Quotes by American Authors - Page 148

Would that ... a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honour become identical.
Margaret Fuller
The louder he talked of his honour the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man has honour if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient unprofitable or dangerous to do so.
Walter Lippmann
It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Mark Twain
No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave.
Calvin Coolidge
Honor lies in honest toil.
Grover Cleveland
I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles the character of an "Honest Man."
George Washington
Anger cannot be dishonest.
George R. Bach
Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
Stephen Vincent Benét
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have the man looked honest enough.
Mark Twain
Everybody has a little bit of Watergate in him.
Billy Graham
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
George Santayana
The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise or due process of law or the Australian ballot.
John F Kennedy
One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.
John Steinbeck
An unlearned carpenter of my acquaintance once said in my hearing: 'There is very little difference between one man and another but what there is is very important.'
William James
Everything in space obeys the laws of physics. If you know these laws and obey them space will treat you kindly. And don't tell me man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go - and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.
Wernher von Braun
There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.
Paul Shepard
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
George Santayana
Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.
William Saroyan
The forgotten man. He is the clean quiet virtuous domestic citizen who pays his debts and his taxes and is never heard of outside his little circle. ... He works he votes generally he prays but his chief business in life is to pay.
William Graham Sumner
Man is a wanting animal - as soon as one of his needs is satisfied another appears in its place. This process is unending. It continues from birth to death.
Douglas McGregor
A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics chemistry or animal behaviour.
Joseph Wood Krutch
To be reborn is a constantly recurring human need.
Henry Hewes
A man is a kind of inverted thermometer the bulb uppermost and the column of self-valuation is all the time going up and down.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
William Faulkner
Most people in action are not worth very much and yet every human being is an unprecedented miracle.
James Baldwin
Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed the only animal that is never satisfied.
Henry George
Who is wise? He that learns from everyone. Who is powerful? He that governs his passions. Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Benjamin Franklin
I am a member of the rabble in good standing.
Westbrook Pegler
In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The race of man while sheep in credulity are wolves for conformity.
Carl Van Doren
Whosoever would be a man must be a non-conformist.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We fancy men are individuals so are pumpkins but every pumpkin in the field goes through every point of pumpkin history.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cultivated man wise to know and bold to perform is the end to which nature works.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is physically as well as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors and a misfit from the start.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man is at the bottom an animal midway a citizen and at the top divine. But the climate of this world is such that few ripen at the top.
Henry Ward Beecher
It is more comfortable to feel that we are a slight improvement on a monkey than such a fallin' off fr'm th' angels.
Finley Peter Dunne
There is properly no history only biography.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The history of things that didn't happen has never been written.
Henry Kissinger
History is more or less bunk.
Henry Ford
The historical sense involves a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.
T.S Eliot
History n: an account mostly false of events mostly unimportant which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves and soldiers mostly fools.
Ambrose Bierce
More history's made by secret handshakes than by battles bills and proclamations.
John Barth
When great changes occur in history when great principles are involved as a rule the majority are wrong.
Eugene V. Debs
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
Will Durant
With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation's wounds.
Abraham Lincoln
Any event once it has occurred can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian.
Lee Simonson
Biography is history seen through the prism of a person.
Louis Fischer
The history of the world is the record of a man in quest of his daily bread and butter.
Hendrik Willem van Loon
All history is but the lengthened shadow of a great man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.
Will Durant
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
History never looks like history when you are living through it. It always looks confusing and messy and it always feels uncomfortable.
John W. Gardner
When the historian Charles A. Beard was asked about the lessons from history he said there were four: 1. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 2. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power. 3. The mills of God grind slowly but they grind exceeding small. 4. When it is dark enough you can see the stars.
Charles A. Beard
The game of History is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.
Eric Hoffer
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
W.H. Auden
History is a vast early warning system.
Norman Cousins
I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.
Abraham Lincoln
This thing of being a hero about the main thing to it is to know when to die.
Will Rogers
Ezra Pound - idiosyncrasy on a monument.
Randall Jarrell