More on    Aaliyah [Haughton] (1979–2001), R&B singer, actress

I want people to remember me as a full on entertainer and a good person.
– Aaliyah

It's hard to say what I want my legacy to be when I'm long gone.
– Aaliyah

Keep working hard and you can get anything that you want. If God gave you the talent, you should go for it. But don't think it's going to be easy. It's hard!
– Aaliyah

More on    Hank [Henry Louis] Aaron (1934– ), Hall of Fame baseball player

Can I smoke now without someone taking my picture?
– Hank Aaron

Didn't come up here to read. Came up here to hit.
– Hank Aaron

Guessing what the pitcher is going to throw is eighty percent of being a successful hitter. The other twenty percent is just execution.
– Hank Aaron

I can't recall a day this year or last when I did not hear the name of Babe Ruth.
– Hank Aaron

I don't see pitches down the middle anymore – not even in batting practice.
– Hank Aaron

I don't want them to forget Ruth, I just want them to remember me!
– Hank Aaron

I looked for the same pitch my whole career, a breaking ball. All of the time. I never worried about the fastball. They couldn't throw it past me, none of them.
– Hank Aaron

I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.
– Hank Aaron (1992)

I never smile when I have a bat in my hands. That's when you've got to be serious. When I get out on the field, nothing's a joke to me. I don't feel like I should walk around with a smile on my face.
– Hank Aaron

I'm hoping someday that some kid, black or white, will hit more home runs than myself. Whoever it is, I'd be pulling for him.
– Hank Aaron

It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
– Hank Aaron

Last year, I was sort of a kid and I was a little scared, I ain't scared any more.
– Hank Aaron

My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.
– Hank Aaron

On the field, blacks have been able to be super giants. But, once our playing days are over, this is the end of it and we go back to the back of the bus again.
– Hank Aaron

Roger Maris lost his hair the season he hit sixty-one, I still have all my hair, but when it's over, I'm going home to Mobile and fish for a long time.
– Hank Aaron

The pitcher has got only a ball. I've got a bat. So the percentage in weapons is in my favor and I let the fellow with the ball do the fretting.
– Hank Aaron

The triple is the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them.
– Hank Aaron

You can only milk a cow so long, then you're left holding the pail.
– Hank Aaron

You got to play a hundred and fifty games a year, so pick your spots. You can miss two games a month; so pick the days you're gonna be hurt, or you're gonna rest or you're gonna have a drink or two. The rest of the time, be on that field.
– Hank Aaron

More on    Edward Abbey (1927–1989), American essayist, novelist, atheist, anarchist and militant conservationist

A city man is at home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.
– Edward Abbey

A cowboy is a hired hand on the middle of a horse contemplating the hind end of a cow.
– Edward Abbey

A man without a horse is like a man without a weapon: stunted and naked.
– Edward Abbey

A cowboy is a farm boy in leather britches and a comical hat.
– Edward Abbey

A critic is to an author as a fungus to an oak.
– Edward Abbey

A drink a day keeps the shrink away.
– Edward Abbey

A formal education can sometimes be broadening but more often merely flattens.
– Edward Abbey

A genius is always on duty; even his dreams are tax deductible.
– Edward Abbey

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.
– Edward Abbey

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.
– Edward Abbey

A good writer must have more than vin rose in his veins, use more than Chablis for ink.
– Edward Abbey

A leader leads from in front, by the power of example. A ruler pushes from behind, by means of the club, the whip, the power of fear.
– Edward Abbey

A life without tragedy would not be worth living.
– Edward Abbey

A Mahler symphony is full of surprises – but each surprise, on second hearing, turns out to be an inevitable surprise.
– Edward Abbey

A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.
– Edward Abbey

A man without passion would be like a body without a soul. Or even more grotesque, like a soul without a body.
– Edward Abbey

A man's duty? To be ready – with rifle or rood – to defend his home when the showdown comes.
– Edward Abbey

A mother's sorrow is more true, honorable, and beautiful than the detachment of the sage.
– Edward Abbey

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
– Edward Abbey

A pretty girl can do no wrong.
– Edward Abbey

A rancher is a farmer who farms the public lands with a herd of four-legged lawn mowers.
– Edward Abbey

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and The Last Whole Earth Catalog.
– Edward Abbey

A true conservative must necessarily be a conservationalist.
– Edward Abbey

A true libertarian supports free enterprise, opposes big business; supports local self-government, opposes the nation-state; supports the National Rifle Association, opposes the Pentagon.
– Edward Abbey

A woman, as much as a man, is responsible by the age of forty for the character of her face. But women, obeying the biological imperative, strive harder to preserve a youthful appearance (the reproductive look) and lose it sooner.
– Edward Abbey

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State.
– Edward Abbey

According to the current doctrines of mysticoscientism, we human animals are really and actually nothing but "organic patterns of nodular energy composed of collocations of infinitesimal points oscillating on the multi-dimensional coordinates of the space-time continuum." I'll have to think about that. Sometime. Meantime, I'm going to gnaw on this sparerib, drink my Blatz beer, and contemplate the a posteriori coordinates of that young blonde over yonder, the one in the tennis skirt, tying her shoelaces.
– Edward Abbey

Ah, to be a buzzard now that spring is here!
– Edward Abbey

Alaska is our biggest, buggiest, boggiest state. Texas remains our largest unfrozen state. But mountainous Utah, if ironed out flat, would take up more space on a map than either.
– Edward Abbey

Alaska's chief attractions are: (a) its small and insignificant human population, thanks to the miserable climate; and (b) its large and magnificent wildlife population, thanks to (a). Both of these attractions are being rapidly diminished, however, by (c) the Law of Growth and Space-Age Sleaze.
– Edward Abbey

All dams are ugly, but the Glen Canyon Dam is sinful ugly.
– Edward Abbey

All forms of government are pernicious, including good government.
– Edward Abbey

All gold is fool's gold.
– Edward Abbey

All governments need enemies. How else to justify their existence?
– Edward Abbey

All governments require enemy governments.
– Edward Abbey

All is One? But One is so Many!
– Edward Abbey

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.
– Edward Abbey

All revolutions have failed? Perhaps. But rebellion for good cause is self-justifying – a good in itself. Rebellion transforms slaves into human beings, if only for an hour.
– Edward Abbey

All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love – and most of all, an audience!
– Edward Abbey

America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.
– Edward Abbey

Among politicians and businessmen, *Pragmatism* is the current term for "To hell with our children."
– Edward Abbey

An empty man is full of himself.
– Edward Abbey

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.
– Edward Abbey

Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners.
– Edward Abbey

Anarchy works. Italy has proved it for a thousand years.
– Edward Abbey

Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times (ten, actually), trying to get it just right. He failed.
– Edward Abbey

Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in.
– Edward Abbey

Anywhere, anytime, I'd sacrifice the finest nuance for a laugh, the most elegant trope for a smile.
– Edward Abbey

Appearance "versus" reality? Appearance "is" reality, God damn it!
– Edward Abbey

Apuleius married a rich widow, then wrote The Golden Ass.
– Edward Abbey

Are people more important than the grizzly bear? Only from the point of view of some people.
– Edward Abbey

Art, science, philosophy, religion – each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.
– Edward Abbey

As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.
– Edward Abbey

As between the skulking and furtive poacher, who hunts for the sake of meat, and the honest gentleman shooter, who kills for the pleasure of sport, I find the former a higher type of humanity.
– Edward Abbey

As Mark Twain said, "I love Wagner – if only they'd cut out all that damned singing!"
– Edward Abbey

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
– Edward Abbey

Baseball is a slow, sluggish game, with frequent and trivial interruptions, offering the spectator many opportunities to reflect at leisure upon the situation on the field: This is what a fan loves most about the game.
– Edward Abbey

Baseball serves as a good model for democracy in action: Every player is equally important and each has a chance to be a hero.
– Edward Abbey

"Be fair," say the temporizers, "tell both sides of the story." But how can you be fair to both sides of a rape? Of a murder? Of a massacre?
– Edward Abbey

Be it ever so vile, there's no place like home.
– Edward Abbey

Be of good cheer: We'll live to piss on the graves of our enemies.
– Edward Abbey

Beauty is only skin deep; ugliness goes all the way through.
– Edward Abbey

Belief in God? An afterlife? I believe in rock: this apodictic rock beneath my feet.
– Edward Abbey

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
– Edward Abbey

Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses ...
– Edward Abbey

Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.
– Edward Abbey

Beware of the man who has no enemies.
– Edward Abbey

Beware the writer who always encloses the word reality in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.
– Edward Abbey

Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.
– Edward Abbey

Books are like eggs – best when fresh.
– Edward Abbey

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.
– Edward Abbey

By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
– Edward Abbey

Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.
– Edward Abbey

Charity should be spontaneous. Calculated altruism is an affront.
– Edward Abbey

Chastity is more a state of mind than of anatomy.
– Edward Abbey

Cheer up, comrades: You can't feel as bad as you look. Or look as bad as you feel.
– Edward Abbey

Christian theology: nothing so grotesque could possibly be true.
– Edward Abbey

Cities should be like the county fairgrounds: empty places except during times of festival and tournament.
– Edward Abbey

Civilization, like an airplane in flight, survives only as it keeps going forward.
– Edward Abbey

Climbing K2 or floating the Grand Canyon in an inner tube: There are some things one would rather have done than do.
– Edward Abbey

Cold morning on Aztec Peak Fire Lookout. First, build fire in old stove. Second, start coffee. Then, heat up last night's pork chops and spinach for breakfast. Why not? And why the hell not?
– Edward Abbey

Concrete is heavy; iron is hard – but the grass will prevail.
– Edward Abbey

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
– Edward Abbey

Cowboys make better lovers: Ask any cow.
– Edward Abbey

Critics are like ticks on a dog or tits on a motor: ornamental but dysfunctional.
– Edward Abbey

Crossing the bar: "I want to buy a beer for every man in the house. If any."
– Edward Abbey

Daddy, the garbage man is here! Tell him we don't need any.
– Edward Abbey

Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely.
– Edward Abbey

Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.
– Edward Abbey

Democracy – rule by the people – sounds like a fine thing; we should try it sometime in America.
– Edward Abbey

Desire lends strength. Aspiration creates inspiration, which, for the artist, is the breath of life.
– Edward Abbey

Desire, said the Buddha, is the cause of suffering. But without desire, what delight?
– Edward Abbey

Do I believe in ghosts? I believe in the ghosts that haunt the human mind.
– Edward Abbey

Edmund Wilson was our greatest American literary critic because he was more than a literary critic: He was a fearless, even radical judge of the society he lived in. (See, for example, A Piece of My Mind; The Cold War and the Income Tax; the introduction to Patriotic Gore.) Our conventional critics cannot forgive him for those scandalous lapses in good taste.
– Edward Abbey

England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.
– Edward Abbey

Epitaphs for a gravestone: "Please: no hooliganism"; or "Es prohibe se hace agua aqui"; or "No comment".
– Edward Abbey

Every analysis leaves a residue of the unknown; this we call God or Karma or – depending on time and place – the UFO. (Unidentified Fucking Object).
– Edward Abbey

Every man has two vocations: his own and philosophy.
– Edward Abbey

Every man should be his own guru; every woman her own gurette.
– Edward Abbey

Every moment is precious. And precarious.
– Edward Abbey

Every writer has his favorite coterie of enemies: Mine is the East Coast literati – those prep school playmates and their Ivy League colleagues.
– Edward Abbey

Everyone should learn a manual trade: It's never too late to become an honest person.
– Edward Abbey

Except for the scale of the operation, there was nothing unusual about Hitler's massacre of the Jews. Genocide's an old tradition, as human as mother love or cherry pie.
– Edward Abbey

Fantastic doctrines (like Christianity or Islam or Marxism) require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions. Thus the fear and the hate; thus the torture chamber, the iron stake, the gallows, the labor camp, the psychiatric ward.
– Edward Abbey

Farting is such sweet sorrow.
– Edward Abbey

Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
– Edward Abbey

Filling out the form: Race? Human. Religion? Paiute. Occupation? Criminal anarchy. Hobbies? Survival with honor.
– Edward Abbey

Fire lookout, 1400 hours, ferocious lightning storm. Me and God. That fucker is trying to get me again, God damn him. But I got me old .357 ...
– Edward Abbey

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are – retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.
– Edward Abbey

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.
– Edward Abbey

For women, the sexual act is a means to a higher end. For a man, it is an end in itself.
– Edward Abbey

Free love is priced right.
– Edward Abbey

Freedom begins between the ears.
– Edward Abbey

From the point of view of a tapeworm, man was created by God to serve the appetite of the tapeworm.
– Edward Abbey

Generally speaking, it's a matter of only mild intellectual interest to me whether the earth goes around the sun or the sun goes around the earth. In fact, I don't care a rat's ass either way.
– Edward Abbey

Girls, like flowers, bloom but once. But once is enough.
– Edward Abbey

Girls: I never wanted them all. Just all the ones I wanted.
– Edward Abbey

God bless America. Let's save some of it.
– Edward Abbey

God is love? Not bloody likely.
– Edward Abbey

Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.
– Edward Abbey

Good writing can be defined as having something to say and saying it well. When one has nothing to say, one should remain silent. Silence is always beautiful at such times.
– Edward Abbey

Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law.
– Edward Abbey

Government should be weak, amateurish and ridiculous. At present, it fulfills only a third of the role.
– Edward Abbey

Grand opera is a form of musical entertainment for people who hate music.
– Edward Abbey

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.
– Edward Abbey

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.
– Edward Abbey

Grown men do not need leaders.
– Edward Abbey

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
– Edward Abbey

"Have a nice day," said Lady Macbeth.
– Edward Abbey

Henry James: our finest lady novelist.
– Edward Abbey

Henry James was our master of periphrasis – the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.
– Edward Abbey

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks – chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring ...
– Edward Abbey

Hierarchical institutions are like giant bulldozers – obedient to the whim of any fool who takes the controls.
– Edward Abbey

Home is where, when you have to go there, you probably shouldn't.
– Edward Abbey

Homosexuality, like androgyny, might be an instinctive racial response to overpopulation, crowding, and stress. Both flourish when empire reaches its apogee.
– Edward Abbey

How can I be so evil? It ain't easy.
– Edward Abbey

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.
– Edward Abbey

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.
– Edward Abbey

How to Avoid Pleurisy: Never make love to a girl named Candy on the tailgate of a half-ton Ford pickup during a chill rain in April out on Grandview Point in San Juan County, Utah.
– Edward Abbey

How to Overthrow the System: brew your own beer; kick in your Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your own cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it.
– Edward Abbey

Humankind will not be free until the last Kremlin commissar is strangled with the entrails of the last Pentagon chief of staff.
– Edward Abbey

Humility is a virtue when you have no other.
– Edward Abbey

I always wanted to be a cowboy. But alas! I was burdened early with certain inescapable obligations to world literature.
– Edward Abbey

I always write with my .357 magnum handy. Why? Well, you never know when God may try to interfere.
– Edward Abbey

I am an enemy of the State. But isn't everyone?
– Edward Abbey

I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin.
– Edward Abbey

I am my brother's keeper, says the chickenshit liberal. Perhaps he does not realize that he now has more than 2 1/2 billion brothers.
– Edward Abbey

I believe in nothing that I cannot touch, kiss, embrace ... The rest is only hearsay.
– Edward Abbey

I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
– Edward Abbey

I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.
– Edward Abbey

I find more and more, as I grow older, that I prefer women to men, children to adults, animals to humans ... And rocks to living things? No, I'm not that old yet.
– Edward Abbey

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words "phenomenology" or "structuralism," I reach for my buck knife.
– Edward Abbey

I have been a lucky man. But someone has to be.
– Edward Abbey

I have found through trial and error that I work best under duress. In fact I work only under duress.
– Edward Abbey

I have written much about many good places. But the best places of all, I have never mentioned.
– Edward Abbey

I intend to be good for the rest of my natural life – if I live that long.
– Edward Abbey

I know my own nation best. That's why I despise it the most. And know and love my own people, too, the swine. I'm a patriot. A dangerous man.
– Edward Abbey

I like the smell of oil, grease, gasoline – and gunfire.
– Edward Abbey

I, too, believe in fidelity. But how can I be true to one woman without being false to all the others?
– Edward Abbey

I was once invited to take part in a heroic, possibly fatal enterprise, but I declined, mainly on account of sloth.
– Edward Abbey

I would never betray a friend to serve a cause. Never reject a friend to help an institution. Great nations may fall in ruin before I would sell a friend to save them.
– Edward Abbey

I would prefer to write about everything; what else is there? But one must be selective.
– Edward Abbey

I wouldn't trade a good horse for the best Rolls-Royce ever made – unless I could trade the Rolls for two good horses.
– Edward Abbey

I'd rather kill a man than a snake. Not because I love snakes or hate men. It is a question, rather, of proportion.
– Edward Abbey

If America could be, once again, a nation of self-reliant farmers, craftsmen, hunters, ranchers, and artists, then the rich would have little power to dominate others. Neither to serve nor to rule: That was the American dream.
– Edward Abbey

If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts not the institutions of men, then there's hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler's Germany and Rebecca's Sunnybrook Farm.
– Edward Abbey

If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns.
– Edward Abbey

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture – that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves.
– Edward Abbey

If people persist in trespassing upon the grizzlies' territory, we must accept the fact that the grizzlies, from time to time, will harvest a few trespassers.
– Edward Abbey

If the end does not justify the means – what can?
– Edward Abbey

If the world is irrational, we can never know it – either it or its irrationality.
– Edward Abbey

If there's anything I hate, it's the vibraphone. And the cha-cha-cha. And Latin rhythms generally.
– Edward Abbey

If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
– Edward Abbey

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
– Edward Abbey

If you feel that you must suffer, then plan your suffering carefully – as you choose your dreams, as you conceive your ancestors.
– Edward Abbey

If you feel that you're not ready to die, never fear; nature will give you complete and adequate assistance when the time comes.
– Edward Abbey

If you're never ridden a fast horse at a dead run across a desert valley at dawn, be of good cheer: You've only missed out on one half of life.
– Edward Abbey

I'm a fastidious sort of fellow, fond of watermelon and buckbrush nuts.
– Edward Abbey

I'm in favor of animal liberation. Why? Because I'm an animal.
– Edward Abbey

In a nation of sheep, one brave man forms a majority.
– Edward Abbey

In all of nature, there is no sound more pleasing than that of a hungry animal at its feed. Unless you are the food.
– Edward Abbey

In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.
– Edward Abbey

In art as in a boat, a bullet, or a coconut-cream pie, purpose determines form.
– Edward Abbey

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.
– Edward Abbey

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.
– Edward Abbey

In everything but brains and brawn, women are vastly superior to men. A different race.
– Edward Abbey

In history-as-politics, the "future" is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.
– Edward Abbey

In marriage, the occasional catastrophic crisis is easier to manage than the daily routine.
– Edward Abbey

In metaphysics, the notion that earth and all that's on it is a mental construct is the product of people who spend their lives inside rooms. It is an indoor philosophy.
– Edward Abbey

In my case, saving the world was only a hobby.
– Edward Abbey

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.
– Edward Abbey

In social affairs, I'm an optimist. I really do believe that our military-industrial civilization will soon collapse.
– Edward Abbey

In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
– Edward Abbey

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rocks.
– Edward Abbey

In the dog-eat-dog economy, the Doberman is boss.
– Edward Abbey

In the end, for all our differences and conflicts, most women and men share the same food, work, shelter, bed, life, joy, anguish, and fate. We need each other.
– Edward Abbey

In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.
– Edward Abbey

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political – especially that which pretends not to be.
– Edward Abbey

In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.
– Edward Abbey

In the world of words, one of my best-loved tribes is the diatribe.
– Edward Abbey

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
– Edward Abbey

Indolence and melancholy: Each generates the other. If one can speak of such feeble passions as generating anything.
– Edward Abbey

Industrialism, whether of the capitalist or socialist coloration, is the basic tyrant of the modern age.
– Edward Abbey

Is a mirage real? Well, it's a real mirage.
– Edward Abbey

Is it possible to grow wiser without knowing it? One hopes so. We all hope so.
– Edward Abbey

Is the Archbishop's blessing any more meaningful than the Politician's handshake? The come, they go, with bigger things than us on their minds.
– Edward Abbey

Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?
– Edward Abbey

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
– Edward Abbey

It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?
– Edward Abbey

It is not an easy thing to inflate a dog.
– Edward Abbey

It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it.
– Edward Abbey

It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
– Edward Abbey

It is the difference between men and women, not the sameness, that creates the tension and the delight.
– Edward Abbey

It is time for us men to acknowledge not only that women are vastly superior beings (that's easy) but also that they are – in every way that matters – our equals. That's hard.
– Edward Abbey

It is true that some of my fiction was based on actual events. But the events took place after the fiction was written.
– Edward Abbey

It may be true that my desk here is really "nothing but" a transient eddy of electrons in the flux of universal process. Nevertheless, I find that it continues to support my feet, my revolver, and my cigars all day long. What happens when my back is turned I don't know. Or much care. That's no concern of mine.
– Edward Abbey

It may be true that there are no atheists in foxholes. But you don't find many Christians there, either. Or, about as many of one as the other.
– Edward Abbey

It's a fool's life, a rogue's life, and a good life if you keep laughing all the way to the grave.
– Edward Abbey

It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.
– Edward Abbey

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.
– Edward Abbey

I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets – the seventeen who got away.
– Edward Abbey

J. Edgar Hoover, J. Bracken Lee, J. Parnell Thomas, J. Paul Getty – you can always tell a shithead by that initial initial.
– Edward Abbey

Jack Kerouac, like a sick refrigerator, worked too hard at keeping cool and died on his mama's lap from alcohol and infantilism.
– Edward Abbey

James Joyce buried himself in his great work. Finnegan's Wake is his monument and his tombstone. A dead end.
– Edward Abbey

Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.
– Edward Abbey

Jesus don't walk on water no more; his feet leak.
– Edward Abbey

John Updike: our greatest suburban chic-boutique man of letters. A smug and fatal complacency has stunted his growth beyond hope of surgical repair. Not enough passion in his collected works to generate steam in a beer can. Nevertheless, he is considered by some critics to be America's finest living author: Hold a chilled mirror to his lips and you will see, presently, a fine and dewy moisture condensing – like a faery breath! – upon the glass.
– Edward Abbey

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
– Edward Abbey

Life: another day, another dolor.
– Edward Abbey

Life imitates art – but badly.
– Edward Abbey

Life is too short for grief. Or regret. Or bullshit.
– Edward Abbey

Life is too tragic for sadness: Let us rejoice.
– Edward Abbey

Life is unfair. And it's not fair that life is unfair.
– Edward Abbey

Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
– Edward Abbey

Lifting her skirt, she revealed her treasure. The mother lode. Pretty, I thought, but is it art?
– Edward Abbey

Like any writer, I'd rather be read than dead. Like any serious author, I'd rather be dead than not read at all.
– Edward Abbey

Literary critics, like a herd of cows or a school of fish, always face in the same direction, obeying that love for unity that every critic requires.
– Edward Abbey

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
– Edward Abbey

Little boys love machines; girls adore horses; grown-up men and women like to walk.
– Edward Abbey

Longevity, like intelligence and good looks and health and strength of character, is largely a matter of genetic heritage. Choose your parents with care.
– Edward Abbey

Love implies anger. The man who is angered by nothing cares about nothing.
– Edward Abbey

King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
– Edward Abbey

Koan: Why "did" the chicken cross the road?
– Edward Abbey

Liberty cannot be guaranteed by law. Nor by any thing else except the resolution of free citizens to defend their liberties.
– Edward Abbey

Life is cruel? Compared to what?
– Edward Abbey

Life is hard? True – but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.
– Edward Abbey

Life without music would be an intolerable insult.
– Edward Abbey

Man was created to complete the horse.
– Edward Abbey

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat – planet Earth – could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama – soap opera with literary trimmings.
– Edward Abbey

Married couples who quarrel bitterly every day may really need each other as deeply as those who appear to be desperately in love.
– Edward Abbey

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
– Edward Abbey

Men have never loved one another much, for reasons we can readily understand: Man is not a lovable animal.
– Edward Abbey

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.
– Edward Abbey

Mental degeneracy may be caused by lead poisoning. Or by a poor dip in the gene pool.
– Edward Abbey

Metaphysics is a cobweb that the mind weaves around things.
– Edward Abbey

Mexico: where life is cheap, death is rich, and the buzzards are never unhappy.
– Edward Abbey

Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
– Edward Abbey

Money confers the power to command the labor of others. Love of money is love of power. And love of power is the root of evil.
– Edward Abbey

Mormonism: Nothing so hilarious could possibly be true. Or all bad.
– Edward Abbey

Most academic economists know nothing of economy. In fact, they know little of anything.
– Edward Abbey

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.
– Edward Abbey

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.
– Edward Abbey

Most of us lead lives of chaotic improvisation from day to day, bawling for peace while plunging grimly into fresh disorders.
– Edward Abbey

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about.
– Edward Abbey

Most writers are naturally sycophants. Born in the fetal position, they never learn to stand erect.
– Edward Abbey

Motherhood is an essential, difficult, and full-time job. Women who do not wish to be mothers should not have babies.
– Edward Abbey

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.
– Edward Abbey

Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music.
– Edward Abbey

Music clouds the intellect but clarifies the heart.
– Edward Abbey

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.
– Edward Abbey

Music is a savage art, a measured madness.
– Edward Abbey

My Aunt Ida at age eighty-three: "Yeah," she said, "I'll be dead pretty soon. And frankly, I don't give a damn."
– Edward Abbey

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.
– Edward Abbey

My books are not taken seriously. But that's all right; they are given playfully.
– Edward Abbey

My computer tells me that in twenty-five years there will be no more computers.
– Edward Abbey

My cousin Elroy spent seven years as an IBM taper staring at THINK signs on the walls before he finally got a good idea: He quit.
– Edward Abbey

My notion of a great novel is something like a five-hundred-page shaggy-dog story, with only the punch line omitted.
– Edward Abbey

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.
– Edward Abbey

My Publisher: "Yes, sooner or later, we all wake up dead!"
– Edward Abbey

My sole literary ambition is to write one good novel, then retire to my hut in the desert, assume the lotus position, compose my mind and senses, and sink into meditation, contemplating my novel.
– Edward Abbey

Narrow-minded provincialism: Sad to say but true – I am more interested in the mountain lions of Utah, the wild pigs of Arizona, than I am in the fate of all the Arabs of Araby, all the Wogs of Hindustan, all the Ethiopes of Abyssinia ...
– Edward Abbey

Nature is indifferent to our love, but never unfaithful.
– Edward Abbey

Nature, like Miamonides said, is mainly a good place to throw beer cans on Sunday afternoons.
– Edward Abbey

Nearly all of Latin America, from Chile to Mexico, is one long rack of torture. Financed, equipped, and refined by the U.S. government.
– Edward Abbey

Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never make love to a woman called Mizz *La Belle Dame*.
– Edward Abbey

New Yorkers like to boast that if you can survive in New York, you can survive anywhere. But if you can survive anywhere, why live in New York?
– Edward Abbey

No man is wise enough to be another man's master. Each man's as good as the next – if not a damn sight better.
– Edward Abbey

No man likes to be smoked out of his hole in February.
– Edward Abbey

No man-made structure in all of American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as that Glen Canyon Dam at Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County.
– Edward Abbey

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.
– Edward Abbey

Nobody has so many friends that he can afford to lose one.
– Edward Abbey

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our antimaterialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.
– Edward Abbey

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.
– Edward Abbey

Nothing could be more reckless than to base one's moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.
– Edward Abbey

Nothing could be older than the daily news, nothing deader than yesterday's newspaper.
– Edward Abbey

Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
– Edward Abbey

Once upon a time, I dreamed of becoming a great man. Later, a good man. Now, finally, I find it difficult enough and honor enough to be – a man.
– Edward Abbey

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.
– Edward Abbey

One day in Dipstick, Nebraska, or Landfill, Oklahoma, is worth more to me than an eternity in Dante's plastic Paradiso, or Yeats's gold-plated Byzantium.
– Edward Abbey

One must be reasonable in one's demands on life. For myself, all that I ask is: (1) accurate information; (2) coherent knowledge; (3) deep understanding; (4) infinite loving wisdom; (5) no more kidney stones, please.
– Edward Abbey

One thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly sow and her cub is getting between a businessman and a dollar bill.
– Edward Abbey

One thing worse than self-hatred is chiggers.
– Edward Abbey

One word is worth a thousand pictures. If it's the right word.
– Edward Abbey

Only a fool is astonished by the foolishness of mankind.
– Edward Abbey

Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.
– Edward Abbey

Only the half-mad are wholly alive.
– Edward Abbey

Opera: I like it, except for all those howling sopranos and caterwauling tenors. (Why can't tenors sing like men?)
– Edward Abbey

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
– Edward Abbey

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.
– Edward Abbey

Our contemporary Tories prefer the term "ordered liberty" to quot;freedom". The word "freedom" scares them; it has too much of a paleolithic ring to it.
– Edward Abbey

Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.
– Edward Abbey

Our "neoconservatives" are neither new nor conservative, but old as Bablyon and evil as Hell.
– Edward Abbey

Our suicidal poets (Plath, Berryman, Lowell, Jarrell, et al.) spent too much of their lives inside rooms and classrooms when they should have been trudging up mountains, slogging through swamps, rowing down rivers. The indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.
– Edward Abbey

Paradise for a happy man lies in his own good nature.
– Edward Abbey

Perfection is a minor virtue.
– Edward Abbey

Phoenix, Arizona: an oasis of ugliness in the midst of a beautiful wasteland.
– Edward Abbey

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.
– Edward Abbey

Poetry – even bad poetry – may be our final hope.
– Edward Abbey

Poor Dimitri Shostakovich: In the Soviet Union, he was condemned as being too radical; in the West, for being too conservative. He could please no one but the musical public. He revenged himself on both by writing a short piece called "March of the Soviet Police."
– Edward Abbey

Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best.
– Edward Abbey

Preacher to me: "A dollar for the Lord, brother?" Me to preacher: "That's all right, I'm headed his way. I'll give it to him when I see him."
– Edward Abbey

Proust again: One can only wish that a man with such powers of total recall had led a less tedious life, moved among somewhat livelier circles ...
– Edward Abbey

Proverbs save us the trouble of thinking. What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.
– Edward Abbey

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.
– Edward Abbey

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.
– Edward Abbey

Reason has seldom failed us because it has seldom been tried.
– Edward Abbey

Reason is the newest and rarest thing in human life, the most delicate child of human history.
– Edward Abbey

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
– Edward Abbey

Reincarnation? There is such a thing. What could be more Mozartian than the Nutcracker Suite?
– Edward Abbey

Remembrance of Things Past: an enormous fruitcake laced with cyanide.
– Edward Abbey

Representative government has broken down. Our politicians represent not the people who vote for them but the commercial interests who finance their election campaigns. We have the best politicians that money can buy.
– Edward Abbey

"Rock" is the music of slaves. Of adolescents pursuing the illusion of freedom and protest while the steel chains of technology bind them ever tighter.
– Edward Abbey

"Rock": music to hammer out fenders by. Music for vomiting to after a hard day spreading asphalt. Vietnam music. Imitation-Afro, industrial air-compressor music.
– Edward Abbey

Rocks, like louseworts and snail darters and pupfish and 3rd-world black, lesbian, militant poets, have rights, too. Especially the right to exist.
– Edward Abbey

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.
– Edward Abbey

Roosters: The cry of the male chicken is the most barbaric yawp in all of nature.
– Edward Abbey

Salome had but seven veils; the artist has a thousand.
– Edward Abbey

Saving the world was merely a hobby. My vocation has been that of inspector of desert water holes.
– Edward Abbey

"Say what you like about my bloody murderous government," I says, "but don't insult me poor bleedin' country."
– Edward Abbey

Science is the whore of industry and the handmaiden of war.
– Edward Abbey

Science transcends mere politics. As recent history demonstrates, scientists are as willing to work for a Tojo, a Hitler, or a Stalin as for the free nations of the West.
– Edward Abbey

Scientific method: There's a madness in the method.
– Edward Abbey

Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. One brave deed is worth a thousand books.
– Edward Abbey

Sex is not compulsory, reply the fetus lovers. True: but we're not talking about sex – we're talking about maternity.
– Edward Abbey

Shakespeare wrote great poetry and preposterous plays. Who really cares, for example, which petty tyrant rules Milan? Or who succeeds to the throne of Denmark? Or why the barons ganged up on Richard II?
– Edward Abbey

Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.
– Edward Abbey

Society is like a stew. If you don't keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top.
– Edward Abbey

Spartacus, like Jesus, was also crucified by the Romans. And for equally good reasons.
– Edward Abbey

Some lives are tragic, some ridiculous. Most are both at once.
– Edward Abbey

Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. A few more wore red coats, a few wore blue coats, and the rest wore no coats at all. We never did figure out who won that war.
– Edward Abbey

South of the border: The Hispanics despise the mestizos, the mestizos look with contempt on *Los Indios*, the Indians take it out on their women and dogs.
– Edward Abbey

Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.
– Edward Abbey

Some people write to please, to soothe, to console. Others to provoke, to challenge, to exasperate and infuriate. I've always found the second approach the more pleasing.
– Edward Abbey

Suicide: Don't knock it if you ain't tried it.
– Edward Abbey

Susan Sontag: What she really wanted, throughout her career, was to grow up to be a Frenchman.
– Edward Abbey

Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
– Edward Abbey

Tee Vee football: one team wins, one team loses – they tie – who cares? And why?
– Edward Abbey

Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
– Edward Abbey

That which today calls itself science gives us more and more information, an indigestible glut of information, and less and less understanding.
– Edward Abbey

The absurd vanity of metaphysicians who like to imagine that they create the world by thinking about it.
– Edward Abbey

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.
– Edward Abbey

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.
– Edward Abbey

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.
– Edward Abbey

The basic question is this: Why should anything exist? Nothing would be tidier.
– Edward Abbey

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology – the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.
– Edward Abbey

The best American writers have come from the hinterlands – Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never even went to college.
– Edward Abbey

The best argument for Christianity is the Gregorian chant. Listening to that music, one can believe anything – while the music lasts.
– Edward Abbey

The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.
– Edward Abbey

The best people, like the best wines, come from the hills.
– Edward Abbey

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.
– Edward Abbey

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.
– Edward Abbey

The critics say that Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony has no form. They are wrong; it has the form of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony.
– Edward Abbey

The death penalty would be even more effective, as a deterrent, if we executed a few innocent people more often.
– Edward Abbey

The developers and entrepreneurs must somehow be taught a new vocabulary of values.
– Edward Abbey

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.
– Edward Abbey

The dog's life is a good life, for a dog.
– Edward Abbey

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.
– Edward Abbey

The ever-rising cost of living: Someday soon, the corporate technicians will be locking meters on our noses and charging us a royalty on the air we breathe.
– Edward Abbey

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
– Edward Abbey

The feminist notion that the whole of human history has been nothing but a vast intricate conspiracy by men to enslave their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters presents us with an intellectual neurosis for which we do not yet have a name.
– Edward Abbey

The feminists have a legitimate grievance. But so does everyone else.
– Edward Abbey

The function of an ideal is not to be realized but, like that of the North Star, to serve as a guiding point.
– Edward Abbey

The great question of life is not the question of death but the question of life. Fear of death shames us all.
– Edward Abbey

The greater your dreams, the more terrible your nightmares.
– Edward Abbey

The gurus come from the sickliest nation on earth to tell us how to live. And we pay them for it.
– Edward Abbey

The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.
– Edward Abbey

The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
– Edward Abbey

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.
– Edward Abbey

The ideal kitchen-sink novel: Throw in everything but the kitchen sink. Then add the kitchen sink.
– Edward Abbey

The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
– Edward Abbey

The industrial corporation is the natural enemy of nature.
– Edward Abbey

The industrial way of life leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.
– Edward Abbey

The Latino military fare badly when they stumble into war with the gringos. But in the torture, murder, and massacre of their own people, they have always performed with brilliance and elan.
– Edward Abbey

The mad scientist was once only a creature of gothic romance; now he is everywhere, busy torturing atoms and animals in his laboratory.
– Edward Abbey

"The mind is everything," wrote Proust. No doubt true, when you're dead from the neck down.
– Edward Abbey

The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages – as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
– Edward Abbey

The more corrupt a society, the more numerous its laws.
– Edward Abbey

The more fantastic an ideology or theology, the more fanatic its adherents.
– Edward Abbey

The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chain saws.
– Edward Abbey

The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners – and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
– Edward Abbey

The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirits weak.
– Edward Abbey

The night I filled an inside straight: Even a blind hog's gonna root up an acorn once in a while.
– Edward Abbey

The nuclear bomb took all the fun out of war.
– Edward Abbey

The one great gift to humankind from our nuclear physicists has been the nuclear bomb. How can we ever thank them?
– Edward Abbey

The one thing worse than a knee-pad Tory is a chickenshit liberal. The type that can not say "shit" even when his mouth is full of it.
– Edward Abbey

The plow has probably done more harm – in the long run – than the sword.
– Edward Abbey

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink.
– Edward Abbey

The purpose and function of government is not to preside over change but to prevent change. By political methods when unavoidable, by violence when convenient.
– Edward Abbey

The purpose of love, sex, and marriage is the production and raising of children. But look about you: Most people have no business having children. They are unqualified, either genetically or culturally or both, to reproduce such sorry specimens as themselves. Of all our privileges, the license to breed is the one most grossly abused.
– Edward Abbey

The rancher strings barbed wire across the range, drills wells and bulldozes stock ponds everywhere, drives off the elk and antelope and bighorn sheep, poisons coyotes and prairie dogs, shoots eagle and bear and cougar on sight, supplants the native bluestem and grama grass with tumbleweed, cow shit, cheat grass, snakeweed, anthills, poverty weed, mud and dust and flies – and then leans back and smiles broadly at the Tee Vee cameras and tells us how much he loves the West.
– Edward Abbey

The ready availability of suicide, like sex and alcohol, is one of life's basic consolations.
– Edward Abbey

The real work of men was hunting meat. The invention of agriculture was a giant step in the wrong direction, leading to serfdom, cities, and empire. From a race of hunters, artists, warriors, and tamers of horses, we degraded ourselves to what we are now: clerks, functionaries, laborers, entertainers, processors of information.
– Edward Abbey

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.
– Edward Abbey

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from "bad" to "very bad." (Is there another gamut?)
– Edward Abbey

The rich are not very nice. That's why they're rich.
– Edward Abbey

The rich can buy everything but health, virtue, friendship, wit, good looks, love, pride, intelligence, grace, and, if you need it, happiness.
– Edward Abbey

The rifle and handgun are "equalizers" – the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship.
– Edward Abbey

The sense of justice springs from self-respect; both are coeval with our birth. Children are born with an innate sense of justice; it usually takes twelve years of public schooling and four more years of college to beat it out of them.
– Edward Abbey

The sexual revolution transformed the American West: Now even cowboys can get laid.
– Edward Abbey

The sneakiest form of literary subtlety, in a corrupt society, is to speak the plain truth. The critics will not understand you; the public will not believe you; your fellow writers will shake their heads. Laughter, praise, honors, money, and the love of beautiful girls will be your only reward.
– Edward Abbey

The "terror" of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.
– Edward Abbey

The tragedy of modern war is not so much that the young men die but that they die fighting each other – instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.
– Edward Abbey

The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
– Edward Abbey

The true, unacknowledged purpose of capital punishment is to inspire fear and awe – fear and awe of the State.
– Edward Abbey

The very poor are strictly materialistic. It takes money to be a mystic.
– Edward Abbey

The world exists for its own sake, not for ours. Swallow *that* pill!
– Edward Abbey

The world is full of burled and gnarly knobs on which you can hang a metaphysical system. If you must.
– Edward Abbey

The world is older and bigger than we are. This is a hard truth for some folks to swallow.
– Edward Abbey

The world is what it is, no less and no more, and therein lies its entire and sufficient meaning.
– Edward Abbey

The world is wide and beautiful. But almost everywhere, everywhere, the children are dying.
– Edward Abbey

The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
– Edward Abbey

The writer concerned more with technique than truth becomes a technician, not an artist.
– Edward Abbey

The writer speaks not to his audience (who wants to listen to lectures?) but for them, expressing their thoughts and emotions through the imaginative power of his art.
– Edward Abbey

There are circumstances in which suicide presents a viable option; a workable alternative; the only sensible solution.
– Edward Abbey

There are only two kinds of books – good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.
– Edward Abbey

There are two kinds are art: (1) decorative, nonobjective, wallpaper art; and (2) art with a moral purpose.
– Edward Abbey

There are two kinds of people I cannot abide: bigots and any well-organized ethnic group.
– Edward Abbey

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self-effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.
– Edward Abbey

There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last.
– Edward Abbey

There has got to be a God; the world could not have become so fucked up by chance alone.
– Edward Abbey

There has never been a day in my life when I was not in love.
– Edward Abbey

There has never been an "original" sin: each is quite banal.
– Edward Abbey

There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
– Edward Abbey

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.
– Edward Abbey

There is a wine called Easy Days and Mellow Nights, well-known on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation. It is an economical wine, fortified with the best of intentions, and I recommend it to every serious wino.
– Edward Abbey

There is a kind of poetry in simple fact.
– Edward Abbey

There is much to admire in the work of D.H. Lawrence – excepting his queer, soft, gooey, and epicene prose.
– Edward Abbey

There is no force more potent in the modern world than stupidity fueled by greed.
– Edward Abbey

There is no trajectory so pathetic as that of an artist in decline.
– Edward Abbey

There is science, logic, reason; there is thought verified by experience. And then there is California.
– Edward Abbey

There is this to be said for walking: It's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog.
– Edward Abbey

There never was a good war or a bad revolution.
– Edward Abbey

There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.
– Edward Abbey

There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.
– Edward Abbey

There's something about winning at poker that restores my faith in the innate goodness of my fellowman.
– Edward Abbey

This world may be only illusion – but it's the only illusion we've got.
– Edward Abbey

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on taste usually possess no other talent.
– Edward Abbey

Those who dream of the joys of living in a space colony should live in a space colony.
– Edward Abbey

Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least.
– Edward Abbey

Though I've lived in the rural West most of my life, I never once fell in love with a horse. Not once. Neither end.
– Edward Abbey

Though men now possess the power to dominate and exploit every corner of the natural world, nothing in that fact implies that they have the right or the need to do so.
– Edward Abbey

Three words remain that can yet stir the blood of man: the word "rebellion"; the word "revolt"; the word "revolution".
– Edward Abbey

Through logic and inference we can prove anything. Therefore, logic and inference, in contrast to ordinary daily living experience, are secondary instruments of knowledge. Probably tertiary.
– Edward Abbey

To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious. But the stupid have an answer for every question.
– Edward Abbey

Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can't quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
– Edward Abbey

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot.
– Edward Abbey

Trout fishing. One must be a stickler for proper form. Use nothing but #4 blasting caps. Or a hand grenade, if handy. Or at a pool well-lined with stone, one blast from a .44 magnum will bring a few stunned brookies quietly to the surface.
– Edward Abbey

Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth.
– Edward Abbey

Truth is merely common sense, say the naive realist. Really? Then where, precisely, is the location of – a rainbow? In the air? In the eye? In between? Or somewhere else?
– Edward Abbey

Us nature mystics got to stick together.
– Edward Abbey

Vladimir Nabokov was a writer who cared nothing for music and whose favorite sport was the pursuit, capture, and murder of butterflies. This explains many things; for example, the fact that Nabokov's novels, for all their elegance and wit, resemble nothing so much as butterflies pinned to a board: pretty but dead; symmetrical but stiff.
– Edward Abbey

War: First day in the U.S. Army, the government placed a Bible in my left hand, a bayonet in the other.
– Edward Abbey

