. If your actions are upright and benevolent, be assured they will augment your power and happiness.’

“History is a mighty drama, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.”

“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”

“In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.”

“The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.”

“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans (1888).”

“The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.”

“I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”

“I choose the likely man in preference to the rich man; I want a man without money rather than money without a man.”

“You just keep pushing. You just keep pushing. I made every mistake that could be made. But I just kept pushing.”

“If there is no God, everything is permitted.”

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

“The disease of an evil conscience is beyond the practice of all the physicians of all the countries in the world.”

“All art is to some extent propaganda.”

“When thoughts arise, then do all things arise. When thoughts vanish, then do all things vanish.”

“Socialism is very properly recognized by the capitalist class as the one cloud upon the horizon which portends an end to the system in which they have waxed fat, insolent and despotic through the exploitation of their countless wage-working slaves.”

“When the sword of rebellion is drawn, the sheath should be thrown away.”

“The conscience is the best and most impartial judge that a righteous man has.”

“Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.”

“Notwithstanding all the differences in the aims and tasks of the Russian revolution, compared with the French revolution of 1871, the Russian proletariat had to resort to the same method of struggle as that first used by the Paris Commune – civil war.”

“Science of today – the superstition of tomorrow. Science of tomorrow – the superstition of today.”

“A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.”

“Common sense is not so common.”

“Arise! All those who don’t want to be slaves! Let our flesh and blood forge our new Great Wall! As the Chinese nation has arrived at its most perilous time, every person is forced to expel their very last roar.”

“You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?”

“Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.”

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

“Merely having an open mind is nothing, the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it with something solid.”

“There are things, no matter what the alternative, that those who are charged with the direction of affairs in this country can never give up.”

“They saw, that to live by one man’s will, became the cause of all men’s misery.”

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”

“If a man look sharply and attentively, he shall see Fortune, for, though she be blind, yet she is not invisible.”

“Let our reason, and not our senses, be the rule of our conduct; for reason will teach us to think wisely, to speak prudently, and to behave worthily.”

“A hungry people listens not to reason, nor cares for justice, nor is bent by any prayers.”

“Terrible as is war, it yet displays the spiritual grandeur of man daring to defy his mightiest hereditary enemy — death.”

“If we could have a little patience, we should escape much mortification; time takes away as much as it gives.”

“Men must be either the slaves of duty, or the slaves of force.”

“To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.”

“Courage, like cowardice, is undoubtedly contagious, but some persons are not liable to catch it.”

“The safest way for a state is to lay down the rule that religion is comprised solely in the exercise of charity and justice, and that the rights of rulers in sacred, no less than in secular matters, should merely have to do with actions, but that every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks.”

“In Soviet culture the only conflict that is possible is the one between ‘the good and the best’.”

“In the construction of a country, it is not the practical workers but the idealists and planners that are difficult to find.”

“The axe, pick, saw and trowel, have become more the implement of the American soldier than the cannon, musket and sword.”

”Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”

“There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

“Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity. The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change.”

“We are obligated to be more scrupulous in fulfilling the commandment of charity than any other positive commandment because charity is the sign of a righteous man.”

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”

“I am inclined to believe that this is the Land God gave to Cain.”

“The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven.”

“National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.”

“He has said nothing or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering.”

“We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands; we have a check upon two branches of the legislature, as each branch has upon the other two; the power of electing, at stated periods, one branch, which branch has the power of electing another. It becomes necessary to every (citizen) then, to be in some degree a statesman”.

“Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.”

“In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance.”

“The most practical thing in the world is common sense and common humanity.”

“Seeing much, suffering much and studying much are the three pillars of learning.”

“The world was my oyster, but I used the wrong fork.”

“One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.”

“One is easily fooled by that which one loves”.

“A share in the sovereignty of the state, which is exercised by the citizens at large, in voting at elections is one of the most important rights of the subject, and in a republic ought to stand foremost in the estimation of the law.”

‘He has said nothing or done nothing worth a serious man taking the trouble of remembering’.

‘Bobby hates like me.’

‘Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.’

“Should things go wrong at any time, the people will set them to rights by the peaceable exercise of their elective rights.”

‘Science when well digested is nothing but good sense and reason.’

‘Measures, not men, have always been my mark.’

‘Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.’

‘Politics I conceive to be nothing more than the science of the ordered progress of society along the lines of greatest usefulness and convenience to itself.’

