Quotes by American Authors - Page 189

If you think too long you think wrong.
Jim Kaat
The percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long-drawn-out vacillations and the effect of decisiveness itself "makes things go" and creates confidence.
Anne O'Hare McCormick
Facts are stubborn things but statistics are more pliable.
Laurence J. Peter
False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.
Horace Mann
Man is a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
Alexander Hamilton
Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.
Joseph Wood Krutch
Say you were standing with one foot in the oven and one foot in an ice bucket. According to the percentage people you would be perfectly comfortable.
Bobby Bragan
Many persons of high intelligence have notoriously poor judgement.
Sydney J. Harris
In the three years I played ball we won six lost seventeen and tied two. Some statistician ... calculated that we won 75 percent of the games we didn't lose.
Roger M. Blough
The will to be totally rational is the will to be made out of glass and steel: and to use others as if they were glass and steel.
Marge Piercy
How far would Moses have gone if he had taken a poll in Egypt?
Harry S. Truman
When faith is supported by facts or by logic it ceases to be faith.
Edith Hamilton
A decision is an action you must take when you have information so incomplete that the answer does not suggest itself.
Arthur Radford
Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation and without being allowed the preliminary trials the failures and botches that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.
Lewis Mumford
The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction book didn't come with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
There is no data on the future.
Laurel Cutler
Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.
Anna Deavere Smith
The Pilgrims didn't have any experience when they landed here. Hell if experience was that important we'd never have anybody walking on the moon.
Doug Rader
You must not change one thing one pebble one grain of sand until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.
Ursula K. LeGuin
One faces the future with one's past.
Pearl S. Buck
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge fitter to bruise than to polish.
Anne Bradstreet
You wouldn't want to be caught wearing cheap perfume would you? Then why do you want to wear cheap perfume on your conduct?
Margaret Culkin Banning
I get a little angry about this highhanded scrapping of the look of things. What else have we to go by? How else can the average person form an opinion of a girl's sense of values or even of her chastity except by the looks of her conduct?
Margaret Culkin Banning
History is a stern judge.
Svetlana Alliluyeva
We lose the fear of making decisions great and small as we realize that should our choice prove wrong we can if we will learn from the experience.
Bill W.
People "died" all the time. ... Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes the fire had gone out ... you always knew when you made a decision against life. ... The door clicked and you were safe inside- safe and dead.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor both to yourself and to your country let men label you as they may.
Mark Twain
The best we can do is size up the chances calculate the risks involved estimate our ability to deal with them and then make our plans with confidence.
Henry Ford
I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst take the risk.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution ... is as far as possible to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices simply to do what you find yourself doing to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible to allow things to settle themselves as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.
Christopher Morley
Once the "what" is decided the "how" always follows. We must not make the "how" an excuse for not facing and accepting the "what."
Pearl S. Buck
We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
Thomas Merton
A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.
Dorothea Brande
One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.
Gertrude Stein
Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Charles Horton Cooley
No matter how lovesick a woman is she shouldn't take the first pill that comes along.
Dr. Joyce Brothers
Look for your choices pick the best one then go with it.
Pat Riley
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
Many of life's circumstances are created by three basic choices: the disciplines you choose to keep the people you chose to be with and the laws you choose to obey.
Charles Millhuff
Choices are the hinges of destiny.
Edwin Markham
Decisions determine destiny.
Frederick Speakman
As a man thinketh so is he and as a man chooseth so is he.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In forty hours I shall be in battle with little information and on the spur of the moment will have to make the most momentous decisions. But I believe that one's spirit enlarges with responsibility and that with God's help I shall make them and make them right.
General George S. Patton
Somehow we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind.
Timothy Fuller
Wherever you see a successful business someone once made a courageous decision.
Peter Drucker
Full maturity ... is achieved by realizing that you have choices to make.
Angela Barron McBride
You are the one who must choose your place.
James Lane Allen
Choice of attention ... is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences whatever they may be.
W.H. Auden
Men and women everywhere must exercise deliberate selection to live wisely.
Robert Grant
You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.
Abraham Lincoln
Which I wish to remark - And my language is plain - That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain The heathen Chinese is peculiar.
Bret Harte
What we need is a rebirth of satire of dissent of irreverence of an uncompromising insistence that phoniness is phony and platitudes are platitudinous.
Arthur Schlesinger
You k'n hide de fier but what you guine do wid de smoke?
Joel Chandler Harris
Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A national debt if it is not excessive will be to us a national blessing.
Alexander Hamilton
Wilt thou seal up the avenues of ill? Pay every debt as if God wrote the bill!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A church debt is the devil's salary.
Henry Ward Beecher
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death.
Walt Whitman
I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade.
Alan Seecer