War? The one war I'd be happy to join is the war against officers.
– Edward Abbey

We are all ONE, say the gurus. Aye, I might agree – but one WHAT?
– Edward Abbey

We judge individual man and women as we do nations and races – by the character of their achievement and by their achievement of character.
– Edward Abbey

We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
– Edward Abbey

We live in a time of twin credulities: the hunger for the miraculous combined with a servile awe of science. The mating of the two gives us superstition plus scientism – a Mongoloid metaphysic.
– Edward Abbey

We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.
– Edward Abbey

We should restore the practice of dueling. It might improve manners around here.
– Edward Abbey

Wealth should come like manna from heaven, unearned and uncalled for. Money should be like grace – a gift. It is not worth sweating and scheming for.
– Edward Abbey

We spend more time working for our labor-saving machines than they do working for us.
– Edward Abbey

"Welcome to the banquet of life," said a recent Pope, forgetting that most have to fight their way to the table.
– Edward Abbey

What are called inspirational books, like Gibran's The Prophet or Bach's Seagull, seem to have been strained through a bowl of fish-eye tapioca.
– Edward Abbey

What did Jesus say to the headwaiter at the Last Supper? "Separate checks, please."
– Edward Abbey

What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.
– Edward Abbey

What ideal, immutable Platonic cloud could equal the beauty and perfection of any ordinary everyday cloud floating over, say, Tuba City, Arizona, on a hot day in June?
– Edward Abbey

What is reason? Knowledge informed by sympathy, intelligence in the arms of love.
– Edward Abbey

What is the purpose of the giant sequoia tree? The purpose of the giant sequoia tree is to provide shade for the tiny titmouse.
– Edward Abbey

What our economists call a depressed area almost always turns out to be a cleaner, freer, more livable place than most.
– Edward Abbey

Whatever we cannot easily understand we call God; this saves much wear and tear on the brain tissues.
– Edward Abbey

What's the difference between a whore and a congressman? A congressman makes more money.
– Edward Abbey

What's the difference between the Lone Ranger and God? There really is a Lone Ranger.
– Edward Abbey

When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism.
– Edward Abbey

When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem.
– Edward Abbey

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
– Edward Abbey

When I hear the word "culture," I reach for my checkbook.
– Edward Abbey

When riding my old Harley at ninety per at midnight down the Via Roma in Naples, I kept one consolation firmly in mind: If anything goes wrong, I'll never have time to regret it.
– Edward Abbey

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.
– Edward Abbey

When the philosopher's argument becomes tedious, complicated, and opaque, it is usually a sign that he is attempting to prove as true to the intellect what is plainly false to common sense. But men of intellect will believe anything – if it appeals to their ego, their vanity, their sense of self-importance.
– Edward Abbey

When the situation is desperate, it is too late to be serious. Be playful.
– Edward Abbey

When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.
– Edward Abbey

When the writer has done his best, he then should proceed to do his second best.
– Edward Abbey

Whenever I read Time or Newsweek or such magazines, I wash my hands afterward. But how to wash off the small but odious stain such reading leaves on the mind?
– Edward Abbey

Whenever I see a photograph of some sportsman grinning over his kill, I am always impressed by the striking moral and esthetic superiority of the dead animal to the live one.
– Edward Abbey

Who needs astrology? The wise man gets by on fortune cookies.
– Edward Abbey

Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
– Edward Abbey

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the locus Dei.
– Edward Abbey

Why I oppose the nuclear-arms race: I prefer the human race.
– Edward Abbey

Why do I write? I write to entertain my friends and to exasperate our enemies. To unfold the folded lie, to record to truth of our time, and, of course, to promote esthetic bliss.
– Edward Abbey

Why must love always be accompanied – sooner or later – by sorrow and pain? Why not? Because pure bliss is for pure idiots.
– Edward Abbey

Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.
– Edward Abbey

Wilderness begins in the human mind.
– Edward Abbey

William Dean Howells: a rubber chicken dangling on a string.
– Edward Abbey

With the neutron bomb, which destroys life but not property, capitalism has found the weapon of its dreams.
– Edward Abbey

Women truly are better than men. Otherwise, they'd be intolerable.
– Edward Abbey

Women: We cannot love them all. But we must try.
– Edward Abbey

Women who love only women may have a good point.
– Edward Abbey

Writing on the wall: "Will trade three blind crabs for two with no teeth."
– Edward Abbey

Writers should avoid the academy. When a writer begins to accept pay for talking about words, we know what he will produce soon: nothing but words.
– Edward Abbey

You cannot reshape human nature without mutilating human beings.
– Edward Abbey

You can't belay a man who's falling in love.
– Edward Abbey

You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light.
– Edward Abbey

You long for success? Start at the bottom; dig down.
– Edward Abbey

Zen: the sound of the ax chopping. Chopping logic.
– Edward Abbey

More on    Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott (1821–1893), Canadian Prime Minister

I hate politics, and what are considered their appropriate methods. I hate notoriety, public meetings, public speeches, caucuses, and everything that I know of that is apparently the necessary incident of politics – except doing public work to the best of my ability.
– Sir John Abbott (June 4, 1891)

War is the science of destruction.
– Sir John Abbott

More on    Lyman Abbott (1835–1922), U.S. clergyman, author

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice – but as yet unstained.
– Lyman Abbott

Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry and sin not.
– Lyman Abbott

Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.
– Lyman Abbott

Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.
– Lyman Abbott

I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity.
– Lyman Abbott

In New York – whose subway trains in particular have been "tattooed" with an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame – not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.
– Lyman Abbott

It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity.
– Lyman Abbott

Patience is passion tamed.
– Lyman Abbott

Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.
– Lyman Abbott

The brotherhood of man is an integral part of Christianity no less than the Fatherhood of God; and to deny the one is no less infidel than to deny the other.
– Lyman Abbott

The earth is mankind's ultimate haven, our blessed terra firma. When it trembles and gives way beneath our feet, it's as though one of God's checks has bounced.
– Lyman Abbott

The highest qualities of character … must be earned.
– Lyman Abbott

[The Trinity] is a corruption borrowed from the heathen religions, and ingrafted on the Christian faith.
– Lyman Abbott, A Dictionary of Religious Knowledge

We "need" cancer because, by the very fact of its insurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer.
– Lyman Abbott

More on    Abd al-Qadir [`Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza'iri](1808–1883), Algerian Arab military leader and poet

Death is a black camel, which kneels at the gates of all.
– Abd al-Qadir

If I have accepted leadership, this is to have the right to be the first to march in the battles, and I am ready to step behind any other chief whom you judge more worthy and more capable than me to lead you, provided that he pledges to take in hand the cause of our faith.
– Abd al-Qadir

If on behalf of your king you were to offer me all the riches of France and you were able to place all of them here on my burnous [raw wool robe], I would prefer to be thrown in this sea, the waves of which break against the walls of my prison, rather than give up the commitments made towards me publicly and officially. I shall take these commitments with me to my grave. I am here as your guest. Make me prisoner if you want. But shame and dishonor will reach you, not me.
– Abd al-Qadir, rejecting a bribe offered by Napoleon III while Abd al-Qadir was imprisoned in Toulon

But what do we mean by the American Revolution? Do we mean the American War? The revolution was effected before the war commenced. The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to stick to it.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

One who's our friend is fond of us; one who's fond of us isn't necessarily our friend.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

Prosperity depends more on wanting what you have than having what you want.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

The most important thing about having goals is having one.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

When you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

When you take charge of your life, there is no longer need to ask permission of other people or society at large. When you ask permission, you give someone veto power over your life.
– Geoffrey F. Abert

You people are telling me what you think I want to know. I want to know what is actually happening.
– Creighton Abrams, commanding general, U.S. forces in Vietnam

I never said I had no idea about most of the things you said I had no idea about.
– Elliot Abrams

In fact, the ubiquity of the handheld reflects two other key trends among the Baby Boomers: No one has a secretary, and no one can remember a damn thing.
– Elliot Abrams

Religion is now one of the organizing principles behind American policy.
– Elliot Abrams, in an introduction to the book The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and Foreign Policy, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001

There isn't any way for the people of Nicaragua to find out what's going on in Nicaragua.
– Elliot Abrams

More on    Bella Savitsky Abzug (1920-1998) U.S. Congressman, lawyer, writer, news commentator

Abortion doesn't belong in the political arena. It's a private right, like many other rights concerning the family.
– Bella Abzug

All of the men on my staff can type.
– Bella Abzug

I am not being facetious when I say that the real enemies in this country are the Pentagon and its pals in big business.
– Bella Abzug

I am not elevating women to sainthood, nor am I suggesting that all women share the same views, or that all women are good and all men bad.
– Bella Abzug

I began wearing hats as a young lawyer because it helped me to establish my professional identity. Before that, whenever I was at a meeting, someone would ask me to get coffee.
– Bella Abzug

I prefer the word "homemaker" because "housewife" always implies that there may be a wife someplace else.
– Bella Abzug

I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.
– Bella Abzug

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.
– Bella Abzug

The establishment is made up of little men, very frightened.
– Bella Abzug

The inside operation of Congress – the deals, the compromises, the selling out, the co-opting, the unprincipled manipulating, the self-serving career-building – is a story of such monumental decadence that I believe if people find out about it they will demand an end to it.
– Bella Abzug

The test for whether or not you can hold a job should not be the arrangement of your chromosomes.
– Bella Abzug

They used to give us a day – it was called International Women's Day. In 1975 they gave us a year, the Year of the Woman. Then from 1975 to 1985 they gave us a decade, the Decade of the Woman. I said at the time, who knows, if we behave they may let us into the whole thing. Well, we didn't behave and here we are.
– Bella Abzug

We are coming down from our pedestal and up from the laundry room. We want an equal share in government and we mean to get it.
– Bella Abzug

Women have been and are prejudiced, narrowminded, reactionary, even violent. Some women. They, of course, have a right to vote and a right to run for office. I will defend that right, but I will not support them or vote for them.
– Bella Abzug

Women have been trained to speak softly and carry a lipstick. Those days are over.
– Bella Abzug

A man whose life has been dishonourable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death.
– Lucius Accius (170 BC–86 BC)

Indeed, wretched the man whose fame makes his misfortunes famous.
– Lucius Accius (170 BC–86 BC)

Let them hate so long as they fear.
Latin: Oderint Dum Metuant
– Lucius Accius (170 BC–86 BC)

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader, but to protect the writer.
– Dean Acheson

Controversial proposals, once accepted, soon become hallowed.
– Dean Acheson

I doubt very much if a man whose main literary interests were in works by Mr. Zane Grey, admirable as they may be, is particularly equipped to be the chief executive of this country, particularly where Indian Affairs are concerned.
– Dean Acheson, on Eisenhower

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull. This is not always easy to achieve.
– Dean Acheson

The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office.
– Dean Acheson

Washington is like a self-sealing tank on a military aircraft. When a bullet passes through, it closes up.
– Dean Acheson

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
– Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg] (1834–1902), British historian

Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.
– Attributed to Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg] (1834–1902), British historian

Learn as much by writing as by reading.
– Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg] (1834–1902), British historian

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.
– Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg] (1834–1902), British historian

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
– Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg] (1834–1902), British historian, letter, April 5, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton. The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, Vol. 1, Chapter 13 (1904).

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
– Lord Acton [John Emerich Edward Dalberg] (1834–1902), British historian, letter, April 5, 1887, to Bishop Mandell Creighton. The Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, Vol. 1, Chapter 13 (1904).

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
– Abigail Adams (1744–1818), wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams.

If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.
– Abigail Adams (1744–1818), wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams.

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
– Abigail Adams (1744–1818), wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams.

... whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining absolute power over wives. But you must remember that Arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken – and notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters, and without violence throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet.
– Abigail Adams (1744–1818), wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams. In a letter dated May 7, 1776 and written from Braintree, Mass. to her husband, John Adams, reprinted in The Feminist Papers, Part 1, by Alice S. Rossi (1973)

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
– Douglas Adams

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
– Douglas Adams

Of making many books there is no end –
    So Sancho Panza said, and so say I.
Thou wert my guide, philosopher and friend
     When only one is shining in the sky.

Books cannot always please, however good;
     The good is oft interred with their bones.
To be great is to be misunderstood,
     The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans.

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,
     I never write as funny as I can.
Remote, unfriendly, studious let me sit
     And say to all the world, "This was a man!"

Go, lovely Rose, that lives its little hour!
    Go, little booke! and let who will be clever!
Roll on! From yonder ivy-mantled tower
    The moon and I could keep this up forever.
– Franklin P. Adams, "Lines on and from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations"

More on    Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918), American writer and historian, grandson of John Quincy Adams, great-grandson of John Adams.

As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
– Henry Adams , letter to Brooks Adams (July 11, 1905)

Had Grant been a Congressman one would have been on one’s guard, for one knew the type. One never expected from a Congressman more than good intentions and public spirit. Newspaper-men as a rule had no great respect for the lower House; Senators had less; and Cabinet officers had none at all. Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: "You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!"
– Henry Adams , The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 17 (1906)

Henry B. Adams was the first in an infinite series to discover and admit to himself that he really did not care whether truth was, or was not, true. He did not even care that it should be proved true, unless the process were new and amusing. He was a Darwinian for fun.
– Henry Adams , The Education of Henry Adams (1906)

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.
– Henry Adams , letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell (October 28, 1894)

It’s a queer sensation, this secret belief that one stands on the brink of the world’s greatest catastrophe. For it means the fall of Western Europe, as it fell in the fourth century. It recurs to me every November, and culminates every December. I have to get over it as I can, and hide, for fear of being sent to an asylum.
– Henry Adams , letter to Brooks Adams (November 23, 1900)

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
– Henry Adams , The Education of Henry Adams (1906)

My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.
– Henry Adams , letter to Brooks Adams (August 10, 1902)

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.
– Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 7 (1906)

Positively I sit here, and look at Europe sink, first one deck disappearing, then another, and the whole ship slowly plunging bow-down into the abyss; until the nightmare gets to be howling. The Roman Empire was a trifle to it.
– Henry Adams , letter to Elizabeth Cameron (April 22, 1901)

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic ... No mind is so well balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it; and finding it disputed with him by hungry packs of wolves and hounds whose lives depend on snatching the carrion.
– Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 28 (1906)

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
– Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 24 (1906)

Thank God, I never was cheerful. I come from the happy stock of the Mathers, who, as you remember, passed sweet mornings reflecting on the goodness of God and the damnation of infants.
– Henry Adams , letter to Elizabeth Cameron (December 20, 1914)

The more I live here in western Europe, the more I am impressed by the sense of decay; not the graceful and dignified decay of an oriental, but the vulgar and sordid decay of a bankrupt cotton-mill.
– Henry Adams , letter to Elizabeth Cameron (January 20, 1898)

The Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind – fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination, – haunted by suspicion, by idées fixes, by violent morbid excitement; but this was not all. They were stupendously ignorant of the world. As a class, the cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced, and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close society on whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like oil on flame. They showed a young student his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.
– Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 7 (1906)

You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living – of every statesman – every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
– Henry Adams , letter to Brooks Adams (January 30, 1910)

You seem to think that I am adapted to nothing but the sugar-plums of intellect and had better not try to digest anything stronger.... a writer of popular sketches in magazines; a lecturer before Lyceums and College societies; a dabbler in metaphysics, poetry, and art, than which I would rather die, for if it has come to that, alas! verily, as you say, mediocrity has fallen on the name of Adams.
– Henry Adams , letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr. (February 9, 1859)

More on    John Adams (1735–1826), second U.S. president

... a revolution of government is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense.
– John Adams, Journal (1786)

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
– John Adams, "Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials" (December 1770)
(see Tobias Smollett)

Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.
– John Adams, "Thoughts on Government" (April 1776)

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
– John Adams

In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one man is a shame, two is a lawfirm, and three or more is a congress.
– John Adams

Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyranical and cruel as unlimited despots.
– John Adams, letter to a friend in England, quoted in Jefferson's Great Gamble by Charles A. Cerami. (1789)

No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it.
– John Adams

The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will, as a political body.
– John Adams

There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
– John Adams, Journal (1772)

We ought to consider what is the end of government, before we determine which is the best form. Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree, that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man. From this principle it will follow, that the form of government which communicates ease, comfort, security, or, in one word, happiness, to the greatest number of persons, and in the greatest degree, is the best.
– John Adams, "Thoughts on Government" (April 1776)

When people talk of the freedom of writing, speaking or thinking I cannot choose but laugh. No such thing ever existed. No such thing now exists; but I hope it will exist. But it must be hundreds of years after you and I shall write and speak no more.
– John Adams

More on    John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), 6th US President (1825-29), eldest son of John Adams, 2nd US president.

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.
– John Quincy Adams

All rising to great place is by a winding stair.
– John Quincy Adams, speech at Plymouth, Massachusetts

All the public business in Congress now connects itself with intrigues, and there is great danger that the whole government will degenerate into a struggle of cabals.
– John Quincy Adams

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

America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
– John Quincy Adams

[America] well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
– John Quincy Adams, speech (July 4, 1821)

Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.
– John Quincy Adams

Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air.
– John Quincy Adams

Duty is ours; results are God's.
– John Quincy Adams

From the time we became an independant nation, it was as much a law of nature that this would become our claim as that the Mississippi should flow to sea.
– John Quincy Adams

I inhabit a week, frail, decayed tenement; battered by the winds and broken in on by the storms, and, from all I can learn, the landlord does not intend to repair.
– John Quincy Adams

Idleness is sweet, and its consequences are cruel.
– John Quincy Adams

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
– John Quincy Adams

In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill-will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow-men, not knowing what they do.
– John Quincy Adams, in a letter to A. Bronson

It is essential ... that you should form and adopt certain rules or principles, for the government of your own conduct and temper. Unless you have such rules and principles, there will be numberless occasions on which you will have no guide for your government but your passions...It is in the Bible, you must learn them, and from the Bible how to practice them.
– John Quincy Adams

Man wants but little here below
Nor wants that little long,
'Tis not with me exactly so;
But 'tis so in the song.
My wants are many, and, if told,
Would muster many a score;
And were each wish a mint of gold,
I still should long for more.
– John Quincy Adams, "The Wants of Man"

Not stones, nor wood, nor the art of artisans make a state; but where men are who know how to take care of themselves, these are cities and walls.
– John Quincy Adams, in his diary

Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.
– John Quincy Adams

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud, is the only maxim which can ever preserve the liberties of any people.
– John Quincy Adams

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
– John Quincy Adams

Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
– John Quincy Adams

Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.
– John Quincy Adams

So great is my veneration for the Bible that the earlier my children begin to read it the more confident will be my hope that they will prove useful citizens of their country and respectable members of society. I have for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year.
– John Quincy Adams

The Bible contains the revelation of the will of God. It contains the history of the creation of the world, and of mankind.
– John Quincy Adams

The declaration that our People are hostile to a government made by themselves, for themselves, and conducted by themselves, is an insult.
– John Quincy Adams, speech in Westmoreland County, Virginia

The die was now cast; I had passed the Rubicon. Swim or sink, live or die, survive or perish with my country was my unalterable determination.
– John Quincy Adams, in a conversation with Jonathan Sewell

The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity.
– John Quincy Adams

The manners of women are the surest criterion by which to determine whether a republican government is practicable in a nation or not.
– John Quincy Adams, in his diary

The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.
– John Quincy Adams, letter to Mrs. Adams

Think of your forefathers! Think of your posterity!
– John Quincy Adams, speech at Plymouth, Massachusetts

This hand, to tyrants ever sworn the foe,
For freedom only deals the deadly blow;
Then sheathes in calm repose the vengeful blade,
For gentle peace in freedom's hallowed shade.
– John Quincy Adams, written in an album

This is the last of earth! I am content.
– John Quincy Adams, last words (February 21, 1848)

This mode of electioneering suited neither my taste nor my principles. I thought it equally unsuitable to my personal character and to the station in which I am placed.
– John Quincy Adams

To live without having a Cicero and a Tacitus at hand seems to me as if it was aprivation of one of my limbs.
– John Quincy Adams

To respect the rights of the State governments is the inviolable duty of that of the Union; the government of every State will feel its own obligation to respect and preserve the rights of the whole.
– John Quincy Adams

Westward the star of empire takes its way.
– John Quincy Adams, speech at Plymouth, Massachusetts

Where annual elections end, there slavery begins.
– John Quincy Adams

Yesterday the greatest question was decided which was ever debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, that those United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.
– John Quincy Adams, letter to Mrs. Adams

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
– Scott Adams

I'm slowly becoming a convert to the principle that you can't motivate people to do things, you can only demotivate them. The primary job of the manager is not to empower but to remove obstacles.
– Scott Adams

He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young.
– Joseph Addison (1672–1719). (see Samuel Johnson)

A thick skin is a gift from God.
– Konrad Adenauer

A prosperous fool is a grievous burden.
– Aeschylus, Fragment 383

Against a spike
Kick not, for fear it pain thee if thou strike.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, lines 1623–4.

And in this too profit begets profit.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 437

And though all streams flow from a single course to cleanse the blood from polluted hand, they hasten on their course in vain.
– Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, line 72

As long as there are men the bulwark is safe.
– Aeschylus, The Persians, line 349

Ask the gods nothing excessive.
– Aeschylus, The Suppliants

Be bold and boast, just like the cock beside the hen.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1671

But from the good health of the mind comes that which is dear to all and the object of prayer – happiness.
– Aeschylus, Eumenides, line 535

Call no man happy till he is dead.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 938

Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Destiny waits alike for the free man as well as for him enslaved by another's might.
– Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers

Exiles feed on hope.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1668

Fear hurries on my tongue through want of courage.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 259

Few men have the natural strength to honor a friend's success without envy.
– Aeschylus

For he does not wish to seem but to be just.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 592

For the impious act begets more after it, like to the parent stock.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 758.

For there is no defense for a man who, in the excess of his wealth, has kicked the great altar of Justice out of sight.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 381.