‘Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.’

‘A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.’

‘All children are essentially criminal.’

‘The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.’

‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’

‘They who drink beer will think beer.’

‘To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.’

‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’

’Twas a woman who drove me to drink. I never had the courtesy to thank her.’

‘Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom: it is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.’

‘Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.’

‘He’s got hold of the red meat of the English language and turned it into hamburger.’

‘The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.’

‘When the righteous rule, the people rejoice; when the wicked rule, the people groan.’

‘Whoever serves his country well has no need of ancestors.’

‘While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humored and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a dead end or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.’

“In selecting officeholders, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate, look to character.”

‘Equality (i.e., in essential nature) is the sacred law of humanity.’

‘Eloquence, at its highest pitch, leaves little room for reason or reflection, but addresses itself entirely to the fancy or the affections, captivates the willing hearers, and subdues their understanding.’

‘Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.’

‘Excessive distrust is not less hurtful than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is unwilling to risk being deceived.’

‘Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called.’

‘High titles lower, instead of raising, those who know not how to support them.’

‘The thinker requires exactly the same light as the painter, clear, without direct sunshine, or blinding reflection, and, where possible, from above.’

‘Wherever a corrupt style of speech finds favour, you may be sure that morals have gone astray.’

‘This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.’

‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’

‘A quart of ale is a dish fit for a King.’

‘Selfishness is the greatest curse of the human race.’

‘Whatever a man’s professional calling, he ought to aim evangelically at doing good.’

‘A lie told often enough becomes the truth.’

‘Men must be either pampered or crushed, because they can get revenge for small injuries but not for grievous ones.’

‘Every extension of the franchise, renders more powerful the newspaper and less powerful the politician.’

‘Being Vice President is like being a cut dog.’

‘Let these be thine arts. Bear dominion over the nations and impose the law of peace.’

‘All the world over, I will back the masses against the classes.’

‘The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: “Lazarus, come forth!” and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.’

‘All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.’

‘There is no man so friendless but when he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths.’

‘Great abilities are rare, and they are often accompanied by qualities which make the abilities useless to him who has them, and even injurious to society.’

‘Art is the only serious thing in the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.’

‘Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.’

‘You can look out of your life like a train and see what you’re heading for, but you can’t stop the train.’

‘Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.’

‘We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.’

‘The principal advantage of the English Constitution consists without doubt in the fact that the national spirit is always in full vitality and has its eyes on the conduct of the king, who doubtless can for a long spell of years arrogate to himself more authority than he ought to have, may even use his great power to commit injustice, but the cries of the nation soon change to thunder, and sooner or later the King yields.’

‘As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.’

‘Only the dead have seen the end of war.’

‘Having no destination, I am never lost.’

‘The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.’

‘Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.’

‘You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.’

‘Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it.’

‘The easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self; for what partitioned man wishes he generally believes to be true.’

‘Our life is frittered away by details. Simplify, simplify.’

‘In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.’

‘Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.’

‘To an unjust government a martyr is more harmful than a rebel.’

‘Gold is like pepper. The more you eat the more it pricks you.’

‘Let us leave conclusions to imbeciles.’

‘There is no slave out of heaven like a loving woman; and, of all loving women, there is no such slave as a mother.’

‘Everything there is to say about life on this planet could be said in a single sentence of moderate length.’

‘Peace, like charity, begins at home.’

‘The measure of the progress of civilization is the progress of the people.’

‘I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes. Over 700 of which I wrote myself.’

‘Since life is but a dream, Why toil to no avail?’

‘It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.’

‘Every person is responsible for only the good within his abilities, and for no more, and no one can tell whose sphere is the largest.’

‘The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.’

‘There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little property in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthright. But it seems now, except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right … I wonder, we were so much deceived.’

‘When men lack a sense of awe, there will be disaster.’

‘He who cannot enjoy good fortune when it comes has no right to complain when it passes him by.

‘Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study.’

‘Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.’

‘It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong.’

‘It is not a form of entertainment I understand’.

‘With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you. I most devoutly wish that your later days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable.’

‘It is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both’.

‘The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second; hardship, poverty, and want are the best school for a soldier.’

‘If any conflict breaks out in England, one or other of the rivals is master within ten days or less’.

‘You, if you are wise, will not know what you do know.’

‘Never believe anything in politics until it has been officially denied.’

