Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The repose of nations cannot be secure without arms, armies cannot be maintained without pay, nor can the pay be produced without taxes
The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.
No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.
Russians, in the knowledge of inexhaustible supplies of manpower, are accustomed to accepting gigantic fatalities with comparative calm.
To ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false, is essentially a meaningless question.
Most of these alternative arrangements, so-called, arise out of the ruins of marriages, not as an improvement of old fashioned marriage.
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.
Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. English civilization scorned and neglected him. French civilization embraced and cherished him.
So, I think that's the centerpiece of morality: Don't lie. But to do that, you have to go a step further and find out what the truth is.
I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
It [Egypt] has more wonders in it than any other country in the world and provides more works that defy description than any otherplace.
Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way
You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.
I have often heard that the outstanding man is he who thinks deeply about a problem, and the next is he who listens carefully to advice.
I'm one of those people who lies awake all night and worries about all the horrible things that can go wrong, whether a comma was wrong.
Max Askeli was a very courageous, principled man up to a point. He had left Italy before he was thrown in jail by [Francesco] Mussolini.
I say personally because I am 84 years old, and [Barack Obama's] is the first administration that has scared me in terms of my lifespan.
A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.
The reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order.
When every province of the world so teems with inhabitants that they can neither subsist where they are nor remove themselves elsewhere.
For as good habits of the people require good laws to support them, so laws, to be observed, need good habits on the part of the people.
In the long run, Europe will certainly move toward unification. But it will be a process of push and pull, and there will be resistance.
The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities.
There is a kitsch of death. For example, death transformed into sweet sleep: The 'good night, sweet prince' of the last scene of Hamlet.
In 1945, there were more people killed, more buildings destroyed, more high explosives set off, more fires burning than before or since.
Again, during a sacrifice, the augur Spurinna warned Caesar that the danger threatening him would not come later than the Ides of March.
concessions to adversaries only end in self reproach, and the more strictly they are avoided the greater will be the chance of security.
You see often it's not ideas, it's inertia, it's bureaucratism, it's all the other things that sometimes come in the way of a good idea.
Though the object of being a Great Power is to be able to fight a Great War, the only way of remaining a Great Power is not to fight one.
I think it's outrageous if a historian has a 'leading thought' because it means they will select their material according to their thesis
Progressive rhetoric has the effect of concealing social crisis and moral breakdown by presenting them as the birth pangs of a new order.
The proper reply to right wing religiosity is not to insist that politics and religion don't mix. This is the stock response of the left.
God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves?
Congress and state legislatures should not tell teachers how to teach, any more than they should tell surgeons how to perform operations.
As a consequence [of a closed economic circle], in 1912 there was not a single Irishman who sat on a single board of a major Boston bank.
Postmodernism entices us with the siren call of liberation and creativity, but it may be an invitation to intellectual and moral suicide.
But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power.
There might be a fact of the greatest significance reported by Thucydides which will only be recognized as such a hundred years from now.
For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
Although the world proved not yet ready for the brotherhood of baseball, that would be only a matter of time, baseball magnates believed.
Today, the notion of progress in a single line without goal or limit seems perhaps the most parochial notion of a very parochial century.
It took a world war, between 1914 and 1918, to draw the United States into a deeper and more sustained relationship with the wider world.
I've always loved reading diaries and memoirs and just getting a sense of different personalities and what made them tick as individuals.