God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause.
– Aeschylus

His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon

I say that the dead are slaying the living.
– Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, line 886

I would far rather be ignorant than wise in the foreboding of evil.
– Aeschylus

If you pour oil and vinegar into the same vessel, you would call them not friends but opponents.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 322

In every tyrant’s heart there springs in the end
This poison, that he cannot trust a friend.
– Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

In few men is it part of nature to respect a friend's prosperity without begrudging him.
– Aeschylus

In war, truth is the first casualty.
– Aeschylus

It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.
– Aeschylus

It is always in season for old men to learn.
– Aeschylus

It is an easy thing for one whose foot is on the outside of calamity to give advice and to rebuke the sufferer.
– Aeschylus

It is in the character of very few men to honor without envy a friend who has prospered.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon

It is not the oath that makes us believe the man, but the man [makes us believe] the oath.
– Aeschylus

Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.
– Aeschylus

Making it a valid law to learn by suffering.
– Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, line 177

Necessity is stronger far than art.
– Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, line 513

Never in misfortune nor in prosperity may I share my dwelling with the tribe of women.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 187

Obedience is the mother of success, and success the parent of salvation.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 224

Of prosperity mortals can never have enough.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1331

Only when man's life comes to its end in prosperity can one call that man happy.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Shoals of corpses shall witness, mute, even to generations to come, before the eyes of men that we ought never, being mortal, to cast our sights too high.
– Aeschylus, The Persians, line 818

Since long I’ve held silence a remedy for harm.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 177

So, in the Libyan fable it is told
 That once an eagle, stricken with a dart,
  Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft,
   "With our own feathers, not by others' hand
    Are we now smitten.
– Aeschylus, Fragment (Plumptre's translation), line123

Success is man's god.
– Aeschylus

Sweet is a grief well ended.
– Aeschylus

The evils of mortals are manifold; nowhere is trouble of the same wing seen.
– Aeschylus, The Suppliants, line 327.

The field of doom bears death as its harvest.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 601

The future you shall know when it has come; before then forget it.
– Aeschylus

The reward of suffering is experience.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 185.

The saying goes that the gods leave a town once it is captured.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 217

The wisest of the wise may err.
– Aeschylus

There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.
– Aeschylus

These things are not inscribed in tablets, not sealed in the folds of papyri, but you hear them clearly from the tongue in a free mouth.
– Aeschylus, The Suppliants, line 946.

Time as he grows old teaches all things.
– Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

To be rather than to seem.
Latin: Esse quam videri.
– Aeschylus, Siege of Thebes

We have a man who does not boast, but whose hand sees what must be done.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 534

We shall perish by guile just as we slew.
– Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, line 888

We should know clearly before we discuss this matter; to guess is one thing, to know clearly another.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1368

What atonement is there for blood spilt upon the earth?
– Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, line 48

What exists outside is a man’s concern; let no woman give advice; and do no mischief within doors.
– Aeschylus, The Seven Against Thebes, line 200

When a man's willing and eager, the gods join in.
– Aeschylus

When a tongue fails to send forth appropriate shafts, there might be a word to act as healer of these.
– Aeschylus, The Suppliants, line 446.

Words are the physicians of the mind diseased.
– Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound

You shall learn, though late, the lesson of how to be discreet.
– Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1423

You wish to be thought to act justly rather than to do so.
– Aeschylus, Eumenides, line 430.

More on    Aesop, legendary Greek fabulist.

A man who has no enemies has no friends.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Man with No Enemies"

An oak and a reed were arguing about their strength. When a strong wind came up, the reed avoided being uprooted by bending and learning with the gusts of wind. But the oak stood firm and was torn up by the roots.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Oak and the Reeds"

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing"

Appearances often are deceiving.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing"

Be content with your lot; one cannot be first in everything.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Peacock and Juno"

Better be wise by the misfortunes of others than by your own.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass"

Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Ass and His Shadow"

Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Milkmaid and Her Pail"

Every truth has two sides. It is well to look at both before we commit ourselves to either side.
– Aesop

Familiarity breeds contempt.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Fox and the Lion"

He that is neither one thing nor the other has no friends.
– Aesop

In union there is strength.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Father and His Sons"

It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Wolf and the Kid"

It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Vain Jackdaw"

Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.
– Aesop, Fables, "The Fox and the Goat"

No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
– Aesop

Outside show is a poor substitute for inner worth.
– Aesop

Put your shoulder to the wheel.
– Aesop, Fables, "Hercules and the Wagoner"

The gods help them that help themselves.
– Aesop, Fables, "Hercules and the Wagoner"

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.
– Aesop

We often despise what is most useful to us.
– Aesop

Wealth unused might as well not exist.
– Aesop

"Why bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; "we have got plenty of food at present."
– Aesop

If the enemy within cannot kill us, then the enemy without can do us no harm.
– African Proverb

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.
– African Proverb

When two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
– African Proverb

The truth which makes men free is often the truth which men prefer not to hear.
– Herbert Agar

Even God cannot change the past.
– Agathon (448–400 BC), Athenian tragic poet

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.
– Agathon (448–400 BC), Athenian tragic poet

In the United States today, we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.
– Spiro Agnew (1918–1996), American politician, Nixon's vice-president, in a speech at San Diego

To one extent, if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.
– Spiro Agnew (1918–1996), American politician, Nixon's vice-president

Ultra-liberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.
– Spiro Agnew (1918–1996), American politician, Nixon's vice-president, before he pled nolo contendere on charges of tax evasion on bribes taken when he was governor of Maryland.

Set your expectations high; find men and women whose integrity and values you respect; get their agreement on a course of action; and give them your ultimate trust.
– John Akers

Adversity is the seed of well-doing: it is the nurse of heroism and boldness; who that hath enough, will endanger himself to have more? who that is at ease, will set his life on the hazard?
– Akhenaton? (Egyptian pharaoh, c. 1375 BC)

Labour not after riches first, and think thou afterwards wilt enjoy them. He who neglecteth the present moment, throweth away all that he hath. As the arrow passeth through the heart, while the warrior knew not that it was coming; so shall his life be taken away before he knoweth that he hath it.
– Akhenaton? (Egyptian pharaoh, c. 1375 BC)

To be satisfied with a little, is the greatest wisdom;
and he that increaseth his riches, increaseth his cares;
but a contented mind is a hidden treasure,
and trouble findeth it not.
– Akhenaton? (Egyptian pharaoh, c. 1375 BC)

A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
– Herm Albright

I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
– Louisa May Alcott

If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average.
– M.H. Alderson

Magnificent desolation.
– "Buzz" Aldrin, astronaut, when he first set foot on the moon

Had I been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.
– Alfonso X, the Wise, Spanish king of Castile (1226–1284)

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
– Muhammed Ali

I always liked to chase the girls. Parkinson's stops all that. Now I might have a chance to go to heaven.
– Muhammed Ali, calling his Parkinson's Disease a blessing.

I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.
– Muhammed Ali (1975)

I am the greatest.
– Muhammed Ali

I figured that if I said it enough, I would convince the world that I really was the greatest.
– Muhammed Ali

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I just beat people up.
– Muhammed Ali

It's lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.
– Muhammed Ali

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
– Muhammed Ali

The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.
– Muhammed Ali

Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here.
Italian: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate.
– Dante Alighieri

For what is liberty but the unhampered translation of will into act?
– Dante Alighieri

How bitter another's bread is, thou shalt know
By tasting it; and how hard to the feet
Another's stairs are, up and down to go.
– Dante Alighieri

My soul tasted that heavenly food, which gives new appetite while it satiates.
Italian: L'anima mia gustava di quel cibo,
Che saziando di se, di se s'asseta.
– Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio (XXXI, 128)

Pride, envy, avarice – these are the sparks have set on fire the souls of man.
– Dante Alighieri,

The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.
– Dante Alighieri, Paradiso (XXVI, 137)

The hottest places in hell are reserved for whose who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
– Dante Alighieri

There is no greater grief than to recall a time of happiness when in misery.
– Dante Alighieri

This audacity of theirs is not new.
Italian: Questa lor tracotanza non e nuova.
– Dante Alighieri, Inferno (VIII, 124)

I'm a little tired of writing "I told you so" regarding the Bush Administration and Iraq. We in the anti-war camp have been proven horribly right, and to be honest, continuing to point this out ain't so much fun anymore. American credibility with the world – thanks to the WMD issue – is almost non-existent. Iraq is falling apart and a country that before the war wasn't a haven for Islamic groups such as Al Qa’ida, is now. Pointing out the myriad flaws in logic, misplaced claims, stretched truths and unexamined untruths from Washington no longer helps.
– Christopher Allbritton, freelance journalist

The resistance that has claimed 50+ Americans in direct combat deaths since May 1, and perceived by many to be an anti-coalition or anti-American resistance movement, could be metastasizing into an anti-Western intifada/Arab nationalist revival. It's unlikely a small group of former Ba'athists led by Saddam loyalists are leading the resistance now, and it's pretty obvious that killing Uday and Qusai Hussein was ineffective, seeing as the attacks have increased. Likewise, killing or capturing Saddam Hussein is probably equally ineffective – this is no longer about him.
– Christopher Allbritton, freelance journalist

In those parts of the world where learning and science have prevailed, miracles have ceased; but in those parts of it as are barbarous and ignorant, miracles are still in vogue.
– Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American revolutionary, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784)

I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I never disputed, being conscious I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism makes me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not strictly speaking, whether I am one or not.
– Ethan Allen (1738–1789) American revolutionary, Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784)

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
– Fred Allen

What's on your mind? If you'll forgive the overstatement.
– Fred Allen

You will become as small as your controlling desire, as great as your dominant aspiration.
– James Allen

I didn't accept it. I received it.
– Richard Allen, National Security Advisor to President Reagan, explaining the $1000 in cash and two watches he was given by two Japanese journalists after he helped arrange a private interview for them with First Lady Nancy Reagan.

Buying stock is exactly the same thing as going to a casino, only with no cocktail service.
– Ted Allen

More on    Woody Allen [born Allen Stewart Konigsberg} (1935– ) American comic actor, writer, and filmmaker

A "Bay Area Bisexual" told me I didn't quite coincide with either of her desires.
– Woody Allen

A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me and she said "no."
– Woody Allen

Another good thing about being poor is that when you are seventy your children will not have declared you legally insane in order to gain control of your estate.
– Woody Allen

As the poet said,"Only God can make a tree" – probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
– Woody Allen

At the moment it's just a Notion, but with a bit of backing I think I could turn it into Concept, and then an Idea.
– Woody Allen

Basically my wife was immature. I'd be at home in the bath and she'd come in and sink my boats.
– Woody Allen

Being bisexual doubles your chance of a date on Saturday night.
– Woody Allen

Agathon: But it was you who proved that death doesn't exist.
Socrates: Hey listen – I've proved a lot of things. That's how I pay my rent. Theories and little observations. A puckish remark now and then. Occasional maxims. It beats picking olives, but let's not get carried away.
Agathon: But you have proved many times that the soul is immortal.
Socrates: And it is! On paper. See, that's the thing about philosophy – it's not all that functional once you get out of class.
Simmias: And the eternal "forms"? You said each thing did exist and always will exist.
Socrates: I was talking mostly about heavy objects. A statue or something. With people it's a lot different.
Agathon: But all that talk about death being the same as sleep.
Socrates: Yes, the difference is that when you're dead and somebody yells, "Everybody up, it's morning," it's very hard to find your slippers.
– Woody Allen, "My Apology"

But she was so sweet and we just walked in the park and I was so touched by her that, after fifteen minutes, I wanted to marry her and, after half an hour, I completely gave up the idea of snatching her purse.
– Woody Allen, "Take the Money and Run"

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
– Woody Allen

Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak.
– Woody Allen, "The Condemned"

Comedy just pokes at problems, rarely confronts them squarely. Drama is like a plate of meat and potatoes, comedy is rather the dessert, a bit like meringue.
– Woody Allen

Don't knock masturbation – it's sex with someone I love.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

Eighty percent of success is showing up.
– Woody Allen

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.
– Woody Allen

His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.
– Woody Allen

How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
– Woody Allen, Without Feathers, 1975

How is it possible to find meaning in a finite world, given my waist and shirt size?
– Woody Allen

How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't even know how the can opener works!
– Woody Allen, "Hannah and Her Sisters"

I am at two with nature.
– Woody Allen

I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.
– Woody Allen

I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government.
– Woody Allen

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
– Woody Allen

I could tell by the sound of your voice over the phone. Very authoritative you know, like the Pope or the computer in 2001.
– Woody Allen, "Manhattan"

I do not believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
– Woody Allen

I don't respond well to mellow, you know what I mean, I-I have a tendency to... if I get too mellow, I-I ripen and then rot.
– Woody Allen

I don't think my parents liked me. They put a live teddy bear in my crib.
– Woody Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying.
– Woody Allen

I don't wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.
– Woody Allen

I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible would be like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

I had a mad impulse to throw you down on the lunar surface and commit interstellar perversion with you.
– Woody Allen

I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.
– Woody Allen

I have bad reflexes. I was once run over by a car being pushed by two guys.
– Woody Allen

I interestingly dated a woman in the Eisenhover administration, briefly, and it was ironic to me because I was trying to do to her what Eisenhover has been doing to the country for the last few years.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

I know exactly what I think about all this, but I can never find words to put it in. Maybe if I get a little drunk I could dance it for you.
– Woody Allen, "Shadows and Fog"

I tended to place my wife under a pedestal.
– Woody Allen

I think being funny is not anyone's first choice.
– Woody Allen

I think you should defend to the death their right to march, and then go down and meet them with baseball bats.
– Woody Allen

I thought your line was great about, uh,"life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television." I mean, it's completely true.
– Woody Allen, "Husbands and Wives"

I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
– Woody Allen

I was raised in the Jewish tradition, taught never to marry a Gentile woman, shave on a Saturday night and, most especially, never to shave a Gentile woman on a Saturday night.
– Woody Allen

I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead.
– Woody Allen

I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.
– Woody Allen

I'd like to meet the man who invented sex and see what he's working on now.
– Woody Allen

If George W. is sincere about wanting to hunt down and kill the people responsible for Osama Bin Laden, he might as well start with his father. It was the Reagan/Bush CIA, after all, that made Bin Laden what he is today. Everybody knows this, but nobody mentions it – partly because it's so inconvenient, and partly because we're so embarrassed by the obvious Freudian implications of it all, and the thought that thousands and thousands of people may be about to die for what boils down to a rivalry over the sexual favors of Barbara Bush.
– Woody Allen (September 17, 2001)

If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.
– Woody Allen

If Jesus Christ came back today and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.
– Woody Allen, "Hannah and Her Sisters"

If my films don't show a profit, I know I'm doing something right.
– Woody Allen

If my films make one more person miserable, I'll feel I have done my job.
– Woody Allen

If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.
– Woody Allen

If there is reincarnation, I'd like to come back as Warren Beatty's fingertips.
– Woody Allen

If you don't fail now and again, it's a sign you're playing it safe.
– Woody Allen

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.
– Woody Allen

I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.
– Woody Allen

I'm such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.
– Woody Allen

I'm very proud of my gold pocket watch. My grandfather, on his deathbed, sold me this watch.
– Woody Allen

In Beverly Hills they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

In my house I'm the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.
– Woody Allen

Inertia accounts for two-thirds of marriages. But love accounts for the other third.
– Woody Allen, "Hollywood Ending," (2002)

Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought – particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
– Woody Allen

Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.
– Woody Allen

It is no secret that organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
– Woody Allen

It makes up for the strip search.
– Woody Allen, on receiving a standing ovation at the 2002 Academy Awards

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
– Woody Allen

It is impossible to experience one's death objectively and still carry a tune.
– Woody Allen

It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off.
– Woody Allen

It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens.
– Woody Allen

I've never been an intellectual but I have this look.
– Woody Allen

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
– Woody Allen

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.
– Woody Allen

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it's all over much too soon.
– Woody Allen

Love is the answer, but while you are waiting for the answer, sex raises some pretty good questions.
– Woody Allen

Man consists of two parts, his mind and his body, only the body has more fun.
– Woody Allen

Marriage is the death of hope.
– Woody Allen

Men die, but does Cloquet die? This question puzzled him, but a few simple line drawings on a pad done by one of the guards set the whole thing clear.
– Woody Allen, "The Condemned"

Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
– Woody Allen

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
– Woody Allen

Most of the time I don't have much fun. The rest of the time I don't have any fun at all.
– Woody Allen

Linda: My God. Can't you cook anything but that TV dinner?
Allan: Who bothers to cook them? I suck them frozen.
– Woody Allen, "Play It Again, Sam"

My luck is getting worse and worse. Last night, for instance, I was mugged by a quaker.
– Woody Allen

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.
– Woody Allen

Nietzsche says that we will live the same life, over and over again. God – I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.
– Woody Allen

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
– Woody Allen

Nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind.
– Woody Allen

Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable; with the possible exception of a moose singing "Embraceable You" in spats.
– Woody Allen

On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just as easily lying down.
– Woody Allen

Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.
– Woody Allen

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
– Woody Allen

Sex between a man and a woman can be absolutely wonderful – provided you get between the right man and the right woman.
– Woody Allen

Sex is like having dinner: sometimes you joke about the dishes, sometimes you take the meal seriously.
– Woody Allen

Sex between two people is a beautiful thing; between five it's fantastic.
– Woody Allen

Sex is better than talk ... Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex.
– Woody Allen, "Hollywood Ending," (2002)

Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best.
– Woody Allen

She wore a short skirt and a tight sweater and her figure described a set of parabolas that could cause cardiac arrest in a yak.
– Woody Allen

Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him "Be fruitful and multiply." But not in those exact words.
– Woody Allen

Students achieving Oneness will move on to Twoness.
– Woody Allen

That was the most fun I've ever had without laughing.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

The baby is fine, the only problem is that he looks like Edward G. Robinson.
– Woody Allen

The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife – a depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that there is an afterlife but no one will know where it's being held.
– Woody Allen

The curtain rises on a vast primitive wasteland, not unlike certain parts of New Jersey.
– Woody Allen

The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.
– Woody Allen

"The food at this place is really terrible."
And the other one says, "Yeah, I know. And such small portions."
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

The government is unresponsive to the needs of the little man. Under 5'7", it is impossible to get your congressman on the phone.
– Woody Allen

The last time I was in a woman I was visiting the Statue of Liberty.
– Woody Allen, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989)

The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won't get much sleep.
– Woody Allen

The only time my wife and I had a simultaneous orgasm was when the judge signed the divorce papers.
– Woody Allen

The prison psychiatrist asked me if I thought sex was dirty. I told him only when it's done right.
– Woody Allen

The talent for being happy is appreciating and liking what you have, instead of what you don't have.
– Woody Allen

The whole country was tied together by radio. We all experienced the same heroes and comedians and singers. They were giants.
– Woody Allen

There are two types of people in this world, good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much more.
– Woody Allen, "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989)

There are worst things than death. If you've ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman, you know exactly what I mean.
– Woody Allen, "Love and Death" (1975)

There's nothing sexier than a lapsed Catholic.
– Woody Allen, "Alice" (1990)

Thought: Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
– Woody Allen

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.
– Woody Allen

Sonja: To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love, but then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love, to be happy then is to suffer but suffering makes one unhappy, therefore to be unhappy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness. I hope you're getting this down.
– Woody Allen, "Love and Death"

To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition.
– Woody Allen

Tradition is the illusion of permanance.
– Woody Allen

What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.
– Woody Allen

What if nothing exists and we're all in somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?
– Woody Allen

What is it about death that bothers me so much? Probably the hours.
– Woody Allen, Without Feathers (1975)

When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.
– Woody Allen

When the Academy called, I panicked. I thought they might want their Oscars back and the pawn shop has been out of business for awhile.
– Woody Allen, at the 2002 Academy Awards

When we played softball, I'd steal second base, feel guilty and go back.
– Woody Allen

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?
– Woody Allen

You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred.
– Woody Allen

Annie: You know I just like to smoke a little something before sex, it helps me relax.
Alvy: How about I give you some Sodium Pentathol and can sleep through the whole thing.
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

Alvy: You look like a really happy couple? Are you?
Woman: Yeah.
Alvy: Yeah? So how to you count for it?
Woman: I am very shallow and empty, and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Man: And I'm exactly the same way.
Alvy: I see. That's very interesting. So you managed to work out something?
Man: Right!
– Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

You use sex to express every emotion except love.
– Woody Allen, "Husbands and Wives"

How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?
– Isabel Allende

The poet and the baker are brothers in the essential task of nourishing the world.
– Isabel Allende

As a nation we have revisited that bitter lesson all too often since the school prayer decision of 1962. In the name of prayer and "family values," large numbers of citizens have reacted to their neighbors with hate and anger when public school religious practices have been challenged as violating the Bill of Rights. It is astounding and depressing to witness people who claim that school prayer is necessary to return the nation to spiritual values, attacking with vicious and intemperate behavior fellow citizens who disagree with their solution. In the name of their deity, these self-styled keepers of public morality exhibit the most outrageous forms of discrimination, hate, and intimidation against those who challenge organized prayer in public schools. And the venom has not been diluted over the thirty-four years since Engle. Further, on those occasions where the challenge to school prayer originated with Jewish citizens, the ugly head of anti-Semitism lurks all too close to the surface.
– Robert S. Alley, Without a Prayer: Religious Expression in Public Schools, page 22

Over and over again throughout this book we witness the majority of citizens in a given community, in the name of prayer, abusing and tyrannizing those who have challenged local- or state-endorsed religious practices. And these represent only a few examples: the problem itself is too widespread for every instance to be included here. Establishment in the name of the majority has bred hooligans ready to threaten fellow citizens, harassing both adults and children alike in the name of prayer. The disease of de facto religious establishments is evident today in the vicious treatment by community majorities of those courageous citizens who seek protection under the First Amendment.
– Robert S. Alley, Without a Prayer: Religious Expression in Public Schools, (back cover)

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
– Alonzo of Aragon, as quoted by Francis Bacon in Apothegm

What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.
– Robert Altman, film director, Interview, The Observer (London) (April 11, 1981)

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
– Oscar Ameringer (from Politicians and Other Scoundrels by Ferdinand Lundberg)