‘Advertising is rattling a stick in a swill bucket.’

‘Après Moir, le deluge’ (After me, the storm)

‘A prince ‘must avoid anything which will make him hated and despised,’ as ‘nothing brings a man greater honour than the new laws and new institutions he has established.’

‘He’d be better off shoveling snow than scribbling on manuscript paper.’

‘Mad wars destroy in one year the works of many years of peace.’

‘A tenacious adherence to the rights and liberties transmitted from a wise and virtuous ancestry, public spirit, and a love of one’s country, are the support and ornaments of government.’

‘It is allowed on all hands that the people of England are more corrupt in their morals than any other nation this day under the sun.’

‘The setting of a great hope is like the setting of the sun. The brightness of our life is gone.’

‘Who dares nothing, need hope for nothing.’

‘The truest expression of people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie.’

‘All wish to posses knowledge but few, comparatively speaking, are willing to pay the price.’

‘The German Empire is the main limb, Germany is the centre of Europe. Germany is the battlefield on which the struggle for mastery in Europe is fought.’

‘Friendship makes prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.’

‘Aptitude for war is aptitude for movement.’

‘In war there is never any chance for a second mistake.’

‘Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains the victory.’

‘A man’s real possession is his memory. In nothing else is he rich, in nothing else is he poor.’

‘The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.’

‘Nature hates calculators; her methods are salutary and impulsive.’

‘On two occasions, I have been asked [by MPs], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?”…I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.’

‘The causes of events are ever more interesting than the events themselves.’

‘When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it – this is knowledge.’

‘What one needs to do at every moment of one’s life is to put an end to the old world and to begin a new world.’

‘To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient truths; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.’

‘We must keep ever in mind that a republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it.’

‘The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.’

‘We look forward to the time when the power of love will replace the love of power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.’

‘Knowledge is the highest good, truth the supreme value, all the rest is secondary and subordinate.’

‘No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country – thus far shalt thou go and no further.’

‘True patriotism sometimes requires of men to act exactly contrary, at one period, to that which it does at another, and the motive which impels them the desire to do right is precisely the same.’

‘Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.’

‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the tastes of the public.’

‘He has introduced Caesarism into corporate life.’

‘Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams.’

‘I don’t care for the applause one gets by saying what others are thinking; I want actually to change people’s thoughts. Power over people’s minds is the main personal desire of my life; and this sort of power is not acquired by saying popular things.’

‘Haste in every business brings failures.’

‘The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.’

‘Give me a bed and a book and I am happy.’

‘The haste of a fool is the slowest thing in the world.’

‘We discovered two or three villages, and the people all came down to the shore, calling out to us.… An old man came on board my boat; the others, both men and women cried with loud voices: “Come and see the men who have come from the sky. Bring them victuals and drink.”

‘There is only one proof of ability – action.’

‘Real excellence, indeed, is most recognized when most openly looked into.’

‘It was wisely said, by a man of great observation, that there are as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them.

‘If Virginia stands by the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes… then I will follow my native state with my sword and, if need be, with my life.’

‘A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you.’

‘The gods are on the side of the stronger.’

‘Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.’

“I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’”

‘All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat.’

‘Woe is me. I think I am becoming a God.’

‘The Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have national spirit … they are just a heap of loose sand… Other men are the carving knife and serving dish; we are the fish and the meat.’

‘There are two worlds: the world that we can measure with line and rule, and the world we feel with our hearts and imagination.’

‘All knowledge, when separated from justice and virtue, is seen to be cunning and not wisdom.’

‘Many have original minds who do not think it — they are led away by custom. Now it appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own citadel.’

‘He who doesn’t know how to dissimulate, doesn’t know how to rule.’

‘I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.’

‘Facts are to the mind what food is to the human body.’

‘Most of the conflicts the world has seen in the past ten decades have not been called forth by princely ambition or ministerial conspiracy but through the passionate avocation of public opinion.’

‘Hypocrisy is a homage that vice pays to virtue.’

‘Martyrdom sir, is what these people like; it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.’

‘We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.’

‘Mankind are an incorrigible race. Give them but bugbears and idols — it is all that they ask; the distinctions of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, are worse than indifferent to them.’

‘For those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.’

‘In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.’

‘No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.’

‘When one is alone and unarmed, a surrender may be pardoned’.

‘Don’t doubt the Creator, because it is inconceivable that accidents could be the controller of this universe’.

