Quotes by American Authors - Page 29

When white-collar people get jobs they sell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well. They sell by week or month their smiles and their kindly gestures and they must practise prompt repression of resentment and aggression.
C. Wright Mills
Beware all enterprises that require new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
If one defines the term 'dropout' to mean a person who has given up serious effort to meet his responsibilities then every business office government agency golf club and university faculty would yield its quota.
John W. Gardner
We work to become not to acquire.
Elbert Hubbard
Most people like hard work particularly when they're paying for it.
Franklin P. Jones
Unionism seldom if ever uses such powers as it has to ensure better work almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.
H.L. Mencken
They say hard work never hurt anybody but I figure why take the chance.
Ronald Reagan
The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.
Vidal Sassoon
One of the saddest things is the only thing a man can do for 8 hours a day day after day is work. You can't eat 8 hours a day nor drink for 8 hours a day nor make love for 8 hours.
William Faulkner
No task rightly done is truly private. It is part of the world's work.
Woodrow Wilson
If you want a work well done select a busy man: the other kind has no time.
Elbert Hubbard
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work 12 hours a day.
Robert Frost
Every utterance is an event and no two events are precisely alike. The extreme view therefore is that no word ever means the same thing twice.
Louis B. Saloman
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
May Sarton
A word has its use Or like a man it will soon have a grave.
Edward Arlington Robinson
The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.
James Reston
Change is legitimate and inevitable for our language is a mighty river picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there but growing ever wider and richer.
Robert MacNeil
Our language one of our most precious natural resources deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands streams and whooping cranes.
James Lipton
Even if language is a living evolving organism we don't have to embrace all the changes that occur during our lifetimes. If language is so alive it can get sick.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as the poetry of sentences.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
You have to fall in love with hanging around words.
John Ciardi
Plain English - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.
Jacques Barzun
Man's command of the language is most important. Next to kissing it's the most exciting form of communication.
Oren Arnold
Slang is language which takes off its coat spits on its hands - and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
Ezra Pound
Like stones words are laborious and unforgiving and the fitting of them together like the fitting of stones demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.
Edmund Morrison
In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain
The two words 'information' and 'communication' are often used interchangeably but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out communication is getting through.
Sydney J. Harris
I wonder what language truck drivers are using now that everyone is using theirs?
Beryl Pfizer
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain
Some words are like the old Roman galleys large-scaled and ponderous. They sit low in the water even when their cargo is light.
William Jovanovich
A language is a dialect with its own army and navy.
Max Weinreich
For of all sad words of tongue or pen The saddest are these: "It might have been!"
John Greenleaf Whittier
Man does not live by words alone despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
Adlai Stevenson
One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.
Theodore Roosevelt
Speaking words of endearment where words of comfort availed not.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Why don't you speak for yourself John?
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
If I am not worth the wooing I surely am not worth the winning.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Men love to wonder and that is the seed of our science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every artist was first an amateur.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go ahead with your life your plans.... Don't waste time by stopping before the interruptions have started.
Richard L. Evans
Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.
Sandra Day O'Connor
There is clearly much left to be done and whatever else we are going to do we had better get on with it.
Rosalynn Carter
Never mistake motion for action.
Ernest Hemingway
Procrastination usually results in sorrowful regret. Today's duties put off until tomorrow give us a double burden to bear the best way is to do them in their proper time.
Ida Scott Taylor
Imposing limitations on yourself is cowardly because it protects you from having to try and perhaps failing.
Vladimir Zworykin
The difference between getting somewhere and nowhere is the courage to make an early start.
Charles M. Schwab
There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say "Yes I've got dreams of course I've got dreams." Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it and yep they're still there. These are great dreams but they never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line to hold them up and say "How good or how bad am I?" That's where courage comes in.
Erma Bombeck
Earth's noblest thing a Woman perfected.
James Russell Lowell
Man has his will - but woman has her way.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The ideal woman which is in every man's mind is evoked by a word or phrase or the shape of her wrist her hand. The most beautiful description of a woman is by understatement. Remember all Tolstoy ever said to describe Anna Karenina was that she was beautiful and could see in the dark like a cat. Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful and it's best to take the gesture the shadow of the branch and let the mind create the tree.
William Faulkner
Woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life or contemplative life or saintly life.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
H.L. Mencken
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.
Gloria Steinem
There are no ugly women only lazy ones.
Helena Rubinstein
Woman's place is in the wrong.
James Thurber
When a woman dressjBS up for an occasion the man should become the black velvet pillow for the jewel.
John Weitz
The only question left to be settled now is are women persons?
Susan B. Anthony
Nature is in earnest when she makes a woman.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Women keep a special corner of their hearts for sins they have never committed.
Cornelia Otis Skinner