Oh, order! Material order, intellectual order, moral order! What a comfort and strength, and what an economy! To know where we are going and what we want; that is order. To keep one’s word, to do the right thing, and at the right time: more order. To have everything under one’s hand, to put one’s whole army through its manoeuvres, to work with all one’s resources: still order. To discipline one’s habits and efforts and wishes, to organize one’s life and distribute one’s time, to measure one’s duties and assert one’s rights, to put one’s capital and resources, one’s talents and opportunities to profit: again and always order. Order is light, peace, inner freedom, self-determination: it is power. To conceive order, to return to order, to realize order in oneself, around oneself, by means of oneself, this is aesthetic and moral beauty, it is well-being, it is what ought to be.
– Henri Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881), journal entry, The Private Journal of Henri Frédéric Amiel (January 27, 1860)

No power or virtue of man could ever have deserved that what has been fated should not have taken place.
Latin, Nulla vis humana vel virtus meruisse unquam potuit, ut, quod praescripsit fatalis ordo, non fiat.
– Marcellinus Ammianus (–c. 395), Roman historian from Antioch, Historia (XXIII)

Wicked acts are accustomed to be done with impunity for the mere desire of occupation.
Latin: Solent occupationis spe vel impune quaedam scelesta committi.
– Marcellinus Ammianus (–c. 395), Roman historian from Antioch, Historia (XXX)

More on    Anacharsis (6th century BC), Scythian prince and philosopher

At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose.
– Anacharsis

Play so that you may be serious.
– Anacharsis

Wise men argue cases, fools decide them.
– Anacharsis

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will like them only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
– Anacharsis, to Solon when writing his laws

Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.
– Hans Christian Andersen

There isn't one grain of anything in the world that is sold in a free market. Not one! The only place you see a free market is in the speeches of politicians. People who are not in the Midwest do not understand that this is a socialist country.
– Dwayne Andreas

If everything's under control, you're going too slow.
– Mario Andretti, race car driver

[YAF] emerged to offer an ideological and structural critique of the reigning liberalism. They sought to reject, not reform, the consensus liberalism.
– John A. Andrew III, historian, The Other Side of the Sixties: Young Americans for Freedom and the Rise of Conservative Politics

More on    Maya Angelou [Marguerite Johnson] (1928– ), African-American poet, writer, activist

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
– Maya Angelou

Achievement brings its own anticlimax.
– Maya Angelou

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
– Maya Angelou

As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.
– Maya Angelou

Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.
– Maya Angelou

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice.
– Maya Angelou

Being a woman is hard work.
– Maya Angelou

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns all clean.
– Maya Angelou

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.
– Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Chapter 17 (1969)

Effective action is always unjust.
– Maya Angelou

For Africa to me ... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
– Maya Angelou

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
– Maya Angelou

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
– Maya Angelou

Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.
– Maya Angelou

I find it interresting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at commensurate speed.
– Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
– Maya Angelou

I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life's a bitch. You've got to go out and kick ass.
– Maya Angelou

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition – about what we can endure, dream, fail at, and still survive.
– Maya Angelou

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.
– Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. Don't complain.
– Maya Angelou

If you find it in your heart to care for somebody else, you will have succeeded.
– Maya Angelou

If you have only one smile in you, give it to the people you love. Don't be surly at home, then go out in the street and start grinning "Good morning" at total strangers.
– Maya Angelou

I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.
– Maya Angelou

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.
– Maya Angelou

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: "I'm with you kid. Let's go."
– Maya Angelou

Living a life is like constructing a building: if you start wrong, you'll end wrong.
– Maya Angelou

Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.
– Maya Angelou

Lyrical poetry is out for the time being, and something that is called rap or hip-hop is in. It is still poetry, and we can't live without it. We need language to tell us who we are, how we feel, what we're capable of – to explain the pains and glory of our existence.
– Maya Angelou

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness.
– Maya Angelou

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, "I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway."
– Maya Angelou

Now, after years of observation and enough courage to admit what I have observed, I try to plant peace if I do not want discord; to plant loyalty and honesty if I want to avoid betrayal and lies.
– Maya Angelou

One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
– Maya Angelou

Self-pity in its early stage is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.
– Maya Angelou

Some critics will write "Maya Angelou is a natural writer" – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
– Maya Angelou

Talent is like electricity. We don't understand electricity. We use it. You can plug into it and light up a lamp, keep a heart pump going, light a cathedral, or you can electrocute a person with it.
– Maya Angelou

The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
– Maya Angelou

The honorary duty of a human being is to love.
– Maya Angelou

The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.
– Maya Angelou

The most called-upon prerequisite of a friend is an accessible ear.
– Maya Angelou

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.
– Maya Angelou, quoted by Dr. Paul Gorski, "Multicultural Pavilion: Quotations and Proverbs"

The plague of racism is insidious, entering into our minds as smoothly and quietly and invisibly as floating airborne microbes enter into our bodies to find lifelong purchase in our bloodstreams.
– Maya Angelou, quoted by Dr. Paul Gorski, "Multicultural Pavilion: Quotations and Proverbs"

The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination, as are intelligence and necessity when unblunted by formal education.
– Maya Angelou

The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn't need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder – in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.
– Maya Angelou

There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.
– Maya Angelou

There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure truth.
– Maya Angelou

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
– Maya Angelou

We really are 15 countries, and it's remarkable that each of us thinks we represent the real America. The Midwesterner in Kansas, the black American in Durham – both are certain they are the real American.
– Maya Angelou, quoted by Dr. Paul Gorski, "Multicultural Pavilion: Quotations and Proverbs"

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
– Maya Angelou

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.
– Maya Angelou

Among the more irritating consequences of our flagrantly religious society is the special dispensation that mainstream religions receive. We all may talk about religion as a powerful social force, but unlike other similarly powerful institutions, religion is not to be questioned, criticized or mocked.
– Natalie Angier, "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist," in New York Times Magazine (January 14, 2001)

With a large bird above me, I am walking around the sky. I entrust myself to the wind.
– Anishinaabeg dream song

A wise man learns by the experience of others. An ordinary man learns by his own experience. A fool never learns.
– Anonymous

Experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first and the lessons afterwards.
– Anonymous

Experience is something you get too late to do anything about the mistakes you made while getting it.
– Anonymous

Experience is what causes a person to make new mistakes instead of old ones.
– Anonymous

Education is what you get from reading the fine print. Experience is what you get for not reading it.
– Anonymous

Experience is what you got by not having it when you need it.
– Anonymous

One thing you can't recycle is wasted time.
– Anonymous

Sixty-five is the age when one acquires sufficient experience to lose his job.
– Anonymous

The best advice you'll get is from someone who made the same mistake himself.
– Anonymous

The study of the Bible is a post graduate course in the richest library of human experience.
– Anonymous

Trouble brings experience, and experience brings wisdom.
– Anonymous

More on    Susan B[rownell] Anthony (1820–1906), American feminist leader and suffragist

Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.
– Susan B. Anthony, The Revolution (woman suffrage newspaper) March 18, 1869

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.
– Susan B. Anthony, quoted in Rufus K. Noyes, Views of Religion

More on    Antisthenes (444 BC–371 BC), Greek philosopher, student of Socrates, founder of the Cynic school of philosophy; urged return to simplicity of nature.

As iron is eaten away by rust, so the envious are consumed by their own passion.
– Antisthenes

It is better to fall among crows than flatterers; for those devour only the dead – these the living.
– Antisthenes

Not to unlearn what you have learned is the most necessary kind of learning.
– Antisthenes

Observe your enemies, for they first find out your faults.
– Antisthenes

On being praised by some wicked men, I am sadly afraid that I must have done some wicked thing.
– Antisthenes

Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes.
– Antisthenes

Quarrels often arise in marriages when the bridal gifts are excessive.
– Antisthenes

Royalty does good and is badly spoken of.
– Antisthenes

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
– Antisthenes

There are only two people who can tell you the truth about yourself – an enemy who has lost his temper and a friend who loves you dearly.
– Antisthenes

We must not contradict, but instruct him that contradicts us; for a madman is not cured by another running mad also.
– Antisthenes

When brothers agree, no fortress is so strong as their common life.
– Antisthenes

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Clearly the person who accepts the Church as an infallible guide will believe whatever the Church teaches.
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

He who predicts the future is lying even if he tells the truth.
– Arab saying

Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble.
– Arab saying

Choose your friends carefully. Your enemies will choose you.
– Yassir Arafat, chairman, Palestine Liberation Organization

Give me a firm place to stand, and I will move the earth.
– Archimedes

More on    Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), Greek philosopher

A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and unskilled labor.
– Aristotle

A friend is a second self.
– Aristotle

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
– Aristotle

A human being is a naturally political [animal].
– Aristotle

A true friend is one soul in two bodies.
– Aristotle

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.
– Aristotle

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.
– Aristotle

All men by nature desire to know.
– Aristotle

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
– Aristotle

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.
– Aristotle

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
– Aristotle

Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way; this is not easy.
– Aristotle

As a rock on the seashore he standeth firm, and the dashing of the waves disturbeth him not. He raiseth his head like a tower on a hill, and the arrows of fortune drop at his feet. In the instant of danger, the courage of his heart sustaineth him; and the steadiness of his mind beareth him out.
– Aristotle

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
– Aristotle

Bad men are full of repentance.
– Aristotle

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.
– Aristotle

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
– Aristotle

Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.
– Aristotle

Change in all things is sweet.
– Aristotle

Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses and avoids.
– Aristotle

Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues.
– Aristotle

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.
– Aristotle

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
– Aristotle

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
– Aristotle

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.
– Aristotle

Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
– Aristotle

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.
– Aristotle

Education is the best provision for the journey to old age.
– Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
– Aristotle

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
– Aristotle

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.
– Aristotle

For what is the best choice, for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve.
– Aristotle

Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
– Aristotle

Friendship is essentially a partnership.
– Aristotle

Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
– Aristotle

Happiness depends upon ourselves.
– Aristotle

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
– Aristotle

Homer has taught all other poets the are of telling lies skillfully.
– Aristotle

Hope is a waking dream.
– Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms.
– Aristotle

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.
– Aristotle

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.
– Aristotle, in Stobaeus, Florilegium

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.
– Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.
– Aristotle

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way.
– Aristotle

If the hammer and the shuttle could move themselves, slavery would be unnecessary.
– Aristotle

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.
– Aristotle

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
– Aristotle

In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.
– Aristotle

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.
– Aristotle

In the arena of human life the honours and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities.
– Aristotle

It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered.
– Aristotle

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.
– Aristotle

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
– Aristotle

It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.
– Aristotle

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.
– Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics"

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.
– Aristotle

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

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
– Aristotle

Law is mind without reason.
– Aristotle

Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.
– Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
– Aristotle

Man is by nature a political animal.
– Aristotle

Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice.
– Aristotle

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way ... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
– Aristotle

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.
– Aristotle

Men come together in cities in order to live: they remain together in order to live the good life.
– Aristotle

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
– Aristotle

Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
– Aristotle, "Eudemian Ethics"

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
– Aristotle

Most people would rather give than get affection.
– Aristotle

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
– Aristotle

My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
– Aristotle

Nature does nothing uselessly.
– Aristotle

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
– Aristotle

No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
– Aristotle

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.
– Aristotle

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.
– Aristotle

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.
– Aristotle

One swallow does not make a summer.
– Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.
– Aristotle

Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.
– Aristotle

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
– Aristotle

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
– Aristotle

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.
– Aristotle

Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
– Aristotle

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
– Aristotle

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
– Aristotle

Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.
– Aristotle

Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty – excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable – should persist after the beauty was gone.
– Aristotle

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
– Aristotle

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.
– Aristotle

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
– Aristotle

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
– Aristotle

The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.
– Aristotle

The best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
– Aristotle

The best political community is formed by citizens of the middle class.
– Aristotle

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
– Aristotle

The end of labor is to gain leisure.
– Aristotle

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
– Aristotle

The gods too are fond of a joke.
– Aristotle

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
– Aristotle

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.
– Aristotle

The law is reason, free from passion.
– Aristotle

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.
– Aristotle

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
– Aristotle

The more thou dost advance, the more thy feet pitfalls will meet. The Path that leadeth on is lighted by one fire – the light of daring burning in the heart. The more one dares, the more he shall obtain. The more he fears, the more that light shall pale – and that alone can guide.
– Aristotle

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.
– Aristotle

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.
– Aristotle

The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
– Aristotle

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
– Aristotle

The secret to humor is surprise.
– Aristotle

The soul never thinks without a picture.
– Aristotle

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.
– Aristotle

The vigorous are no better than the lazy during one half of life, for all men are alike when asleep.
– Aristotle

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
– Aristotle

The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.
– Aristotle

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
– Aristotle

There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.
– Aristotle

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
– Aristotle

There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
– Aristotle

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.
– Aristotle

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.
– Aristotle

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
– Aristotle

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.
– Aristotle

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.
– Aristotle

To give a satisfactory decision as to the truth it is necessary to be rather an arbitrator than a party to the dispute.
– Aristotle

To perceive is to suffer.
– Aristotle

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
– Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
– Aristotle

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
– Aristotle

We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
– Aristotle

We live in deeds, not years: In thoughts not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial. We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
– Aristotle

We make war that we may live in peace.
– Aristotle

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
– Aristotle

We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.
– Aristotle

Well begun is half done.
– Aristotle

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
– Aristotle, from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
– Aristotle

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.
– Aristotle

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
– Aristotle

Wit is educated insolence.
– Aristotle

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
– Aristotle

Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.
– Aristotle

You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
– Aristotle

Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.
– Aristotle, "Nicomachean Ethics"

Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
– Aristotle

More on    Ayi Kwei Armah (1939– ), Ghanaian novelist and poet

How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our people's death? For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at the sight of their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such a dream is dead, killed by the saviors of his dream.
– Ayi Kwei Armah, 2000 Seasons

Ra's no self-created god
Ra is our self-creation
Ra is us
embracing space
traversing time. So
no my love
whatever we've run short of
this hasty day
its name cannot be
time.
– Ayi Kwei Armah, from "Seed Time"

they dream of substituting
another small tight group
for the one serving its bitter time
at the tip of
the overripe colonial abscess
on this sliver of our continental home
we'we been connected into calling
our state.
– Ayi Kwei Armah, from "News"

You cannot get ahead while you are getting even.
– Dick Armey

If it moves, salute it; if it doesn't move, pick it up; if you can't pick it up, paint it.
– US Army saying

Those who await not gifts from chance have conquered fate.
– Matthew Arnold, Victorian English poet

Miracles are doomed; they will drop out like fairies and witchcraft, from among the matter which serious people believe.
– Matthew Arnold, Victorian English poet, Literature and Dogma

Your expression is the most important thing you can wear.
– Sid Ascher

If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right.
– Neil Ascherson, British journalist

For the past fifteen years or so, British governments have tried to persuade the rest of us that the best judges of the national interest are ... businessmen. This may be a ridiculous statement, but – ominously – fewer and fewer people laugh at it.
– Marykay Ash

Civilized people – Muslims, Christians and Jews – all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator. Civilized people of all religious faiths are called to the defense of His creation. We are a nation called to defend freedom – a freedom that is not the grant of any government or document, but is our endowment from God.
– U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a February 19, 2003 speech at a Christian broadcasters' convention

More on    William Ashworth (1942– ), U.S. Author, Photographer, Musician

A photographer should not capture light, but make love to it.
– William Ashworth

Children of a culture born in a water-rich environment, we have never really learned how important water is to us. We understand it, but we do not respect it.
– William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink (1982)

Locked behind windows of glass that frame the world like a picture, breathing filtered air whose temperature has been determined by the flick of a dial, we can be forgiven for assuming that what the natural world does is no longer of any concern to us. But we make this assumption at our own peril.
– William Ashworth, Nor Any Drop to Drink (1982)

I go now to the wilderness to be a part of it; to accept my place in the world and its place in me; to grow into reality as a tree grows into the rain, to conform to the Earth as a stream conforms to the stones of its bed. To live. To aspire. To be.
– William Ashworth

... anger is the common substitute for logic among those who have no evidence for what they desperately want to believe.
– Isaac Asimov, The Tyrannosaurus Prescription

As it happens, Josephus, who mentions John the Baptist, does not mention Jesus. There is, to be sure, a paragraph in his history of the Jews which is devoted to Jesus, but it interrupts the flow of the discourse and seems suspiciously like an afterthought. Scholars generally believe this to have been an insertion by some early Christian editor who, scandalized that Joesphus should talk of the period without mentioning the Messiah, felt the insertion to be a pious act.
– Isaac Asimov, Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory" is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
– Isaac Asimov

I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it. I've been an atheist for years and years, but somehow I felt it was intellectually unrespectable to say one was an atheist, because it assumed knowledge that one didn't have. Somehow it was better to say one was a humanist or an agnostic. I finally decided that I'm a creature of emotion as well as of reason. Emotionally I am an atheist. I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time.
– Isaac Asimov, Free Inquiry

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
– Isaac Asimov

If mankind recognizes that war is impossible ... that all national rivalries are foolish ... if they get together any kind of an extension of detente ... then we may pull out of it all the better for it.
– Isaac Asimov

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centuries since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes.
– Isaac Asimov, The Canadian Atheists Newsletter

It is no one's privilege to despise another. It is only a hard-won right after long experience.
– Isaac Asimov, "C-Chute"

It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety.
– Isaac Asimov

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
– Isaac Asimov

Naturally since the Sumerians didn't know what caused the flood any more than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.)
– Isaac Asimov, The Tyrannosaurus Prescription

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.
– Isaac Asimov

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.
– Isaac Asimov

Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
– Isaac Asimov

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You'd better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe.
– Isaac Asimov

To rebel against a powerful political, economic, religious, or social establishment is very dangerous and very few people do it, except, perhaps, as part of a mob. To rebel against the "scientific" establishment, however, is the easiest thing in the world, and anyone can do it and feel enormously brave, without risking as much as a hangnail. Thus, the vast majority, who believe in astrology and think that the planets have nothing better to do than form a code that will tell them whether tomorrow is a good day to close a business deal or not, become all the more excited and enthusiastic about the bilge when a group of astronomers denounces it.
– Isaac Asimov

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
– Isaac Asimov

The bible must be seen in a cultural context. It didn't just happen. These stories are retreads. But, tell a Christian that – No, No! What makes it doubly sad is that they hardly know the book, much less its origins.
– Isaac Asimov

The first law of dietetics seems to be: if it tastes good, it's bad for you.
– Isaac Asimov

The fundamentalists deny that evolution has taken place; they deny that the earth and the universe as a whole are more than a few thousand years old, and so on. There is ample scientific evidence that the fundamentalists are wrong in these matters, and that their notions of cosmogony have about as much basis in fact as the Tooth Fairy has.
– Isaac Asimov

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
– Isaac Asimov

The young specialist in English Lit, ... lectured me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong.
... My answer to him was, "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
– Isaac Asimov, The Relativity of Wrong,, page 226. (1996)

Thin people are thin because they don't know any better.
– Isaac Asimov

Things do change. The only question is that since thiings are deteriorating so quickly, will society and man's habits change quickly enough?
– Isaac Asimov

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
– Isaac Asimov

Work while the day is long,
While the right arm is strong,
While the life-blood is young,
  Night cometh on.

Work while the sun is high,
In the bright smiling sky;
Swiftly life's minutes fly:
  Night cometh on.

Strive with thy heart and soul;
Press to the distant goal;
Waste not the hours that roll:
  Night cometh on.

Life is a season lent;
Moments are treasures sent;
See that they're wisely spent:
  Night cometh on.

What thy hand finds to do,
That, with thy might, pursue,
With a brave heart and true:
  Night cometh on.

What though we toil in pain,
'Twill not be all in vain;
Haste then the good to gain:
  Night cometh on.