‘They never achieve anything, who do not believe in success’.

‘I live a very dull life here and know nothing that passes in the town — I never go to any public place; indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else. There are certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from; and as I cannot do as I like, I am obstinate, and stay at home a great deal.’

‘Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich man to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.’

‘Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement; nothing can be done without hope.’

‘I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.’

‘Riches are of little avail in many of the calamities to which mankind are liable.’

‘No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.’

‘The requisites of government are sufficiency of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler’.

‘An extravagance is anything you buy which is of no earthly use to your wife.’

‘Peace: in international affairs, is a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.’

‘When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.’

‘It is a flat’ning thought, that the more we have seen, the less we have to say.’

‘You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.’

‘All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.’

‘The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.’

‘All great truths begin as blasphemies.’

‘Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable compliment to it.’

‘When great men get drunk with a theory, it is the little men who have the headache.’

‘An author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.’

‘We are always getting ready to live, but never living.’

‘Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and the state forever separate.’

‘With man, most of his misfortunes are occasioned by man.’

‘Finally, education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.’

‘He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.’

‘The doctrine of the Declaration of Independence predicated upon the glory of man and the corresponding duty to society that the rights of citizens ought to be protected with every power and resource of the state, and a government that does any less is false to the teachings of that great document – false to the name American.’

‘Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.’

‘One must be something in order to do something.’

‘There are few earthly things more beautiful than a university.’

‘All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.’

‘How strange it seems that education, in practice, so often means suppression: that instead of leading the mind outward to the light of day it crowds things in upon it that darken and weary it. Yet evidently the true object of education, now as ever, is to develop the capabilities of the head and of the heart.’

‘It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.’

‘The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.’

‘The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration: this may be called perfect virtue.’

‘Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.’

‘Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being.’

‘I only want lions in my regiment.’

‘He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.’

‘When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over.’

‘Nothing is changed in France; there is only one Frenchman more.’

‘I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man.’

‘Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh, that is to say over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of illness, of loneliness and of death. There is no real piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.’

‘It is a maxim with me that no man was ever written out of reputation but by himself.’

‘Grace is given of God but knowledge is bought in the market.’

‘His virtue, prudence, intelligence and frugality entitle him to enter the privileged pale of the constituent body of this country.’

‘Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’

‘A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose.’

‘When I want a peerage, I shall buy it like an honest man.’

‘Punctuality is the politeness of kings.’

‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’

‘There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall someday die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.’

‘Upon this, one has to remark that men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.’

‘A pen is certainly an excellent instrument, to fix a man’s attention and to inflame his ambition.’

‘Our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.’

‘Be England what she will, with all her faults, she is my country still.’

‘I cannot approve of monarchs who want to rule over the conscience of the people, and take away their freedom of choice and religion.’

‘One should never put on one’s best trousers to go out in to fight for freedom.’

‘We can do without any article of luxury we have never had; but when once obtained, it is not in human nature to surrender it voluntarily.’

‘An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.’

‘Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.’

‘Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough’.

‘The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.’

‘The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.’

‘A hero is no braver than an ordinary man but he is braver five minutes longer.’

‘A German singer! I should as soon expect to get pleasure from the neighing of my horse.’

‘A hero is no braver than an ordinary man but he is braver five minutes longer.’

‘Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave states. Since there is no escaping your challenge, we accept it in the name of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers, as it is in right.’

‘All political parties are organised hypocrisies.’

‘Isolation is much less dangerous than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.’

“[He] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”

‘We all blundered into the war.’

‘Ego sum rex Romanus et super Grammatica” i.e. “As King of Rome I am above Grammar.

‘We fulfill the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, while you let yourself be debauched in secret by the vilest’.

‘An awful silence reigned on every hand; the hills were deserted, houses smoking in the distance, and our scouts did not meet a soul.’

‘The most difficult thing – but an essential one – is to love Life, to love it even while one suffers, because Life is all. Life is God, and to love Life means to love God.’

‘In and about London more pickpockets succeed in making a comfortable living than in the whole of the rest of Europe.’

‘[I have] never since pulled a trigger on any larger game.’

‘Remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestry.’

‘This achievement of mine I consider an important event in my life.’

‘There are no longer Frenchmen, Germans and Spaniards, or even English, but only Europeans.’

