Quotes by American Authors - Page 214

No way exists in the present to accurately determine the future effect of the least of our actions.
Gerald Jampolsky
I am not bound to win but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live up to what light I have.
Abraham Lincoln
That man is blest who does his best and leaves the rest do not worry.
Charles F. Deems
Doing what's right is no guarantee against misfortune.
William McFee
There is a time for all things a time to preach and a time to pray but those times have passed away there is a time to fight and that time has come!
General Peter Muhlenberg
You take people as far as they will go not as far as you would like them to go.
Jeannette Rankin
He will hew the line of right let the chips fall where they may.
Roscoe Conkling
The success of your presentation will be judged not by the knowledge you send but by what the listener receives.
Lily Walters
God helps them that helps themselves.
Benjamin Franklin
Trust in God and do something.
Mary Lyon
God doesn't make orange juice God makes oranges.
Jesse Jackson
The life of the spirit is centrally and essentially a life of action. Spirituality is something done not merely something believed or known or experienced.
Mary McDermott Shideler
Even if you're on the right track you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
Action is the only reality not only reality but morality as well.
Abbie Hoffman
There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and activity.
Donald G. Mitchell
Who can separate his faith from his actions or his belief from his occupations?
Kahlil Gibran
The only measure of what you believe is what you do. If you want to know what people believe don't read what they write don't ask them what they believe just observe what they do.
Ashley Montagu
Ideas are powerful things requiring not a studious contemplation but an action even if it is only an inner action.
Midge Dector
Having the world's best idea will do you no good unless you act on it. People who want milk shouldn't sit on a stool in the middle of a field in hopes that a cow will back up to them.
Curtis Grant
I learn by going where I have to go.
Theodore Roethke
Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.
Will Durant
When you appeal to force there's one thing you must never do - lose.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
You may be disappointed if you fail but you are doomed if you don't try.
Beverly Sills
Take time to deliberate but when the time for action arrives stop thinking and go in.
Andrew Jackson
There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.
John F Kennedy
Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits.
Thomas A. Edison
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further inertia and the irksomeness of action.
Learned Hand
The men who act stand nearer to the mass of man than the men who write and it is in their hands that new thought gets its translation into the crude language of deeds.
Woodrow Wilson
If you want a thing done go - if not send.
Benjamin Franklin
The frontiers are not east or west north or south but wherever a man fronts a fact.
Henry David Thoreau
When written in Chinese the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
John F Kennedy
To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.
George Santayana
Play out the game act well your part and if the gods have blundered we will not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I want to see you shoot the way you shout.
Theodore Roosevelt
Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down unless you're a king.
Josephine Hull
In Hollywood if you don't have happiness you send out for it.
Rex Reed
On stage I make love to twenty-five thousand people then I go home alone.
Janis Joplin
There are five stages to an actor's career: who is Herschel Bernardi? get me Herschel Bernardi get me a Herschel Bernardi type get me a young Herschel Bernardi and who is Herschel Bernardi?
Herschel Bernardi
I sweat. If anything comes easy to me I mistrust it.
Lilli Palmer
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.
T.S Eliot
Satire is what closes Saturday night.
George S. Kaufman
All the movies used to be 'colossal'. Now they're all 'frank'. I think I liked 'colossal' better.
Beryl Pfizer
If you give audiences a chance they'll do half your acting for you.
Katharine Hepburn
The whole motivation for any performer is 'Look at me Ma.'
Lenny Bruce
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
Orson Welles
From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.
Maxwell Anderson
Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder
A talent for drama is not a talent for writing but is an ability to articulate human relationships.
Gore Vidal
The best actors do not let the wheels show.
Henry Fonda
The real actor - like any real artistj- has a direct line to the collective heart.
Bette Davis
A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he is not alone in the way he feels about himself.
Jack Carson
True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.
Joseph Wood Krutch
When the audience knows you know better it's satire but when they think you can't do any better it's corn.
Spike Jones
With the collapse of vaudeville new talent has no place to stink.
George Burns
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
Thornton Wilder
An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.
Edwin Booth
Opening night is the night before the play is ready to open.
George Jean Nathan
You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.
William T. Wylie
Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.
Richard Lester