What though grief rack the breast?
Doth there not come a rest?
Let us then do our best:
  Night cometh on.
– John Askham (1825-1894) "Work While it is Day" (1863)

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
– Margaret Atwood

Show me a guy who's afraid to look bad and I will show you a guy you can beat every time.
– Rene Auberjonis

More on    W H [Wystan Hugh] Auden (1907–73), British poet

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
– W H Auden

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
– W H Auden

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
– W H Auden

It takes little talent to see what is under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.
– W H Auden

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
– W H Auden

Political history is far too criminal a subject to be a fit thing to teach children.
– W H Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West.
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
– W H Auden

To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
– W H Auden

The most important truths are likely to be those which ... society at that time least wants to hear.
– W H Auden

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
– W H Auden

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.
– W H Auden

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
– Berthold Auerbach

All diseases of Christians are to be ascribed to demons; chiefly do they torment freshly-baptized Christians, yea, even the guiltless new-born infants.
– Saint Augustine

I feel that nothing so casts down the manly mind from it's height as the fondling of women and those bodily contacts which belong to the married state.
– Saint Augustine, De Trinitate 7.7

It is impossible that there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the Earth, since no such race is recorded by Scripture among the descendants of Adam.
– Saint Augustine

It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.
– Saint Augustine, Treatise on the Correction of the Donatists (417), page 214

Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations.
– Saint Augustine

O Lord, help me to be pure, but not yet.
– Saint Augustine

Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, ... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all that we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.
– Saint Augustine, "De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim" (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.
– Saint Augustine

Unless you believe, you will not understand.
– Saint Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio

Women should not be enlightened or educated in any way. They should, in fact, be segregated as they are the cause of hideous and involuntary erections i n holy men.
– Saint Augustine

We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.
– Marcus Aurelius

B      

Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
– Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor (1792–1871)

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.
– Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor (1792–1871), quoted in "In Mathematical Circles" by H. Eves

On two occasions I have been asked, "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.
– Charles Babbage, English mathematician and inventor (1792–1871)

[It] is like living in a wilderness of mirrors. No fact goes unchallenged.
– Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the Interior under Bill Clinton

If things go wrong, don't go with them.
– Roger Babson

It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
– Roger Babson

Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.
– Roger Babson

Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but, character, health, knowledge and good judgement will always be in demand under all conditions.
– Roger Babson

The successful man is the one who had the chance and took it.
– Roger Babson

A woman isn't complete without a man. But where do you find a man – a real man – these days?
– Lauren Bacall

And to meet whom did Franklin D Roosevelt find himself tempted to call off the Yalta Conference? Myrna Loy. And to see what lady in what picture did John Dillinger risk coming out of hiding to meet his bullet-ridden death in an alley in Chicago? Myrna Loy, in Manhattan Melodrama.
– Lauren Bacall

Find me a man who's interesting enough to have dinner with and I'll be happy.
– Lauren Bacall

How many women do we know who were continually kissed by Clark Gable, William Powell, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and Fredric March? Only one: Myrna Loy.
– Lauren Bacall

I am essentially a loner.
– Lauren Bacall

I am not a has-been. I am a will be.
– Lauren Bacall

I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that.
– Lauren Bacall

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.
– Lauren Bacall

Imagination is the highest kite that one can fly.
– Lauren Bacall

In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity.
– Lauren Bacall

Looking at yourself in a mirror isn't exactly a study of life.
– Lauren Bacall

They're guys who want to screw around all the time, which interests me not at all. God knows we've done that, been there, and we don't want to do that any more.
– Lauren Bacall

You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now.
– Lauren Bacall

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
– Johannes Sebastian Bach

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the rightkeys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
– Johannes Sebastian Bach

Success, or failure, very often arrives on wings that seem mysterious to us.
– Dr. Marcus Bach

We catch on to the truth and technique of expectation in those rare moments when we are stirred by an awareness of a guidance seemingly higher and greater than our own, when for a little while we are taken over by a force and an intelligence above and beyond those commonly felt. Confident and free, filled with wonder and ready acceptance, we permit ourselves to be taken over by our unquestioning self.
– Dr. Marcus Bach

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
– Richard Bach

An idea is never given to you without you being given the power to make it reality. You must, nevertheless, suffer for it.
– Richard Bach

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.
– Richard Bach

Ask yourself the secret of your success. Listen to your answer, and practice it.
– Richard Bach

Can miles truly separate us from friends? If we want to be with someone we love, aren't we already there?
– Richard Bach

Can miles truly separate you from friends... If you want to be with someone you love, aren't you already there?
– Richard Bach

Civilization ... wrecks the planet from seafloor to stratosphere.
– Richard Bach

Don't be dismayed by good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends
– Richard Bach

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
– Richard Bach

Every problem has a gift for you in its hands.
– Richard Bach

Evolution made civilization steward of this planet. A hundred thousand years later, the steward stood before evolution not helper but destroyer, not healer but parasite. So evolution withdrew its gift, passed civilization by, rescued the planet from intelligence and handed it to love.
– Richard Bach

Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.
– Richard Bach

Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.
– Richard Bach

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
– Richard Bach

I don't want to do business with those who don't make a profit, because they can't give the best service.
– Richard Bach

I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it?
– Richard Bach

If you love someone, set them free. If they come back they're yours; if they don't they never were.
– Richard Bach

If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
– Richard Bach

If your happiness depends on what somebody else does, I guess you do have a problem.
– Richard Bach

In order to live free and happily you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
– Richard Bach

In order to win, you must expect to win.
– Richard Bach

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.
– Richard Bach

Jonathan is that brilliant little fire that burns within us all, that lives only for those moments when we reach perfection.
– Richard Bach

Learning is finding out what you already know.
– Richard Bach

Listen to what you know instead of what you fear.
– Richard Bach

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.
– Richard Bach

Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.
– Richard Bach

Rarely do members of the same family grow up under the same roof.
– Richard Bach

Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger.
– Richard Bach

The best way to pay for a lovely moment is to enjoy it.
– Richard Bach

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.
– Richard Bach

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
– Richard Bach

The meaning I picked, the one that changed my life: Overcome fear, behold wonder.
– Richard Bach

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
– Richard Bach

The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
– Richard Bach

You are always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
– Richard Bach

You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.
– Richard Bach

You don't want a million answers as much as you want a few forever questions. The questions are diamonds you hold in the light. Study a lifetime and you see different colors from the same jewel.
– Richard Bach

You teach best what you most need to learn.
– Richard Bach

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
– Richard Bach

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.
– Burt Bacharach

More on    Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962), French philosopher

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.
– Gaston Bachelard

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.
– Gaston Bachelard

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.
– Gaston Bachelard

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.
– Gaston Bachelard

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.
– Gaston Bachelard

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
– Gaston Bachelard

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
– Gaston Bachelard

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
– Gaston Bachelard

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.
– Gaston Bachelard

Man is an imagining being.
– Gaston Bachelard

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.
– Gaston Bachelard

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
– Gaston Bachelard

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.
– Gaston Bachelard

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.
– Gaston Bachelard

The words of the world want to make sentences.
– Gaston Bachelard

There is no original truth, only original error.
– Gaston Bachelard

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
– Gaston Bachelard

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
– Gaston Bachelard

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.
– Gaston Bachelard

A bachelor's life is a fine breakfast, a flat lunch, and a miserable dinner.
– Francis Bacon

A good conscience is a continual feast.
– Francis Bacon

A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.
– Francis Bacon

A man must make his opportunity, as oft as find it.
– Francis Bacon

A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
– Francis Bacon

A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.
– Francis Bacon

A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.
– Francis Bacon

A trust is an obligation of conscience of one to the will of another.
– Francis Bacon

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
– Francis Bacon

Acorns were good until bread was found.
– Francis Bacon

All colors will agree in the dark.
– Francis Bacon

All rising to great place is by a winding stair.
– Francis Bacon

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
– Francis Bacon, Certain Apophthegms of Lord Bacon (no. IV)

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.
– Francis Bacon

As for the passions and studies of the mind; avoid envy; anxious fears; anger fretting inwards; subtle and knotty inquisitions; joys and exhilarations in excess; sadness not communicated.
– Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, XXX, "Of Regiment of Health"

As the births of living creatures, at first, are ill-shapen: so are all Innovations, which are the births of time.
– Francis Bacon

Atheism is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.
– Francis Bacon

Be not penny-wise. Riches have wings. Sometimes they fly away of themselves, and sometimes they must be set flying to bring in more.
– Francis Bacon

Be so true to thyself, as thou be not false to others.
– Francis Bacon

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the Infinite.
– Francis Bacon

Boldness is ever blind, for it sees not dangers and inconveniences whence it is bad in council though good in execution.
– Francis Bacon

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.
– Francis Bacon, "Proposition touching Amendment of Laws"

But the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in books, exempted from the wrong of time, and capable of perpetual renovation.
– Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning (book I, Advantages of Learning)

By far the best proof is experience.
– Francis Bacon

By indignities men come to dignities.
– Francis Bacon

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.
– Francis Bacon

Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
– Francis Bacon

Come home to men's business and bosoms.
– Francis Bacon, Essays (dedication of 9th Edition)

Consistency is the foundation of virtue.
– Francis Bacon

Cure the disease and kill the patient.
– Francis Bacon

Cure the disease and kill the patient.
– Francis Bacon

Death is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.
– Francis Bacon

Discretion of speech is more than eloquence, and to speak agreeably to him with whom we deal is more than to speak in good words, or in good order.
– Francis Bacon

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.
– Francis Bacon

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
– Francis Bacon

For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself.
– Francis Bacon

For cleanness of body was ever esteemed to proceed from a due reverence to God, to society, and to ourselves.
– Francis Bacon

For it is esteemed a kind of dishonour unto learning to descend to inquiry or meditation upon matters mechanical, except they be such as may be thought secrets, rarities, and special subtilities, which humour of vain supercilious arrogancy is justly derided in Plato ... But the truth is, they be not the highest instances that give the securest information; as may well be expressed in the tale ... of the philosopher, that while he gazed upwards to the stars fell into the water; for if he had looked down he might have seen the stars in the water, but looking aloft he could not see the water in the stars. So it cometh often to pass, that mean and small things discover great, better than great can discover the small.
– Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, pages 71–72. (1973)

For it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocence, except men know exactly all the conditions of the serpent: his baseness and going upon his belly, his volubility and lubricity, his envy and sting, and the rest; that is, all forms and natures of evil: for without this, virtue lieth open and unfenced.
– Francis Bacon

For my name and memory I leave to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.
– Francis Bacon

Fortune hath somewhat the nature of a woman; if she be too much wooed, she is the farther off.
– Francis Bacon

Fortune is like the market, where, many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.
– Francis Bacon

God almighty first planted a garden: and, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasure.
– Francis Bacon

God hangs the greatest weights upon the smallest wires.
– Francis Bacon

God has placed no limits to the exercise of the intellect he has given us, on this side of the grave.
– Francis Bacon

God's first creature, which was light.
– Francis Bacon

Good fame is like fire; when you have kindled you may easily preserve it; but if you extinguish it, you will not easily kindle it again.
– Francis Bacon

He of whom many are afraid ought to fear many.
– Francis Bacon

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.
– Francis Bacon

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
– Francis Bacon

He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?
– Francis Bacon

Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend.
– Francis Bacon

Hope is a good breakfast but a bad supper.
– Francis Bacon

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.
– Francis Bacon, Essays, "Of Building" (1623)

I do not believe that any man fears to be dead, but only the stroke of death.
– Francis Bacon

I had rather believe all the Fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a Mind.
– Francis Bacon

I have taken all knowledge to be my province.
– Francis Bacon

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.
– Francis Bacon

I think of life as meaningless, but we give it meaning during our own existence.
– Francis Bacon

I would live to study, and not study to live.
– Francis Bacon

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world.
– Francis Bacon

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties. (1605)
– Francis Bacon

If money be not they servant, it will be thy master. The covetous man cannot so properly be said to possess wealth, as that may be said to possess him.
– Francis Bacon
see Italian proverb

If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.
– Francis Bacon (1605)

If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.
– Francis Bacon

Ill Fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not.
– Francis Bacon

Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for what he is.
– Francis Bacon

In charity there is no excess.
– Francis Bacon

In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.
– Francis Bacon

In taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior, for it is a prince's part to pardon.
– Francis Bacon, Essays (1625)

In things that a man would not be seen in himself, it is a point of cunning to borrow the name of the world; as to say, "The world says," or "There is a speech abroad."
– Francis Bacon, Essays, "Of Cunning" (1623)

[It has been well said that] the arch-flatterer with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence is a man's self.
– Francis Bacon, quoted in Essays

It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear.
– Francis Bacon

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth ... and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.
– Francis Bacon

It is a strange desire, to seek power, and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others, and to lose power over a man's self.
– Francis Bacon

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.
– Francis Bacon

It is as natural to die as to be born; and to a little infant, perhaps, the one is as painful as the other.
– Francis Bacon

It is the true office of history to represent the events themselves, together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.
– Francis Bacon

It was prettily devised of Aesop, "The fly sat on the axle tree of the chariot wheel and said, what dust do I raise!"
– Francis Bacon

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.
– Francis Bacon

Judges ought to be more leaned than witty, more reverent than plausible, and more advised than confident. Above all things, integrity is their portion and proper virtue.
– Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power.
Latin: Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.
– Francis Bacon: 12 Meditationes Sacrae De Haeresibus.

Lies are sufficient to breed opinion, and opinion brings on substance.
– Francis Bacon

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.
– Francis Bacon
see Publilius Syrus and Albert Einstein

Little do men perceive what solitude is, and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
– Francis Bacon

Look to make your course regular, that men may know beforehand what they may expect.
– Francis Bacon

Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled. Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still he was never a whit abashed, but said, "If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill."
– Francis Bacon, "Of Boldness"

Man seeketh in society comfort, use and protection.
– Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605)

Many a man's strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.
– Francis Bacon

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
– Francis Bacon

Men in great place are thrice servants, – servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Great Place"

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
– Francis Bacon, Essay XLII, "Of Youth and Age"

Men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.
– Francis Bacon

Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.
– Francis Bacon

Mysteries are due to secrecy.
– Francis Bacon

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men's manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.
– Francis Bacon

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.
– Francis Bacon

Nature is commanded by obeying her.
– Francis Bacon

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.
– Francis Bacon

Next to religion, let your care be to promote justice.
– Francis Bacon

No man's fortune can be an end worthy of his being.
– Francis Bacon

No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage-ground of truth.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Truth"

None of the affections have been noted to fascinate and bewitch but envy.
– Francis Bacon

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.
– Francis Bacon

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.
– Francis Bacon

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.
– Francis Bacon

Nuptial love makes mankind; friendly love perfects it; but wanton love corrupts and debases it.
– Francis Bacon

Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit.
– Francis Bacon

Opportunity makes a thief.
– Francis Bacon

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.
– Francis Bacon

People of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon and seldom drive business home to its conclusion, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.
– Francis Bacon

People of great position are servants times three, servants of their country, servants of fame, and servants of business.
– Francis Bacon

People usually think according to their inclinations, speak according to their learning and ingrained opinions, but generally act according to custom.
– Francis Bacon

Pictures and shapes are but secondary objects and please or displease only in the memory.
– Francis Bacon

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.
– Francis Bacon

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.
– Francis Bacon

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
– Francis Bacon

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
– Francis Bacon

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.
– Francis Bacon

Riches are for spending.
– Francis Bacon

Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
– Francis Bacon

Silence is the virtue of fools.
– Francis Bacon

Small amounts of philosophy lead to atheism, but larger amounts bring us back to God.
– Francis Bacon

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
– Francis Bacon, Essay, "Of Studies"

States as great engines move slowly.
– Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning, Book ii (1605)

Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.
– Francis Bacon

Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.
– Francis Bacon

Suspicions that the mind, of itself, gathers, are but buzzes; but suspicions that are artificially nourished and put into men's heads by the tales and whisperings of others, have stings.
– Francis Bacon

That things are changed, and that nothing really perishes, and that the sum of matter remains exactly the same, is sufficiently certain.
– Francis Bacon

The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.
– Francis Bacon

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express.
– Francis Bacon

The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity there is no excess, neither can angel or man come in danger by it.
– Francis Bacon, Essay, "On Goodness"

The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied.
– Francis Bacon

The French are wiser than they seem, and the Spaniards seem wiser than they are.
– Francis Bacon

The genius, wit, and the spirit of a nation are discovered by their proverbs.
– Francis Bacon

The great advantages of simulation and dissimulation are three. First to lay asleep opposition and to surprise. For where a man's intentions are published, it is an alarum to call up all that are against them. The second is to reserve a man's self a fair retreat: for if a man engage himself, by a manifest declaration, he must go through, or take a fall. The third is, the better to discover the mind of another. For to him that opens himself, men will hardly show themselves adverse; but will fair let him go on, and turn their freedom of speech to freedom of thought.
– Francis Bacon

The joys of parents are secret, and so are their grieves and fears.
– Francis Bacon

The laws of the most kingdoms and states have been like buildings of many pieces, and patched up from time to time according to occasion, without frame or model. ... This continual heaping up of laws without digesting them maketh but a chaos and confusion, and turneth the laws many times to become but snares for the people. ... Then look into the state of your laws and justice of your land: purge out multiplicity of laws: clear the incertainty of them: repeal those that are snaring; and press the execution of those that are wholesome and necessary ...
– Francis Bacon

The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy (science); for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and disgested. Therefore, from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never been made), much may be hoped.
– Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.
– Francis Bacon

The mould of a man's fortune is in his own hands.
– Francis Bacon

The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.
– Francis Bacon

The person is a poor judge who by an action can be disgraced more in failing than they can be honored in succeeding.
– Francis Bacon

The place of justice is a hallowed place.
– Francis Bacon

The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine, because the office of medicine is but to tune the curious harp of man's body.
– Francis Bacon

The remedy is worse than the disease.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Seditions"
see Publius Syrus

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.
– Francis Bacon

The wisdom of our ancestors.
– Francis Bacon

The World's a bubble, and the Life of Man Less than a span.
– Francis Bacon, "The World"

The worst solitude is to have no real friendships.
– Francis Bacon

There is a difference between happiness and wisdom: he that thinks himself the happiest man is really so; but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool.
– Francis Bacon

There is as much difference between the counsel that a friend giveth, and that a man giveth himself, as there is between the counsel of a friend and of a flatterer. For there is no such flatterer as is a man's self.
– Francis Bacon

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Beauty"

There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.
– Francis Bacon

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.
– Francis Bacon

They that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.
– Francis Bacon

This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects for it redoubleth joy, and cutteth griefs in half.
– Francis Bacon

This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge keeps his wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
– Francis Bacon

Time is the measure of business.
– Francis Bacon

To be free minded and cheerfully disposed at hours of meat and sleep and of exercise is one of the best precepts of long lasting.
– Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, XXX, "Of Regiment of Health"

To choose time is to save time.
– Francis Bacon

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Travel"

Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion.
– Francis Bacon

Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
– Francis Bacon

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.
– Francis Bacon

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Beauty"

We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.
– Francis Bacon

What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.
– Francis Bacon

   What then remains but that we still should cry
For being born, and, being born, to die?
– Francis Bacon, paraphrase of a Greek epigram, in "The World"

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.
– Francis Bacon

Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.
– Francis Bacon

   Who then to frail mortality shall trust
But limns on water, or but writes in dust.
– Francis Bacon, "The World"

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
– Francis Bacon

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.
– Francis Bacon

Wives are young men's mistresses; companions for middle age, and old men's nurses.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Marriage and Single Life"

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.
– Francis Bacon

Young people are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and more fit for new projects than for settled business.
– Francis Bacon, "Of Youth and Age"

More on    Roger Bacon (1214–1292), English friar, studied languages, mathematics, optics and science

Argument is conclusive ... but ... it does not remove doubt, so that the mind may rest in the sure knowledge of the truth, unless it finds it by the method of experiment. For if any man who never saw fire proved by satisfactory arguments that fire burns. his hearer's mind would never be satisfied, nor would he avoid the fire until he put his hand in it that he might learn by experiment what argument taught.
– Roger Bacon

For the things of this world cannot be made known without a knowledge of mathematics.
– Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (1266–1267)

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.
– Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (1266–1267)

Mathematics is the door and the key to the sciences.
– Roger Bacon

Neglect of mathmatics works injury to all knowledge, since he who ignorant of it cannot know the other sciences or the things of this world. And what is worse, is that men who are thus ignorant are unable to percieve their own ignorance and so do not seek a remedy.
– Roger Bacon

The strongest arguments prove nothing so long as the conclusions are not verified by experience. Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation.
– Roger Bacon

There are in fact four very different stumbling blocks in the way of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority, longstanding custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge.
– Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (1266–1267)

There are two modes of acquiring knowledge, namely by reasoning and experience. Reasoning draws a conclusion and makes us grant the conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, nor does it remove doubt so that the mind may rest on the intuition of truth, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.
– Roger Bacon, Opus Majus (1266–1267)

I do not know what is the good of keeping this country; it [Afghanistan] is nearly all a howling desert, with a little cultivation along the few river banks. However, personally, I do not mind how long they keep it, it is a jolly climate. These Afghans are awful-looking sportsmen, fine big fellows with great hooked noses and long hair, in loose white clothing, and very murderous. Since we have been here six of our native servants have disappeared and have never been seen again. One of them was the head cook of our mess; we suspected a village near by of murdering him, for he went to buy eggs, so we sent a squadron out there with the political officer and they searched the place, but of course found no signs of the old boy; if they had they would have probably hanged some of the villagers and burned the place.
– Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the World Scout Movement, Memories of India, Chapter 8

In 1880 we were at war with the Afghans under Ayub Khan. It happened this way. Owing to supposed machinations of the Russians with the Ameer of Afghanistan, an expedition was sent to Kabul in November 1878. This force passed through the Khyber Pass and took up its position at Jalalabad and other places on the road to Kabul. At the same time Sir Donald Stewart marched a force through the Bolan Pass into Baluchistan and seized Kandahar. Sir Frederick (now Earl) Roberts, with a third force, marched up into the Kuram valley and on into Afghanistan, defeating the Afghan troops at Paiwar Kotal.
    Under these defeats the Ameer Shere Ali fled the country and died soon afterwards. He was succeeded by his son, Yakub Khan, who then made terms with the British, whose troops left the country, while Major Cavagnari was installed as British Resident at Kabul. A few months later this officer and his staff were massacred, whereupon a fresh expedition was sent into Afghanistan under Sir Frederick Roberts who, after defeating the Afghans at Charasia, took the city of Kabul and captured Yakub Khan. His force was then cut off by a rising of the Afghans; but was relieved by Sir Donald Stewart from Kandahar.
    Abdurrahman was now made Ameer (1880) on condition that he remained an ally of the British; but Ayub Khan, a son of the late Ameer, had meantime raised a force in Persia and advanced from Herat against Kandahar. A British force, consisting of about 2,500 British and native troops under General Burrows, went out to oppose him. They met near Maiwand in a heavy mist and our force was surrounded and defeated with heavy loss. In this fight 961 of our officers and men were killed and 168 were wounded or missing.
– Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the World Scout Movement, Memories of India, Chapter 8

Kandahar itself, which I visited many times, was a strange place and more than a trifle dangerous. All the officers and men went about armed, most officers carrying a hog-spear, some of them revolvers. I had a long stout stick with a lanyard to it, and a beautiful smile which I expected would disarm anybody ! But amongst the crowd there were very often fanatics or Ghazis who were only too anxious to stick their knives into a European, as they believed that if they were then killed in consequence of their act they would go straight to Heaven.
– Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the World Scout Movement, Memories of India, Chapter 8

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful Management of which so much depends.
Do not be discouraged. Pray earnestly that right may triumph, always remembering that the Lord God Omnipotent still reigns, and that His reign is one of law and order, and not of violence and crime.
– George F. Baer (1842–1914), U.S. railroad magnate and mine owner, open letter to the press during the Pennsylvania miners' strike (August 1902)

They don't suffer. They can't even speak English.
– George F. Baer, mine owner, answering a reporter's question about the suffering of starving miners.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.
– Joan Baez (1941– ) US folksinger, political activist.