‘His intellect is no more use than a pistol packed in the bottom of a trunk if one were attacked in a robber-infested Apennines.’

‘Culture is something that must grow. You cannot build a tree; you can only plant it, and care for it and wait for it to mature’.

‘Egypt is a gift of the Nile’

‘They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts.’

‘The best tranquilizer is a clear conscience.’

‘That which is not good for the swarm, neither is it good for the bee.’

‘Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.’

‘A small acquaintance with history shows that all governments are selfish and the French governments more selfish than most.’

‘Life is itself but a game of football.’

‘I am going to build the kind of nation that President Roosevelt hoped for, President Truman worked for and President Kennedy died for.’

‘A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.’

‘There cannot be peaceful coexistence in the ideological realm. Peaceful coexistence corrupts.’

‘Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.’

‘The destructive urge is a creative urge.’

‘The pluck, the energy, the perseverance, the good temper, the self-control, which merit success in cricket or football, are the very qualities which win the day in peace or war.’

‘You cannot be a leader, and ask other people to follow you, unless you know how to follow too.’

‘It did not matter whether it was a penny put away for a rainy day or a vast fortune. Everything was obliterated.’

‘Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.’

‘The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.’

‘Let a merchant hold fast to this precious maxim: honour before gold’.

‘Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.’

‘Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.’

‘You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.’

‘Beauty in all things – no we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.’

‘Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.’

‘The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.’

‘When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.’

‘The tendency of a man’s nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards.’

‘Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence and justice.’

‘What is a throne? A bit of gilded wood covered in velvet. I am the state. I alone am here the representative of the people’.

‘I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.’

‘After I am dead the boy will ruin himself in 12 months.’

‘Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.’

‘Things that were hard to bear, are sweet to remember.’

‘The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.’

‘Fortune is like glass, the brighter the glitter, the more easily broken.’

‘I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.’

‘Necessity makes an honest man a knave.’

‘When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.’

‘I tried to drown my sorrows, but the bastards learned how to swim, and now I am overwhelmed by this decent and good feeling.

‘It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’

‘Think in the morning, act in the noon, eat in the evening, sleep at night.’

‘A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.’

‘The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.’

‘Error of opinion may be tolerated when reason is left free to combat it.’

‘We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.’

‘The superfluous, this very necessary thing.’

‘If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don’t want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.’

‘The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.’

‘That you must please others you must be forgetful of yourself.’

‘If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.’

‘Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.’

‘To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.’

‘To give everyone his due, that is supreme justice.’

‘I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember when I did not so think, and feel.’

‘There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it be thoroughly finished yields the true glory.’

‘Do not disagree between yourselves. Give the soldiers money and despise everyone else.’

‘Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.’

‘Without democracy there is no freedom. Violence, no matter who is using it, is always reactionary.’

‘It’s not what you look at the matters, it’s what you see.’

‘The nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game, is not yet past; it holds the awakening soul still in its grip.’

‘Why should we look for his errors when a brave man dies? Unless we can learn from his experience, there is no need to look for weakness. Rather, we should admire the courage and spirit in his life. What kind of man would live where there is no daring?’

‘There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever.’

‘Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men…the master of superstition is the people; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reverse order.’

‘In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.’

1911 – The first official flight with air mail takes place in Allahabad, British India, when Henri Pequet, a 23-year-old pilot, delivers 6,500 letters to Naini, about 10 kilometres – 6.2 miles – away.

‘If one could find the means of entirely destroying London it would be more humane than letting the blood of a single German soldier flow on the field of battle. Sentimental weakness during war is the most unforgivable stupidity.’

‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.’

‘I believe that every individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruits of his labor, so long as it in no way interferes with any other man’s right.’

‘I am familiar with champagne and have no prejudices against it.’

‘Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.’

‘I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.’

‘December 7th, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy.’

‘There is only one proof of ability – action.’

‘It is to be lamented that great characters are seldom without a blot.’

‘The record of one’s life must prove more interesting to him who writes it than to him who reads what has been written.’

‘The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.’

‘The Labour Party is a class party, and the class is not my class… The class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.’

‘Malice is only another name for mediocrity.’

‘Fascism is a European inquietude. It is a way of knowing everything – history, the State, the achievement of the proletarianization of public life, a new way of knowing the phenomena of our epoch.’

‘Life is an abnormal business.’

‘So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.’

‘The superior man examines his heart, that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself.’

