Quotes by American Authors - Page 196

It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have 'something worth fighting for' they do not feel like fighting.
Eric Hoffer
What is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause but what they say about their opponents.
Robert F. Kennedy
Genuine blasphemy genuine in spirit and not purely verbal is the product of partial belief and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.
T.S Eliot
A conservative believes nothing should be done for the first time.
Lynwood L. Giacomini
Debate is masculine conversation is feminine.
Louisa May Alcott
Listening is a magnetic and strange thing a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward and we want to sit in their radius. When we are listened to it creates us makes us unfold and expand.
Karl Menninger
While the right to talk may be the beginning of freedom the necessity of listening is what makes the right important.
Walter Lippmann
Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.
Margaret Halsey
Too much agreement kills a chat.
Eldridge Cleaver
A man who listens because he has nothing to say can hardly be a source of inspiration. The only listening that counts is that of the talker who alternately absorbs and expresses ideas.
Agnes Repplier
People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking though even that is beyond most of our powers it means taking a vigorous human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer.
Alice Duer Miller
The really important things are said over cocktails and are never done.
Peter F Drucker
As I got warmed up and felt perfectly at home in talk I heard myself boasting lying exaggerating. Oh not deliberately far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.
Bernard Berenson
The time to stop talking is when the other person nods his head affirmatively but says nothing.
Henry S. Haskins
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we have been ignorant of their value.
Buckminster Fuller
Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.
Robert Frost
Great talkers are trying to fill the gap between themselves and others but only widen it.
Mason Cooley
Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.
Ordway Tead
If a cause be good the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defense of it by its friends.
Walter Colton
No great advance has ever been made in science politics or religion without controversy.
Lyman Beecher
In questions of power let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.
Thomas Jefferson
Constitutions should consist only of general provisions the reason is that they must necessarily be permanent and that they cannot calculate for the possible change of things.
Alexander Hamilton
The only man who can change his mind is the man who's got one.
Edward Noyes Westcott
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.
Mark Twain
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
Thorstein Veblen
What is conservatism? Is it not adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?
Abraham Lincoln
We are reformers in spring and summer in autumn and winter we stand by the old reformers in the morning conservers at night. Reform is affirmative conservatism negative conservatism goes for comfort reform for truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A statesman who is enamored of existing evils as distin-quished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.
Ambrose Bierce
Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.
H.L. Mencken
Some statesmen go to Congress and some go to jail. It is the same thing after all.
Eugene Field
Every man in it is a great man an orator a critic a statesman and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory his criticism and his political abilities.
John Adams
Be courteous to all but intimate with few and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
George Washington
Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.
Logan Pearsall Smith
When I come into a game in the bottom of the ninth bases loaded no one out and a one-run lead ... it takes people off my mind.
Tug McGraw
Attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it.
Tyron Edwards
Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.
Lady Bird Johnson
A full mind is an empty baseball bat.
Branch Rickey
Do whatever you do intensely.
Robert Henri
I've learned ruthless concentration. I can write under any circumstances ... street noises loud talk music you name it.
Sylvia Porter
Choice of attention to pay attention to this and ignore that is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.
W.H. Auden
The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands nor in the perfection of their bodies but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight with the blow to live an eternity in an hour.
Elbert Hubbard
If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus you must not be thinking about yourself and equally you must not be thinking about your neighbor: you must be living in your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
While the work or play is on ... don't constantly feel you ought to be doing the other.
Franklin P. Adams
Many people who wonder why they don't amount to more than they do have good stuff in them and are energetic persevering and have ample opportunities. It is all a case of trimming the useless branches and throwing the whole force of power into the development of something that counts.
Walter J. Johnston
Give me a man who says this one thing I do and not these fifty things I dabble in.
Dwight L. Moody
The first law of success ... is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point and to go directly to that point looking neither to the right nor the left.
William Matthews
Successful minds work like a gimlet to a single point.
Christian Bovee
Concentrate your energies your thoughts and your capital. ... The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
Andrew Carnegie
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused dedicated disciplined.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
The secret of concentration is the secret of self-discovery. You reach inside yourself to discover your personal resources and what it takes to match them to the challenge.
Arnold Palmer
The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration.
Kurt Vonnegut
If you don't concentrate you'll end up on your rear.
Tai Babilonia
Compromise makes a good umbrella but a poor roof it is a temporary expedient often wise in party politics almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
Compliments and flattery oftenest excite my contempt by the pretension they imply for who is he that assumes to flatter me? To compliment often implies an assumption of superiority in the complimenter. It is in fact a subtle detraction.
Henry David Thoreau
One of the things my life has taught me is how important it is to try to say "I love you" in ways that can be preserved looked at and read when you are alone or when there is adversity or when circumstances bring separation. In any case . . . saying "I love you" is one of the "secrets" of the happy marriage that Ronnie and I have shared. Ronnie's letters move me to this day. They are his gift to me across the years and throughout the decades of love.
Nancy Reagan
A woman has to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
The bravest thing that men do is love women.
Mort Sahl
No woman ever falls in love with a man unless she has a better opinion of him than he deserves.
Edgar Watson Howe
Americans who make more of marrying for love than any other people also break up more of their marriages but the figure reflects not so much the failure of love as the determination of people not to live without it.
Morton Hunt