The world of humanity has two wings, one is women and the other men. Not until both wings are equally developed can the bird fly.
– Abdu'l Baha, Persian, eldest son of Bahá'u'lláh, the Prophet Founder of the Bahá'í Faith

More on    Pearl Bailey (1918–1992) African-American singer, entertainer, UN delegate, humanitarian

A man without ambition is dead. A man with ambition but no love is dead. A man with ambition and love for his blessings here on earth is ever so alive.
– Pearl Bailey (1971)

There's a period of life when we swallow a knowledge of ourselves and it becomes either good or sour inside.
– Pearl Bailey

There is a way to look at the past. Don't hide from it. It will not catch you if you don't repeat it.
– Pearl Bailey (1993)

When you're young, the silliest notions seem the greatest achievements.
– Pearl Bailey, 1968

More on    Russell Baker (1925– ) U.S. columnist & journalist, winner of Pulitzer in 1982

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.
– Russell Baker

A new star with a tremendous national appeal, the skill of a consummate showman.
– Russell Baker

A railroad station? That was sort of a primitive airport, only you didn't have to take a cab 20 miles out of town to reach it.
– Russell Baker

A solved problem creates two new problems, and the best prescription for happy living is not to solve any more problems than you have to.
– Russell Baker

Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.
– Russell Baker

Americans like fat books and thin women.
– Russell Baker

An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious – just dead wrong.
– Russell Baker

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it.
– Russell Baker

Can't anything be done about calling these guys student athletes? That's like referring to Attila the Hun's cavalry as "weekend warriors"
– Russell Baker

Caution: These verses may be hazardous to your solemnity.
– Russell Baker

Disguises thinner than a Chicago stripteaser's work clothes.
– Russell Baker

Don't try to make children grow up to be like you, or they may do it.
– Russell Baker

Happiness is a small and unworthy goal for something as big and fancy as a whole lifetime, and should be taken in small doses.
– Russell Baker

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.
– Russell Baker

I gave up on new poetry myself thirty years ago, when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens on a hostile world.
– Russell Baker

I was converted from fool [when] my spine [was] somewhat reorganized... What amazed me was how fast a perfectly robust man looking forward to nothing more terminal than a night in Toledo can cease being alive once he pulls the dreamboat out of the driveway.
– Russell Baker

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
– Russell Baker

In America nothing dies easier than tradition.
– Russell Baker

In an age when the fashion is to be in love with yourself, confessing to be in love with somebody else is an admission of unfaithfulness to one's beloved.
– Russell Baker

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories; those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.
– Russell Baker

Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say that what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down.
– Russell Baker

It seems to be a law of American life that whatever enriches us anywhere except in the wallet inevitably becomes uneconomic.
– Russell Baker

It was dramatic to watch [my grandmother] decapitate [a turkey] with an ax the day before Thanksgiving. Nowadays the expense of hiring grandmothers for the ax work would probably qualify all turkeys so honored with "gourmet" status.
– Russell Baker

Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.
– Russell Baker

Live by publicity, you'll probably die by publicity.
– Russell Baker

Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it.
– Russell Baker

New York is the only city in the world where you can get deliberately run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.
– Russell Baker

Objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost
– Russell Baker

People seem to enjoy things more when they know a lot of other people have been left out of the pleasure.
– Russell Baker

People who say you're just as old as you feel are all wrong, fortunately.
– Russell Baker

Poetry is so vital to us until school spoils it.
– Russell Baker

Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.
– Russell Baker

Research is a scientific activity dedicated to discovering what makes grass green.
– Russell Baker

Situation comedy on television has thrived for years on "canned" laughter grafted by gaglines by technicians using records of guffawing audiences that have been dead for years.
– Russell Baker

Skins tanned to the consistency of well-traveled alligator suitcases.
– Russell Baker

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom.
– Russell Baker

Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.
– Russell Baker

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.
– Russell Baker

The lobbies of the new hotels and the Pan American Building exhale a chill as from the unopened Pharaonic tombs... And in their marble labyrinths there is an evil presence that hates warmth and sunlight.
– Russell Baker

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
– Russell Baker

The people who are always hankering loudest for some golden yesteryear usually drive new cars.
– Russell Baker

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.
– Russell Baker

The worst thing about the miracle of modern communications is the Pavlovian pressure it places upon everyone to communicate whenever a bell rings.
– Russell Baker

There are no liberals behind steering wheels.
– Russell Baker

There's so much spectating going on that a lot of us never get around to living.
– Russell Baker

Those people who taught Hubert Humphrey a lesson will still be enjoying the Nixon Supreme Court when Tricia and Julie begin to find silver threads among the gold and the black.
– Russell Baker

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
– Russell Baker

What the New Yorker calls home would seem like a couple of closets to most Americans, yet he manages not only to live there but also to grow trees and cockroaches right on the premises.
– Russell Baker

When it comes to cars, only two varieties of people are possible – cowards and fools.
– Russell Baker

You can't enjoy light verse with a heavy heart.
– Russell Baker

The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.
– Josephine Baker, African-American dancer, emigrated to France (1940)

A violinist had a violin, a painer his palette. All I had was myself. I was the instrument that I must care for.
– Josephine Baker, African-American dancer, emigrated to France

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.
– James Baldwin

Any honest examination of the national life proves how far we are from the standard of human freedom with which we began. The recovery of this standard demands of everyone who loves this country a hard look at himself, for the greatest achievments must begin somewhere, and they always begin with the person. If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
– James Baldwin

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
– James Baldwin (1955)

Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.
– James Baldwin

Be careful what you set your heart upon – for it will surely be yours.
– James Baldwin

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck – but, most of all, endurance.
– James Baldwin

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
– James Baldwin, Nobady Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Confronted with the impossibility of remaining faithful to one's beliefs, and the equal impossibility of becoming free of them, one can be driven to the most inhuman excesses.
– James Baldwin

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be.
– James Baldwin, Nobady Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
– James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955)

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also, much more than that. So are we all.
– James Baldwin (1984)

I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hates so stubbornly is becaue they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with the pain.
– James Baldwin (1955)

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
– James Baldwin

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
– James Baldwin (1955)

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
– James Baldwin

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.
– James Baldwin

It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. The world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.
– James Baldwin

It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind.
– James Baldwin

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.
– James Baldwin

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.
– James Baldwin (1962)

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.
– James Baldwin

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and now we cannot live within.
– James Baldwin

Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex, you thought of nothing else if you didnt have it and thought of other things if you did.
– James Baldwin

Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock.
– James Baldwin

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.
– James Baldwin

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.
– James Baldwin (1962)

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.
– James Baldwin (1961)

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
– James Baldwin

Rage cannot be hidden, it can only be dissembled. This dissembling deludes the thoughtless, and strengthens rage and adds, to rage, contempt.
– James Baldwin

The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
– James Baldwin

The future is like heaven – everyone exalts it, but no one wants to go there now.
– James Baldwin
see Loretta Lynn

The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.
– James Baldwin (1962)
see Shakespeare
see Bob Dylan

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power – and no one holds power forever.
– James Baldwin (1962)

The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions.
– James Baldwin (1962)

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.
– James Baldwin (1961)

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.
– James Baldwin

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.
– James Baldwin

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck – but, most of all, endurance.
– James Baldwin

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
– James Baldwin

The world is before you and you need not take it or leave it as it was when you came in.
– James Baldwin (1961)

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.
– James Baldwin (1961)

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.
– James Baldwin (1962)

Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned.
– James Baldwin

We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours.
– James Baldwin

The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
– Lucille Ball (1911–1989), US television actress

A city [Paris] where great ideas perish, done to death by a witticism.
– Honoré de Balzac

A courage which looks easy and yet is rare; the courage of a teacher repeating day after day the same lessons – the least rewarded of all forms of courage.
– Honoré de Balzac

A husband and wife who have separate bedrooms have either drifted apart or found happiness.
– Honoré de Balzac

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.
– Honoré de Balzac

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.
– Honoré de Balzac

A lover always thinks of his mistress first and himself second; with a husband it runs the other way.
– Honoré de Balzac

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.
– Honoré de Balzac

A mother who is really a mother is never free.
– Honoré de Balzac

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
– Honoré de Balzac

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.
– Honoré de Balzac

A woman who has made fun of her husband can love him no more.
– Honoré de Balzac

All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all.
– Honoré de Balzac

All human power is a compound of time and patience.
– Honoré de Balzac

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.
– Honoré de Balzac

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.
– Honoré de Balzac

Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
– Honoré de Balzac

Believe anything you hear about the world; nothing is too impossibly bad.
– Honoré de Balzac

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
– Honoré de Balzac

Conviction brings a silent, indefinable beauty into faces made of the commonest human clay; the devout worshiper at any shrine reflects something of its golden glow, even as the glory of a noble love shines like a sort of light from a woman's face.
– Honoré de Balzac

Count not thyself to have found true peace, if thou hast felt no grief; nor that then all is well if thou hast no adversary; nor that this is perfect, if all things fall out according to thy desire.
– Honoré de Balzac

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.
– Honoré de Balzac

Economized love is never real love.
– Honoré de Balzac

Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.
– Honoré de Balzac

Finance, like time, devours its own children.
– Honoré de Balzac

First love is a kind of vaccination which saves a man from catching the complaint the second time.
– Honoré de Balzac

Genius is intensity.
– Honoré de Balzac

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.
– Honoré de Balzac

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littleness, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.
– Honoré de Balzac

He went to bed and slept the sleep of the good-for-nothing which, by an anachronism not a single songwriter has yet struck, is proven to be more sound than that of innocence.
– Honoré de Balzac

I am a galley slave to pen and ink.
– Honoré de Balzac

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.
– Honoré de Balzac

If those who are the enemies of innocent amusements had the direction of the world, they would take away the spring, and youth, the former from the year, the latter from human life.
– Honoré de Balzac

If we all said to people's faces what we say behind one another's backs, society would be impossible.
– Honoré de Balzac

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
– Honoré de Balzac

Imagination helps bring out the realism of every detail and only sees the beauties of the work.
– Honoré de Balzac

In a husband there is only a man; in a married woman there is a man, a father, and mother, and a woman.
– Honoré de Balzac

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.
– Honoré de Balzac

Inspiration in matters of taste will not come twice.
– Honoré de Balzac

It is as absurd to say that a man can't love one woman all the time as it is to say that a violinist needs several violins to play the same piece of music.
– Honoré de Balzac

It is easier to be a lover than a husband for the simple reason that it is more difficult to be witty every day than to say pretty things from time to time.
– Honoré de Balzac

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.
– Honoré de Balzac

It is not enough to be an upright man, we must be seen to be one; society does not exist on moral ideas only.
– Honoré de Balzac

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.
– Honoré de Balzac

Love is a game in which one always cheats.
– Honoré de Balzac

Love is the poetry of the senses.
– Honoré de Balzac

Love passes quickly, and passes like a street Arab, anxious to mark his way with mischief.
– Honoré de Balzac

Manners are the hypocrisy of a nation.
– Honoré de Balzac

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.
– Honoré de Balzac

Misfortune, no less than happiness, inspires us to dream.
– Honoré de Balzac

Modesty is the conscience of the body.
– Honoré de Balzac

Most people of action are inclined to fatalism and most of thought believe in providence.
– Honoré de Balzac

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.
– Honoré de Balzac

No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman.
– Honoré de Balzac

Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love.
– Honoré de Balzac

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.
– Honoré de Balzac

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.
– Honoré de Balzac

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul
– Honoré de Balzac

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.
– Honoré de Balzac

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
– Honoré de Balzac

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell you that solitude is fine.
– Honoré de Balzac

Strolling is the gastronomy of the eye. To walk is to vegetate, to stroll is to live.
– Honoré de Balzac

The duration of passion is proportionate with the original resistance of the woman.
– Honoré de Balzac

The errors of women spring, almost always, from their faith in the good, or their confidence in the true.
– Honoré de Balzac

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.
– Honoré de Balzac

The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.
– Honoré de Balzac

The more you judge, the less you love.
– Honoré de Balzac

The motto of chivalry is also the motto of wisdom; to serve all, but love only one.
– Honoré de Balzac

There are no little events with the heart. It magnifies everything; it places in the same scales the fall of an empire of fourteen years and the dropping of a woman's glove, and almost always the glove weighs more than the empire.
– Honoré de Balzac

There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
– Honoré de Balzac

This coffee plunges into the stomach ... the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle. ... Memories charge at full gallop ... the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters.
– Honoré de Balzac

Those sweetly smiling angels with pensive looks, innocent faces, and cash-boxes for hearts.
– Honoré de Balzac

To kill a relative of whom you are tired is something. But to inherit his property afterwards, that is genuine pleasure.
– Honoré de Balzac

To loaf is a science, to loaf is to live.
– Honoré de Balzac

To our shame a woman is never so much attached to us as when we suffer.
– Honoré de Balzac

To promote laughter without joining in it greatly heightens the effect.
– Honoré de Balzac

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
– Honoré de Balzac

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.
– Honoré de Balzac

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.
– Honoré de Balzac

We exaggerate misfortune and happiness alike. We are never as bad off or as happy as we say we are.
– Honoré de Balzac

What is art? Nature concentrated.
– Honoré de Balzac

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.
– Honoré de Balzac

Wit needs leisure, and certain inequalities of position.
– Honoré de Balzac

Woman has this in common with angels, that suffering beings belong especially to her.
– Honoré de Balzac

More on    Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968) , U.S. stage and film actress

Because all my life I've been terrible at remembering people's names. Once I introduced a friend of mine as "Martini". Her name was actually "Olive".
– Tallulah Bankhead, on why she called everyone "darling"

Cocaine isn't habit forming. I should know-I've been using it for years.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Dahling Congressman Boykin: 10 AM is an unprecedented time for a child of the grease paint to cope with the sandman.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Dahling, you're divine. I've had an affair with your husband. You'll be next.
– Tallulah Bankhead, to Joan Crawford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.
– Tallulah Bankhead

I am as pure as the driven slush.
– Tallulah Bankhead

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.
– Tallulah Bankhead

I thought I told you to wait in the car.
– Tallulah Bankhead, on seeing a former lover for the first time in years

I'll go to my grave convinced that I could have drawn the cheers of Longstreet and Beauregard and Robert E. Lee had I been permitted to wrestle with Rhett Butler.
– Tallulah Bankhead, in her autobiography, about losing the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind

I'm as pure as the driven slush.
– Tallulah Bankhead

I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind ... the matter with me is, I WANT A MAN!... six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
– Tallulah Bankhead, in an interview with Motion Picture magazine (1932)

I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.
– Tallulah Bankhead

I've tried several varieties of sex. The conventional position makes me claustrophobic. And the others give me either stiff neck or lockjaw.
– Tallulah Bankhead

If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.
– Tallulah Bankhead

It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work – the night watchman.
– Tallulah Bankhead

It's the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.
– Tallulah Bankhead

My father warned me about men and booze, but he never said anything about women and cocaine.
– Tallulah Bankhead

No man worth his salt, no man of spirit and spine, no man for whom I could have any respect, could rejoice in the identification of Tallulah's husband. It's tough enough to be bogged down in a legend. It would be even tougher to marry one.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have time.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.
– Tallulah Bankhead

The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.
– Tallulah Bankhead

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I'd make all the same mistakes – only sooner.
– Tallulah Bankhead

There is less in this than meets the eye.
– Tallulah Bankhead

They made me sound as if I'd been castrated.
– Tallulah Bankhead

They used to photograph Shirley Temple through gauze. They should photograph me through linoleum.
– Tallulah Bankhead

Working on television is like being shot out of a cannon. They cram you all up with rehearsals, then someone lights a fuse and – BANG – there you are in someone's living room.
– Tallulah Bankhead

More on    P.T. [Phineas Taylor] Barnum (1810–1891), U.S. showman

Every crowd has a silver lining.
– P.T. Barnum

Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.
– P.T. Barnum

Whatever you do, do it with all your might. Work at it, early and late, in season and out of season, not leaving a stone unturned, and never deferring for a single hour that which can be done just as well as now.
– P.T. Barnum

The great common people of this country are slaves, the monopoly is their master. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags... We will stand by our homes and stay by our firesides by force if necessary. The people are at bay, let the bloodhounds of money who have dogged us thus far beware.
– Elizabeth Barr, Kansas agitator (1890)

Always be a little kinder than necessary.
– James M. Barrie

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
– Dave Barry

American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it.
– Dave Barry

Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down.
– Dave Barry

Bill Gates is a very rich man today .. and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.
– Dave Barry

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.
– Dave Barry

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business.
– Dave Barry

Cigarette sales would drop to zero overnight if the warning said "Cigarettes contain fat."
– Dave Barry

"Escargot" is French for "fat crawling bag of phlegm."
– Dave Barry

Experts agree that the best type of computer for your individual needs is one that comes on the market about two days after you actually purchase some other computer.
– Dave Barry

Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.
– Dave Barry

For me, the worst part of playing golf, by far, has always been hitting the ball.
– Dave Barry

Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.
– Dave Barry

Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. (This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print).
– Dave Barry

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.
– Dave Barry

I believe that we parents must encourage our children to become educated, so they can get into a good college that we cannot afford.
– Dave Barry

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.
– Dave Barry

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.
– Dave Barry

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.
– Dave Barry

If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I would give the same answer that most peope would: nuclear war, global warming and Windows.
– Dave Barry

If you want to take long walks, take long walks. If you want to hit things with a stick, hit things with a stick. But there's no excuse for combining the two and putting the results on TV. Golf is not so much a sport as insult to lawns.
– Dave Barry

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.
– Dave Barry

It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate.
– Dave Barry

I've gained a few pounds around the middle. The only lower-body garmets I own that still fit me comfortably are towels.
– Dave Barry

Karate is a form of marital arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.
– Dave Barry

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.
– Dave Barry

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
– Dave Barry

Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.
– Dave Barry

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in Janurary, only more intelligent.
– Dave Barry

Talking about golf is always boring. (Playing golf can be interesting, but not the part where you try to hit the little ball; only the part where you drive the cart).
– Dave Barry

Technically, Windows is an "operating system," which means that it supplies your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, stop operating.
– Dave Barry

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.
– Dave Barry

The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.
– Dave Barry

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.
– Dave Barry

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
– Dave Barry

To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.
– Dave Barry

We journalists ... are also extremely impressed with scientists, and we will, frankly, print just about any wacky thing they tell us, especially if it involves outer space.
– Dave Barry

We operate under a jury system in this country, and as much as we complain about it, we have to admit that we know of no better system, except possibly flipping a coin.
– Dave Barry

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.
– Dave Barry

What Women Want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held.
What Men Want: Tickets for the world series.
– Dave Barry

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.
– Dave Barry

You can say any fool thing to a dog, and the dog will give you this look that says, `My God, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!'
– Dave Barry

Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro.
– Dave Barry

Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him.
– John Barrymore's dying words

The absurd man is he who never changes.
– Auguste Barthelemy

I'm not smart, but I like to observe. Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.
– Bernard Baruch

The sinews of war are five – men, money, materials, maintenance (food) and morale.
– Bernard Baruch

To me old age is always fifteen years older than I am.
– Bernard Baruch, quoted in Newsweek on his 85th birthday

More on    Basho [Matsuo Kinsaku] (1644–1694), Japanese poet, first great poet of haiku

Bush clover in blossom waves
Without spilling
A drop of dew.
– Basho

Spring departs.
Birds cry
Fishes' eyes are filled with tears.
– Basho

Summer grasses
all that remain
of soldiers' dreams.
– Basho

The wind from Mt. Fuji
I put it on the fan.
Here, the souvenir from Edo.
– Basho

The man who never makes a mistake always takes orders from one who does. No man or woman who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way is without enemies.
– Daisy Bates

An Angel struck in fury like an eagle's claw
He seized the miscreant's forelock in a solid hand,
And shaking him he said, "You shall obey the law!
(Because I am your Angel, hear me?) I command!
 
"Know now that you must learn to love – with no grimace –
The poor, the evil ones, the gnarled, those dazed of eye,
In order to prepare for Jesus, when he'll pass,
A fine, triumphal carpet of your charity.
 
"For such is Love! Before your heart and feelings cloy,
Kindle, to God's great glory, once again your joy;
That is the true, the lasting ecstasy to choose!"
 
My word! The Angel chastened him he loved, his fist,
That of a giant, torturing the poor accursed;
But always the condemned one answered: "I refuse!"
– Charles Baudelaire, "The Rebel"

Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry.
– Charles Baudelaire

Conceive me as a dream of stone:
my breast, where mortals come to grief,
is made to prompt all poets' love,
mute and noble as matter itself.
 
With snow for flesh, with ice for heart,
I sit on high, an unguessed sphinx
begrudging acts that alter forms;
I never laugh, I never weep.
 
In studious awe the poets brood
before my monumental pose
aped from the proudest pedestal,
and to bind these docile lovers fast
I freeze the world in a perfect mirror:
 
The timeless light of my wide eyes.
– Charles Baudelaire, "Beauty"

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
– Charles Baudelaire

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
– Charles Baudelaire

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
– Charles Baudelaire

Tonight the moon dreams in a deeper languidness,
And, like a beauty on her cushions, lies at rest;
While drifting off to sleep, a tentative caress
Seeks, with a gentle hand, the contour of her breast;
 
As on a crest above her silken avalanche,
Dying, she yields herself to an unending swoon
And sees a pallid vision everywhere she'd glance,
In the azure sky where blossoms have been strewn.
 