‘God gave us memories so that we might have roses in December.’

‘And from your city do not wholly banish fear. For what man living, freed from fear, will still be just?’

‘Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.’

‘The jaws of power are always opened to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking and writing.’

‘The general who advances without coveting fame and retreats without fearing disgrace, whose only thought is to protect his country and do good service for his sovereign, is the jewel of the kingdom.’

‘What is a communist? One who has yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings.’

‘All political power is a trust.’

‘Better a hundred times an honest and capable administration of an erroneous policy than a corrupt and incapable administration of a good one.’

‘He serves his party best who serves the country best.’

‘Now they [the western powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?’

‘It is better to know nothing than to know what aint so.’

‘Excessive dealings with tyrants are not good for the security of free states.’

‘The [U.S.] Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president.’

‘Woe is me, I think I am becoming a god.’

‘I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.’

‘The trouble with Communism is that it accepts too much of today’s furniture. I hate furniture.’

‘Let him who desires peace, prepare for war.’

‘Tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic wweapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.’

‘So long as democracy exists, even in its very imperfect English form, totalitarianism is in deadly danger.’

‘And kid Congress and the Senate, don’t scold ‘em. They are just children that’s never grown up. They don’t like to be corrected in company. Don’t send messages to ‘em, send candy.’

‘The presidency is not merely an administrative office. That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.’

‘Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.’

‘We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.’

‘The trusts and combinations — the Communism of self — whose machinations have prevented us from reaching the success we deserved, should not be forgotten nor forgiven.’

‘It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.’

‘The time has come when we must proceed with the business of carrying the war to the enemy, not permitting the greater portion of our armed forces and our valuable material to be immobilized within the continental United States.’

‘We want to coax the snakes out of their holes. Then we will strike. My strategy is to let the poisonous weeds grow first and then destroy them, one by one.’

‘Every thought willingly contemplated, ever word meaningfully spoken, every action freely done, consolidates itself in the character, and will project itself onward in a permanent continuity.’

‘We were preparing not for peace only, but eternal peace. There was about us the halo of some divine mission. We must be alert, stern, righteous and ascetic. For we were bent on doing great, permanent and noble things.’

‘Nothing is more sterile, nothing is more costly, than vengeance.’

‘The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.’

‘I could bear it all if it weren’t for the hurt it brings to my mother and my family. They hear so much about what a terrible criminal I am. It’s getting too much for them and I’m just sick of it all myself.’

‘By every civilized and peaceful method we must strive for the rights which the world accords to men.’

‘The Japanese are a disease of the skin; the Communists are a disease of the heart.’

‘I can’t sing and I can’t dance, but I can kick any man’s ass.’

‘The tsar is not treacherous, but he is weak. Weakness is not treachery, but it fulfills all of its functions.’

‘There are things, no matter what the alternative, that those who are charged with the direction of affairs in this country can never give up. We are not going to quail now, even if it be certain that the full price of our freedom has to be paid.’

‘It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.’

‘Never was there a parliament in Ireland so possessed of the confidence of the people; you are the greatest political assembly now sitting in the world; [we have] an unquenchable public fire, which has touched all ranks of men like a visitation.’

‘When I hear anyone talk of culture, I release the safety on my Browning.’

‘The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.’

‘I used to dislike the Whigs, but in my years of loneliness I have come to the conclusion that they governed England better than anybody else. They thought out their measures carefully and adapted them to their times and generation. They were not heroic, but they were wise. In modern days we see much heroism but little wisdom.’

‘The New Englanders, by their canting, whining and insinuating tricks, have persuaded the rest of the colonies that the government is going to make absolute slaves of them.’

‘Pity is treason.’

‘One must never compromise with tyrants. One can only strike at kings through the head. Nothing can be expected from European kings except by force of arms. I vote for the death of the tyrant.’

‘I sailed downstream as a victor to drive out the Asiatics according to the command of Amun…my brave army in front of me like a blast of fire!’

‘Once blood is shed in a national quarrel reason and right are swept aside by the rage of angry men.’

‘The revelation of thought takes men out of servitude into freedom.’

‘What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.’

‘It is but a small matter to be good in the eye of the law only.’

‘It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.’

‘The pious-hearted are cared for by the gods, and they who reverence them are reverenced.’

‘Life itself is short, but lasts longer than misfortunes.’

