Quotes by American Authors - Page 159

Habit is habit and not to be thrown out of the window by any man but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
Mark Twain
Few people have ever seriously wished to be exclusively rational. The good life which most desire is a life warmed by passions and touched with that ceremonial grace which is impossible without some affectionate loyalty to traditional forms and ceremonies.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided. No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty.
Ulysses S. Grant
Pillars are fallen at thy feet Fanes quiver in the air A prostrate city is thy seat And thou alone art there.
Lydia M. Child
Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.
Erich Fromm
You can stand tall without standing on someone. You can be a victor without having victims.
Harriet Woods
Ambition if it feeds at all does so on the ambition of others.
Susan Sontag
The glory that was Greece.
Edgar Allan Poe
The biggest dog has been a pup.
Joaquin Miller
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
T.S Eliot
If my theory of relativity is proven successful Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
Albert Einstein
When you're as great as I am it's hard to be humble.
Muhammad Ali
The banalities of a great man pass for wit.
Alexander Chase
All great men come out of the middle classes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some are born great some achieve greatness and some hire public relations officers.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of things that are to be.
Adlai Stevenson
Each honest calling each walk of life has its own elite its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant
Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.
Lewis Mumford
Calmness is always Godlike.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The heights by men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight But they while their companions slept Were toiling upward in the night.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
All the great blessings of my life are present in my thoughts today.
Phoebe Cary
A great man stands on God. A small man stands on a great man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Few great men could pass Personnel.
Paul Goodman
Every calling is great when greatly pursued.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov
A great part of courage is the courage of having done the thing before.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.
George Washington
It seems to me that government is like a pump and what it pumps up is just what we are a fair sample of the intellect the ethics and the morals of the people no better no worse.
Adlai Stevenson
Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection - they have many friends and few enemies.
Wendell Phillips
Democracy is direct self-government over all the people for all the people by all the people.
Theodore Parker
A house divided against itself cannot stand - I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.
Abraham Lincoln
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
Thomas Jefferson
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
Thomas Jefferson
Though the people support the government the government should not support the people.
Grover Cleveland
Government is a trust and the officers of the government are trustees and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.
Henry Clay
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient.
Louis Brandeis
The supply of government exceeds the demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
The U.S. Senate - an old scow which doesn't move very fast but never sinks.
Everett Dirksen
No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.
J. K. Galbraith
The people's right to change what does not work is one of the greatest principles of our system of government.
Richard Nixon
No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
Abraham Lincoln
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.
Abraham Lincoln
When we got into office the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
John F Kennedy
Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
George Burns
The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbour.
Hubert Humphrey
Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.
Bernard Berenson
All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days nor in the life of this administration nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.
John F Kennedy
The government is becoming the family of last resort.
Jerry Brown
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another but above all try something.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The average man that I encounter all over the country regards government as a sort of great milk cow with its head in the clouds eating air and growing a full teat for everybody on earth.
Clarence C. Manion
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger
There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress and that is continuously incessantly and without interruption. If it's really going to work the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.
Lyndon B. Johnson
That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves.
Thomas Jefferson
The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.
Abraham Lincoln
The worst thing in this world next to anarchy is government.
Henry Ward Beecher
Government is not reason it is not eloquence - it is force.
George Washington
Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
The state it cannot too often be repeated does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody.
Henry George
A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom whilst a republic is a raft which will never sink but then your feet are always in water.
Fisher Ames
Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished all the objects for which government ought to be established are answered.
Thomas Jefferson