Which Quotes

When life is too easy for us, we must beware or we may not be ready to meet the blows which sooner or later come to everyone, rich or poor.

Fortune, which has a great deal of power in other matters but especially in war, can bring about great changes in a situation through very slight forces.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Those newspapers of the nation which most loudly cried dictatorship against me would have been the first to justify the beginnings of dictatorship by somebody else.

There could be no fairer destiny for any physical theory than that it should point the way to a more comprehensive theory in which it lives on as a limiting case.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Mathematics takes us into the region of absolute necessity, to which not only the actual word, but every possible word, must conform.

It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

This shirt is dry clean only. Which means... it's dirty.

I was bold in the pursuit of knowledge, never fearing to follow truth and reason to whatever results they led, and bearding every authority which stood in their way.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

There are certain pursuits which, if not wholly poetic and true, do at least suggest a nobler and finer relation to nature than we know. The keeping of bees, for instance.

To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer.

The logs of wood which move down the river together Are driven apart by every wave. Such inevitable parting Should not be the cause of misery.

Legitimate use of violence can only be that which is required in self-defense.

Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind.

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

Non-violence, which is the quality of the heart, cannot come by an appeal to the brain.

Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls.

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.

Are not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.