‘Enthusiasm gives life to what is invisible, and interest to what has no immediate action on our comfort in this world.’

‘Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a crown of thorns.’

‘I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.’

‘No man should be in public office who can’t make more money in private life.’

‘There runs not a drop of my blood in any living creature… Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one!’

‘I hope to find my country in the right: however I will stand by her, right or wrong.’

‘The improvement of the understanding is for two ends: first, for our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver and make out that knowledge to others.’

‘The inevitableness, the idealism, and the blessing of war, as an indispensable and stimulating law of development, must be repeatedly emphasized.’

‘We must expect everything and fear everything from time and from men.’

‘The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous makes the sublime again.’

‘It is a lively spark of nobleness to descend in most favor to one when he is lowest in affliction.’

‘Give me a lever long enough and a prop strong enough, I can single handed move the world.’

‘If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war.’

‘Old Age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.’

‘Shun fear, it is the ague of the soul! a passion man created for himself – for sure that cramp of nature could not dwell in the warm realms of glory.’

‘Reason commands us far more than imperiously than a master; for in disobeying the one we are unfortunate, and in disobeying the other we are fools.’

‘Man is an animal that makes bargains; no other animal does this, one dog does not exchange a bone with another.’

‘I can’t think that it would be terrible of me to say — and it is occasionally true — that I need physics more than friends.’

“‘He who wants to protect everything, protects nothing,’ is one of the fundamental rules of defense.”

‘And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.’

‘We might win the first battle for Japan, but we won’t win the second. The war is lost to us. Therefore we must forget about ‘face,’ we must surrender as quickly as we can, and we must begin to consider at once how best to preserve our country.’

‘There are only two perfectly useless things in this world. One is an appendix and the other is Poincaré.’

‘One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.’

‘Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.’

‘No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud.’

‘Fortune sides with him who dares.’

‘Our country is the world – our countrymen are all mankind.’

‘My life is one demd (sic) horrid grind.’

‘The Bolshevists, so far as we could get any taste of their flavour, are the most consummate sneaks in the world.’

‘For painters, poets and builders have very high flights, but they must be kept down.’

‘Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived.’

‘The struggle against war, properly understood and executed, presupposes the uncompromising hostility of the proletariat and its organizations, always and everywhere, toward its own and every other imperialist bourgeoisie. ‘

‘Mirth is God’s medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it.’

‘The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas.’

‘Look to your consciences and remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’

‘A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.’

‘I wouldn’t believe Hitler was dead, even if he told me himself.’

‘One of the greatest victories you can gain over someone is to beat him or her at politeness.’

‘If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself.’

‘Every country has the government it deserves.’

‘It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.’

‘We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger.’

‘In the space of seven years I have succeeded in accomplishing a great work and uniting the whole world in one empire.’

‘I am MacWonder one moment and MacBlunder the next.’

‘Happy is he who can trace effects to their causes.’

‘Riches are of little avail in many of the calamities to which mankind are liable.’

‘Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let every new year find you a better man.’

‘The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.’

‘English capital runs as surely and instantly where it is most wanted, and where there is most to be made of it, as water runs to find its level.’

‘No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear’.

‘If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.’

‘Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.’

‘Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.’

‘When I was younger I made it a rule never to take strong drink before lunch. It is now my rule never to do so before breakfast.’

‘If you have men who will only come if they know there is a good road, I don’t want them. I want men who will come if there is no road at all.’

‘If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.’

‘Now in Ireland, now in England, now in Normandy — he must fly rather than go by horse or ship.’

‘The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.’

‘Fever raged around us, society crumbled almost visibly, the German Reich collapsed in ruins…What a background! Unimaginable and unforgettable.’

‘What each man feared would happen to himself, did not trouble him when he saw that it would ruin another.’

‘It is our determination to preserve proper relations between master and servant.’

‘Theirs, not to make reply, Theirs, not to reason why, Theirs but to do or die: Into the valley of Death, Rode the Six Hundred’

‘When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.’

‘There is but one method, and that is hard labour.’

‘A really great man is known by three signs – generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success’.

‘War means fighting, and fighting means killing.’

‘Break up, tis time, spur your feet … To work, to work, with tears.’

‘Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.’

‘The offensive knows what it wants…the defensive is in a state of uncertainty.’

‘A man of wit would often be much embarrassed without the company of fools.’

‘Love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.’