When sometimes, in her weariness, upon our sphere
She might permit herself to shed a furtive tear,
A poet of great piety, a foe of sleep,
 
Catches in the hollow of his hand that tear,
An opal fragment, iridescent as a star;
Within his heart, far from the sun, it's buried deep.
– Charles Baudelaire, "Sorrows of the Moon"

I don't see why Christians should censor themselves out of any forum in which our perspectives can be heard. I disagree with the theology of many groups that I address; Jews, for example, who do not accept Jesus, or atheists.
– Gary Bauer, defending his participation at the "Family Federation for World Peace" conference sponsored by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, where Bauer took between $80,000 and $160,000 plus expences from Moon's church to speak at the conference

I think Robertson stepped down because the position has already been filled ... [Bush] is that leader right now.
– Gary Bauer, crediting George W. Bush with Pat Robertson's decision to resign as president of the Christian Coalition, The Washington Post (December 23, 2001)

We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There's a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody's values will prevail. And the winner gets the right to teach our children what to believe.
– Gary Bauer

From the depths I call out to you,
With my tongue dried up, and
My butterflies scorched over your mouth.
Is this snow from the coldness of your nights
– 'Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayyati (1926–1999), Iraqi poet

The Ship of Fate moved on,
Sinbad of the Wind never came,
How was it you came when our wells
Are poisoned, where can you have come from?
Did we meet before I came to be?
– 'Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayyati (1926–1999), Iraqi poet, "The Impossible"

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
– Charles Beard (1874–1948), American historian

It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
– Caron de Beaumarchais

What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtile flame
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.
– Francis Beaumont, letter to Ben Jonson

One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.
– Simone De Beauvoir

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation and compassion.
– Simone De Beauvoir

More on    Beck Hansen [born Bek David Campbell] (1970– ), U.S. musician and songwriter

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.
– Beck

Had there been no difficulties and no thorns in the way, then man would have been in his primitive state and no progress made in civilization and mental culture.
– Beck

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.
– Beck

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.
– Beck

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
– Beck

Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.
– Beck

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
– Beck

Whole lotta magic goin' on backstage
Everybody wants to get backstage
Backstage must be all of the rage
But backstage is just like turnin' another page
In a book you just want to throw out the window
– Beck, "Take me backstage," song created onstage on February 18, 2000

More on    Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887), US abolitionist & clergyman

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
– Henry Ward Beecher

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
– Henry Ward Beecher

A man's true state of power and riches is to be in himself.
– Henry Ward Beecher

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
– Henry Ward Beecher

A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.
– Henry Ward Beecher

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Clothes and manners do not make the man; but when he is made, they greatly improve his appearance.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Doctrine is nothing but the skin of truth set up and stuffed.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
– Henry Ward Beecher, "Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit" (1887)

Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Expedients are for the hour; principles for the ages.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet juices.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
– Henry Ward Beecher, from "Life Thoughts"

God asks no man whether he will accept life. That is not the choice. You must take it. The only choice is how.
– Henry Ward Beecher

God pardons like a mother, who kisses the offense into everlasting forgiveness.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.
– Henry Ward Beecher

He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Heaven will be inherited by every man who has heaven in his soul.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you.
– Henry Ward Beecher

I don't like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.
– Henry Ward Beecher

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
– Henry Ward Beecher

If a man has come to that point where he is so content that he says; I do not want to know any more, or do any more or be any more, he is in a state of which he ought to be changed into a mummy.
– Henry Ward Beecher

If a man meets with injustice, it is not required that he shall not be roused to meet it; but if he is angry after he has had time to think upon it, that is sinful. The flame is not wrong, but the coals are.
– Henry Ward Beecher

In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
– Henry Ward Beecher

It is defeat that turns bone to flint; it is defeat that turns gristle to muscle; it is defeat that makes men invincible.
– Henry Ward Beecher

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.
– Henry Ward Beecher

It is not work that kills men; it is worry. Worry is rust upon the blade.
– Henry Ward Beecher

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Keep a fair-sized cemetery in your back yard, in which to bury the faults of your friends.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Living is death; dying is life. We are not what we appear to be. On this side of the grave we are exiles, on that citizens; on this side orphans, on that children.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Love is the river of life in the world.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Love, like a lamp, needs to be fed out of another's heart, or its flame burns low.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Men will let you abuse them if only you will make them laugh.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Never forget what a man says to you when he is angry.
– Henry Ward Beecher

No man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Now comes the mystery.
– Henry Ward Beecher, last words (March 8, 1887)

One's best success comes after their greatest disappointments.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Our days are a kaleidoscope. Every instant a change takes place in the contents. New harmonies, new contrasts, new combinations of every sort. Nothing ever happens twice alike. The most familiar people stand each moment in some new relation to each other, to their work, to surrounding objects. The most tranquil house, with the most serene inhabitants, living upon the utmost regularity of system, is yet exemplifying infinite diversities.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Riches are not an end of life, but an instrument of life.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Speak when you're angry and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.
– Henry Ward Beecher

That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.
– Henry Ward Beecher

The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its odor, and no man can tell what becomes of his influence.
– Henry Ward Beecher

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is a human owl, vigilant in darkness, and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.
– Henry Ward Beecher

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is: that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
– Henry Ward Beecher

The meanest, most contemptible kind of praise is that which first speaks well of a man, and then qualifies it with a "but".
– Henry Ward Beecher

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
– Henry Ward Beecher

The power of hiding ourselves from one another is mercifully given, for men are wild beasts, and would devour one another but for this protection.
– Henry Ward Beecher, "Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit" (1887)

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them – the senses, intelligent companions, and books.
– Henry Ward Beecher

There is not a heart but has it's moments of longing, yearning for something better, nobler, holier than it knows now.
– Henry Ward Beecher

There was never a person who did anything worth doing that did not receive more than he gave.
– Henry Ward Beecher

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.
– Henry Ward Beecher

To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Troubles are often the tools God fashions us for better things.
– Henry Ward Beecher

We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to raise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more.
– Henry Ward Beecher

We never know the love of our parents for us till we have become parents.
– Henry Ward Beecher

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.
– Henry Ward Beecher

We steal if we touch tomorrow. It is God's.
– Henry Ward Beecher

When young men are beginning life, the most important period, it is often said, is that in which their habits are formed. That is a very important period. But the period in which the ideas of the young are formed and adopted is more important still. For the ideal with which you go forward to measure things determines the nature, so far as you are concerned, of everything you meet.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
– Henry Ward Beecher

You cannot sift out the poor from the community. The poor are indispensable to the rich.
– Henry Ward Beecher

You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.
– Henry Ward Beecher

You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep burning, unquenchable.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Strength is a matter of the made-up mind.
– John Beecher

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
– Lyman Beecher

Tones that sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.
– Ludwig von Beethoven

America must confront threats to both her security and her freedom. And the more we strive to protect one, the more we endanger the other. We can have a perfectly secure country – but at great cost to our freedom of movement, openness and perhaps even to free expression. And we can have a perfectly free and open society – and be vulnerable to the kind of horrific attacks we still can't quite believe happened in New York and Washington – right before our eyes.
– Paul Begala (September 12, 2001)

More on    Brendan [Francis] Behan (1923–1964), Irish author, dramatist, and IRA activist

Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops.
– Brendan Behan

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.
– Brendan Behan

He was born an Englishman and remained one for years.
– Brendan Behan, Hostage (1958)

I am a drinker with writing problems.
– Brendan Behan

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
– Brendan Behan

I saw a notice which said, "Drink Canada Dry" and I've just started.
– Brendan Behan

If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
– Brendan Behan

It was not really the length of sentence that worried me – for I had always believed that if a fellow went into the I.R.A. at all he should be prepared to throw the handle after the hatchet, die dog or shite the licence – but that I'd sooner be with Charlie and Ginger and Browny in Borstal than with my own comrades and countrymen any place else. It seemed a bit disloyal to me, that I should prefer to be with boys from English cities than with my own countrymen and comrades from Ireland's hills and glens.
– Brendan Behan, Borstal Boy (1958)

Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?
– Brendan Behan, asked what was the message in one of his plays

Never throw stones at your mother,
You'll be sorry for it when she's dead,
Never throw stones at your mother,
Throw bricks at your father instead.
– Brendan Behan, The Hostage (1958)

New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment ... a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.
– Brendan Behan

Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn't affect the theater, but two Yom Kippurs would ruin it.
– Brendan Behan

Quarrel not, hearts too precious to break
so have another pint for Jaysus' sake.
– Brendan Behan

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.
– Brendan Behan

The bells of hell
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.
Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling
Or grave thy victory?
– Brendan Behan, The Hostage (1958)

The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted.
– Brendan Behan

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.
– Brendan Behan

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.
– Brendan Behan

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
– Brendan Behan

To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory.
– Brendan Behan

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.
– Brendan Behan

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
– Brendan Behan

More on    Aphra Behn (1640–1689), English poet, author and playwright, first English woman to earn a living by writing

All trembling in my arms Aminta lay,
Defending of the bliss I strove to take;
Raising my rapture by her kind delay,
Her force so charming was and weak.
The soft resistance did betray the grant,
While I pressed on the heaven of my desires;
Her rising breasts with nimbler motions pant;
Her dying eyes assume new fires.
Now to the height of languishment she grows,
And still her looks new charms put on;
– Now the last mystery of Love she knows,
We sigh, and kiss: I waked, and all was done.
– Aphra Behn, "The Dream," fromA Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684)

Come away; poverty's catching.
– Aphra Behn

... faith, Sir, we are here to Day, and gone to Morrow.
– Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance (1686)

For the future, therefore, I must call Oroonoko Caesar; since by that name only he was known in our Western World, and by that name he was received on shore at Parham-House, where he was destined a slave. But if the King himself (God bless him) had come ashore, there could not have been greater expectation by all the whole plantation, and those neighboring ones, than was on ours at that time; and he was received more like a governor than a slave: notwithstanding, as the custom was, they assigned him his portion of land, his house, and his business up in the plantation. But as it was more for form than any design to put him to his task, he endured no more of the slave but the name, and remained some days in the house, receiving all visits that were made him, without stirring towards that part of the plantation where the negroes were.
– Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1688)

I never vow'd nor sigh'd in vain
But both, thô false, were well receiv'd.
The Fair are pleas'd to give us pain,
And what they wish is soon believ'd.
– Aphra Behn, "A Thousand Martyrs I Have Made"

If things on earth may be to heaven resembled,
It must be love, pure, constant, undissembled.
– Aphra Behn, "And Forgive Us Our Trespasses"

Love ceases to be a pleasure, when it ceases to be a secret.
– Aphra Behn

Love in fantastic triumph sat,
Whilst bleeding hearts around him flow'd,
For whom fresh pains he did create,
And strange tyrannic power he shew'd;
From thy bright eyes he took his fire,
Which round about in sport he hurl'd;
But 'twas from mine he took desire
Enough to undo the amorous world.
– Aphra Behn, "Love Arm'd"

Money speaks sense in a language all nations understand.
– Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)

No friend to Love like a long voyage at sea.
– Aphra Behn

Now judge you what a condition poor England is in: for my part I look upon it as a lost nation.
– Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter (1689)

Of all that writ, he was the wisest bard, who spoke this mighty truth – He that knew all that ever learning writ, Knew only this – that he knew nothing yet.
– Aphra Behn, The Emperor of the Moon (1687)

Oh, what a dear ravishing thing is the beginning of an Amour!
– Aphra Behn

One hour of right down love
Is worth an hour of dully living on.
– Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)

Pan, grant that I may never prove
So great a Slave to fall in love,
And to an Unknown Deity
Resign my happy Liberty:
I love to see the Amorous Swains
...Unto my Scorn their Hearts resign;
With Pride I see the Meads and Plains
...Throng'd all with Slaves, and they all mine:
Whilst I the whining Fools despise,
That pay their Homage to my Eyes.
– Aphra Behn, "Song"

Patience is a flatterer, sir and an ass, sir.
– Aphra Behn

Sure, I rose the wrong way today, I have had such damn'd ill luck every way.
– Aphra Behn, The Town (1677)

The nymph's resentments none but I
Can well imagine or condole:
But none can guess Lysander's soul,
But those who swayed his destiny.
His silent griefs swell up to storms,
And not one god his fury spares;
He cursed his birth, his fate, his stars
But more the shepherdess's charms,
Whose soft bewitching influence
Had damned him to the hell of impotence.
– Aphra Behn, "The Disappointment" (1680)

There is no sinner like a young saint.
– Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)

They once made mourning and fasting for the death of the English Governor, who had given his hand to come on such a day to 'em, and neither came nor sent; believing, when a man's word was past, nothing but death could or should prevent his keeping it: and when they saw he was not dead, they asked him what name they had for a man who promised a thing he did not do. The Governor told them, such a man was a liar, which was a word of infamy to a gentleman. Then one of 'em replied, "Governor, you are a liar, and guilty of that infamy."
– Aphra Behn, Oroonoko: Or, The Royal Slave (1688)

'Twas but a dream, yet by my heart I knew,
Which still was panting, part of it was true:
Oh how I strove the rest to have believed;
Ashamed and angry to be undeceived!
– Aphra Behn, "The Dream," fromA Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684)

Variety is the soul of pleasure.
– Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677)

We were monarchs once of all this spacious world, till you, [the English] an unknown people, landing here, distress'd and ruin'd by destructive storms, abusing all our charitable hospitality, unsurp'd our right, and made your friends your slaves.
– Aphra Behn, The Widow Ranter (1689)

WITS, like Physicians, never can agree,
When of a different Society;
And Rabel's Drops were never more cry'd down
By all the Learned Doctors of the Town,
Than a new Play, whose author is unknown.
– Aphra Behn, Prologue to The Rover (1677)

Yet if thou didst but know how little wit governs this mighty universe.
– Aphra Behn, Comedy of the Rounded Heads (1689)

The fragrance always stays in the hand that gives the rose.
– Hada Bejar

Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.
– Alexander Graham Bell, first telephone message

The great advantage [the telephone] possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus consists in the fact that it requires no skill to operate the instrument.
– Alexander Graham Bell

What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.
– Alexander Graham Bell

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
– Alexander Graham Bell

It appears that my worst fears have been realized: we have made progress in everything yet nothing has changed.
– Derrick Bell (1987)

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.
– Cardinal Bellarmine

To affirm that the Sun ... is at the centre of the universe and only rotates on its axis without going from east to west, is a very dangerous attitude and one calculated not only to arouse all Scholastic philosophers and theologians but also to injure our holy faith by contradicting the Scriptures.
– Cardinal Bellarmine

We, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, have heard that Mr. Galileo Galilei is being slandered or alleged to have abjured in our hands and also to have been given salutary penances for this. Having been sought about the truth of the matter, we say that the above-mentioned Galileo has not abjured in our hands, or in the hands of others here in Rome, or anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine of his; nor has he received any penances, salutary or otherwise. On the contrary, he has only been notified of the declaration made by the Holy Father and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, whose content is that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus (that the earth moves around the sun and the sun stands at the center of the world without moving from east to west) is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we have written and signed this with our own hands, on this 26th day of May 1616.
– Cardinal Bellarmine, in a Certificate regarding the Roman Catholic Church's punishment of Galileo for holding the position that the Earth orbits the Sun

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting.
– Robert Benchley, Benchley – or Else!

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him.
– Robert Benchley

Anything I've ever done that ultimately was worthwhile ... initially scared me to death.
– Betty Bender

– Fabulous shoes of Gettysburg, dead man's shoes,
Did anyone ever wear you, when it was done,
When the men were gone, when the farms were spoiled with the bones,
What became of your nails and leather? The swords went home,
The swords went into museums and neat glass cases,
The swords look well there. They are clean from the war.
You wouldn't put old shoes in a neat glass case,
Still stuck with the mud of marching.
                             And yet, a man
With a taste for such straws and fables, blown by the wind,
Might hide a pair in a labelled case sometime
Just to see how the leather looked, set down by the swords....
– Stephen Vincent Benet, "John Brown's Body"

The buttercup meadows
are very yellow
A child comes there
To fill her hands
The gold she gathers
Is soft and precious
As sweet as new butter
Fresh from the churn

She fills her frock
With the yellow flowers,
The butter she gathers
Is smooth as gold,
Little bright cups
Of new-churned sunshine
For a well behaved
Hoop skirted doll

Her frock's full
And her hands are mothy
With yellow pollen
But she keeps on.
Down by the fence
They are even thicker.
She runs, bowed down
with butter-cup gold.

She sees a rider.
His face is grey
With a different dust
He talks loud.
He rattles like tinware
He has a long sword
To kill little girls.

He shouts at her now,
But she doesn't answer.
"Where is the town?" But she will not hear.
There are other riders
Jangling behind him.
"We won't hurt you youngster!" But they have swords.

The buttercup fall
Like Spilt butter
She runs away.
She runs to her house.
She hides her face
In her mother's apron
And tried to tell her
How dreadful it was.
– Stephen Vincent Benet, "John Brown's Body"

Liberty is being free from the things we don't like in order to be slaves of the things we do like.
– Ernest Benn

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
– Ernest Benn

Your life is the sum result of all the choices you make, both consciously and unconsciously. If you can control the process of choosing, you can take control of all aspects of your life. You can find the freedom that comes from being in charge of yourself.
– Robert F. Bennett

Casual drug users should be shot ... Dealers should be beheaded. I have no moral problem with beheadings.
– William Bennett, Drug Czar for President George H.W. Bush

Conservatives seemed to be flying in all directions after the demise of Communism. I've just discovered what will hold the Republican Party together. I've seen the party coalesce in the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours in opposition to the Clinton proposals.
– William Bennett, Drug Czar for President George H.W. Bush

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born – that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
– Warren G. Bennis

Failing organizations are usually over-managed and under-led.
– Warren G.Bennis

The rewards in business go to the man who does something with an idea.
– William Benton

Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
– Henri Bergson

A committee is a group that keeps the minutes and loses hours.
– Milton Berle

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
– Milton Berle

I'd rather be a could-be if I cannot be an are; because a could-be is a maybe who is reaching for a star. I'd rather be a has-been than a might-have-been, by far; for a might have-been has never been, but a has was once an are.
– Milton Berle

Laughter is an instant vacation.
– Milton Berle

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.
– Milton Berle

Life is 10 percent what you make it, and 90 percent how you take it.
– Irving Berlin

Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
– Ingrid Bergman

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
– Hector Berlioz

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not the opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed the same kind.
– George Bernard

More on    Yogi Berra [Lawrence Peter Berra] (1925– ), baseball catcher, coach, and manager

A nickel isn't worth a dime today.
–Yogi Berra

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
–Yogi Berra

Anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked.
–Yogi Berra

Baseball is 90 percent mental and the other half is physical.
– Yogi Berra

Closed.
– Yogi Berra, when asked as a child how he liked school

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.
– Yogi Berra (on Frenchmen in American politics)

I didn't really say everything I said.
– Yogi Berra

I made a wrong mistake.
– Yogi Berra

I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.
– Yogi Berra, in 1947, when the people of his hometown, St. Louis, celebrated with him before a Yankees-Browns game

If the fans don't come out to the ball park, you can't stop them.
– Yogi Berra

If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be.
– Yogi Berra

If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.
– Yogi Berra

It ain't over till it's over.
– Yogi Berra

It gets late out there early.
– Yogi Berra, referring to the bad sun conditions in left field at the stadium.

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
– Yogi Berra

Ninety percent of all mental errors are in your head.
– Yogi Berra, Sports Illustrated

No one goes there nowadays, it's too crowded.
– Yogi Berra

That's his style of hitting. If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.
– Yogi Berra

The future ain't what it used to be.
– Yogi Berra

This is like deja vu all over again.
– Yogi Berra

We have deep depth.
– Yogi Berra

We made too many wrong mistakes.
– Yogi Berra

When asked what would he do if he found $1 million, Yogi responded, "If the guy was poor, I'd give it back."
– Yogi Berra

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
– Yogi Berra

Yogi ordered a pizza. The waitress asked "How many pieces do you want your pie cut?"
Yogi responded, "Four. I don't think I could eat eight."
– Yogi Berra

You can observe a lot by just watching.
– Yogi Berra

You can't think and hit the ball at the same time.
– Yogi Berra

You have to give one hundred percent in the first half of the game. If that isn't enough, in the second half, you have to give what is left.
– Yogi Berra

An injury engraves itself on metal; a benefit is written on the waves.
– Jean Bertaut

For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.
– Mary MacLeod Bethune

I never stop to plan. I take things step by step.
– Mary MacLeod Bethune

Knowledge is the prime need of the hour.
– Mary MacLeod Bethune (1955)

The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood.
– Mary MacLeod Bethune

We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.
– Mary MacLeod Bethune (1955)

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One ...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds.
– Bhagavad Gita (c. 400 BC) Hindu religious book (quoted by Robert Openheimer after the first test of an atomic bomb)

The life within me seems to swim and faint;
Nothing do I foresee save woe and wail!
It is not good, O Keshav! nought of good
Can spring from mutual slaughter! Lo, I hate
Triumph and domination, wealth and ease,
Thus sadly won! Aho! what victory
Can bring delight, Govinda! what rich spoils
Could profit; what rule recompense; what span
Of life itself seem sweet, bought with such blood?
Seeing that these stand here, ready to die,
For whose sake life was fair, and pleasure pleased ...
– Bhagavad Gita (c. 400 BC) Hindu religious book, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.
– Bible

Abasement: n. A decent and customary mental attitude in the presence of wealth of power. Peculiarly appropriate in an employee when addressing an employer.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Abatis: n. Rubbish in front of a fort, to prevent the rubbish outside from molesting the rubbish inside.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Abdication: n. An act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high temperature of the throne.
Poor Isabella's Dead, whose abdication
Set all tongues wagging in the Spanish nation.
For that performance 'twere unfair to scold her:
She wisely left a throne too hot to hold her.
To History she'll be no royal riddle –
Merely a plain parched pea that jumped the griddle.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Abdomen: n. The temple of the god Stomach, in whose worship, with sacrificial rights, all true men engage. From women this ancient faith commands but a stammering assent. They sometimes minister at the altar in a half-hearted and ineffective way, but true reverence for the one deity that men really adore they know not. If woman had a free hand in the world's marketing the race would become graminivorous.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Ability: n. The natural equipment to accomplish some small part of the meaner ambitions distinguishing able men from dead ones. In the last analysis ability is commonly found to consist mainly in a high degree of solemnity.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Aboriginies: n. Persons of little worth found cumbering the soil of a newly discovered country. They soon cease to cumber; they fertilize.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Abnormal: adj. Not conforming to standard. In matters of thought and conduct, to be independent is to be abnormal, to be abnormal is to be detested. Wherefore the lexicographer adviseth a striving toward the straiter [sic] resemblance of the Average Man.
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911

Abridge: v.t. To shorten.
  "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to abridge their king, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."
        Oliver Cromwell
– Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, 1911