Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The E.U. is an organization that was created after the Second World War for calming down the nationalism of member states, and it did so very successfully.
For they had learned that true safety was to be found in long previous training, and not in eloquent exhortations uttered when they were going into action.
Often, the pretexts for starting a war are not real shortages of land, food or fuel, but rather perceptions - like fear, honor and perceived self-interest.
There is an eternal dispute between those who imagine the world to suit their policy, and those who correct their policy to suit the realities of the world.
Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions
I cannot believe that a republic could subsist if the influence of the lawyers in public business did not increase in proportion to the power of the people.
There are one or two very good women military historians who use imagination, great study and research; they can put themselves in the boots of the soldier.
The way in which we think of ourselves has everything to do with how our world sees us and how we can see ourselves successfully acknowledged by that world.
I ask myself, have nations ever declined from a loss of moral sense rather than from physical reasons or the pressure of barbarians? I think that they have.
For belligerent purposes, the 14th century, like the 20th, commanded a technology more sophisticated than the mental and moral capacity that guided its use.
If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident.
If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.
Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.
I wish we could go back to the time when the private lives of our public figures were relevant only if they directly affected their public responsibilities.
So long as mankind shall continue to lavish more praise upon its destroyers than upon its benefactors war shall remain the chief pursuit of ambitious minds.
Politically, Obama's amazing streak of self-destructing opponents who have lain beneath his feet during his unlikely political career appears to be holding.
No serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist... Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.
The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.
The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.
It is a law of nature that fainthearted men should be the fruit of luxurious countries, for we never find that the same soil produces delicacies and heroes.
The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.
It's definitely going to be harder than it sounds to acquire millions of users in the U.S. It's going to be a lot of work, and you can't make light of that.
Entrepreneurs are simply those who understand that there is little difference between obstacle and opportunity and are able to turn both to their advantage.
By the delusions of seeming good the people are often misled to desire their own ruin; and they are frequently influenced by great hopes and brave promises.
Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility.
I understand politically that uprisings take place as a combination of spontaneity and preparation, not that preparation is more important than spontaneity.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
At best, the natural good-nature is edged with complaint or has changed into sullenness and gloom. And now and then it blazes forth in veiled but hot anger.
In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.
No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.
Organized force alone enables the quiet and the weak to go about their business and to sleep securely in their beds, safe from the violent without or within.
For most Americans the Constitution had become a hazy document, cited like the Bible on ceremonial occasions but forgotten in the daily transactions of life.
A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
The Israelis are very smart about politics and strategy, but there are a few exceptions. One is Lebanon, the other is Gaza, where they were completely inept.
I'm a pro forma Bernie Sanders donor. In years past, when Michael Harrington was still alive, I was a very active member of Democratic Socialists of America.
In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
The caliber of play suffered and attendance declined year by year. Interest in college football was exploding, and there was this new game called basketball.
Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.
Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.
Yet again, unscientific claims were being circulated broadly, but the scientists' refutation of them was published where only fellow scientists would see it.
Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become rampant.
Public scandals are America's favorite parlor sport. Learning about the flaws and misdeeds of the rich and famous seems to satisfy our egalitarian yearnings.
William Henry Harrison, who died of pneumonia in April of 1841, after only one month in office, was the first Chief Executive to hide his physical frailties.
The Bay of Pigs was an operation the United States endorsed. That was a preventive operation. We were afraid that Castro was going to subvert the hemisphere.
I would not minimize the digital divide, which separates the computerized world from the rest, nor would I underestimate the importance of traditional books.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.