‘The passion of hatred is so durable and so inveterate that the surest prognostic of death in a sick man is a wish for reconciliation.’

‘In reality there are as many religions as there are individuals.’

‘We begin by trying to alter the faults of those about us, we go on to make the best of them, and perhaps end by loving them.’

‘Restless he rolls from whore to whore, a merry monarch, scandalous and poor.’

‘He, like a rock in the sea, stands his ground.’

‘This trip is turning out to be terrific. Here we are in Dallas, and it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine.’

‘I can never have enough children; in this I am insatiable.’

‘Daring is not safe against daring men.’

‘I cannot fiddle, but I can make a great state from a little city.’

‘He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.’

‘These are the days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence’. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.’

[I create laws] ‘common to all the nation, whether Englishmen, Danes or Britons.’

‘A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.’

‘A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.’

‘History … is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’

‘I had rather be dead than put in custody’.

‘A leader is a dealer in hope.’

‘Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.’

‘Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you’ll be able to see farther.’

‘Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.’

‘Marilyn, this man is the punishment of God in your life.’

‘Money-getters are the benefactors of our race.’

‘Paint me as I am.’

‘When the white man came, we had the land and he had the Bibles; now they have the land and we have the Bibles.’

‘I’ve had 18 straight whiskies……I think that’s the record.’

‘In this world I would rather live two days like a tiger, than two hundred years like a sheep.’

‘When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart.’

‘It was wisely said, by a man of great observation, that there are as many miseries beyond riches as on this side of them.’

‘Most of the time we were solitary adventurers in a great land as fresh and new as a spring morning, and we were free and full of the zeal of darers.’

‘History, like religion, unites all learning and power, especially ancient history; that is, the history of the nations of the youthful world — Grecian and Roman, Jewish and early Christian.’

‘The cautious seldom err.’

‘If we could have a little patience, we should escape much mortification; time takes away as much as it gives.’

‘Can the grooves of old mental habits be effaced?’

‘The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.’

‘Gentlemen, it was necessary to abolish the fez, which sat on the heads of our nation as an emblem of ignorance, negligence, fanaticism and hatred of progress and civilization, to accept in its place the hat, the headgear worn by then civilized world.’

‘We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.’

‘All great historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’

‘Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’

‘When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are things to be ashamed of. When a country is ill governed, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.’

‘It takes a long time to learn the difference between talent and genius, especially ambitious young men and women.’

‘My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.’

‘The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.’

‘It is strange to see with what feverish ardor the Americans pursue their own welfare, and to watch the vague dread that constantly torments them lest they should have not chosen the shortest path which may lead to it.’

‘Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims.’

‘Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively.’

‘The electric telegraph has saved India.’

‘Every man is a suffering-machine and a happiness-machine combined. The two functions work together harmoniously, with a fine and delicate precision, on the give-and-take principal.’

‘Don’t play (bet on) my horse today, I don’t feel lucky.’

‘I may not be a lion. But I am a lion’s cub. And I have a lion’s heart.’

‘Don’t ask, Act! Action will delineate and define you.’

‘Newspapers, the lavatory role of the nation.’

‘We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.’

‘Give me liberty, or give me death.’

‘A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.’

‘By the 2nd century CE, basically every home of any means in Rome had running water (supplied by the Aquaducts). Across the entire span of the Middle Ages, they didn’t achieve this.’

‘I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valor so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship.’

‘He who does not forget the past is master of the present.’

‘He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.’

‘It is far more difficult to be simple than to be complicated; far more difficult to sacrifice skill and cease exertion in the proper place, than to expend both indiscriminately.’

‘Real excellence, indeed, is most recognized when most openly looked into.’

‘A great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle (patriotism) alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest, or some reward.’

‘Doing good is the only certainly happy action of a man’s life.’

‘Believe me, a thousand friends suffice thee not; In a single enemy thou hast more than enough.’

‘A faithful and good servant is a real godsend; but truly it is a rare bird in the land.’

‘It was the supreme expression of the mediocrity of the apparatus that Stalin himself rose to his position.’

‘They charge me with fanaticism. If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large’.

‘The Germans should allow themselves to be guided by me if they wish to avoid unpardonable blunders. In politics it is undeniable that I am more intelligent than Hitler.’

‘Happiness lies in conquering one’s enemies, in driving them in front of oneself, in taking their property, in savouring their despair, in outraging their wives and daughters.’