Quotes by American Authors - Page 32

Most people coming out of war feel lost and resentful. What had been a minute-to-minute confrontation with yourself your struggle with what courage you have against discomfort at the least and death at the other end ties you to the people you have known in the war and makes for a time others seem alien and frivolous.
Lillian Hellman
It is well that war is so terrible - we would grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
Human war has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions.
Robert Ardrey
So far war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community and until an equivalent discipline is organized I believe that war must have its way.
William James
The object of war is to survive it.
John Irving
A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. People court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom to be relieved of fear and frustration.
Nels F. S. Ferre
Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities.
John Foster Dulles
World War II was the last government program that really worked.
George Will
In time of war the first casualty is truth.
Boake Carter
Boys are the cash of war. Whoever said: we're not free spenders- doesn't know our like.
John Ciardi
The possibility of war increases in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the instruments of war.
Norman Cousins
It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts - for democracy.
Woodrow Wilson
Frankly I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry.
Joseph Heller
Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it.
Anne O'Hare McCormick
War is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Barbara Tuchman
A war regarded as inevitable or even probable and therefore much prepared for has a very good chance of eventually being fought.
Anaïs Nin
Either war is obsolete or men are.
Buckminster Fuller
So long as the anti-militarists propose no substitute for war's disciplinary function no moral equivalent of war analogous as one might say to the mechanical equivalent of hate so long they fail to realize the full equities of the situation.
William James
Let us not be deceived - we are today in the midst of a cold war.
Bernard Baruch
All wars are popular for the first 30 days.
Arthur Schlesinger
Above all Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.
Myra McPherson
A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if it does not lose.
Henry Kissinger
It is but a truism that labor is most productive where its wages are largest. Poorly paid labor is inefficient labor the world over.
Henry George
When there is no vision people perish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One of your most powerful inner resources is your own creativity. Be willing to try on something new and play the game full-out.
Marcia Wieder
Make-believe colors the past with innocent distortion and it swirls ahead of us in a thousand ways-in science in politics in every bold intention. It is part of our collective lives entwining our past and our future ... a particularly rewarding aspect of life itself.
Shirley Temple Black
Imagination has always had powers of resurrection that no science can match.
Ingrid Bengis
A couple of times a day I sit quietly and visualize my body fighting the AIDS virus. It's the same as me sitting and seeing myself hit the perfect serve. I did that often when I was an athlete.
Arthur Ashe
It's our dreams that keep us going that separate us from the beasts. I wouldn't even want to live if I thought it was all just eating and sleeping and taking off my clothes.
Mary Chase
Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them. They make the impossible happen.
Dr. Robert Jarvik
Within your heart keep one still secret spot where dreams may go.
Louise Driscoll
Dreams are the sources of action the meeting and the end a resting place among the flight of things.
Muriel Rukeyser
Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?
Alice James
Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.
Lauren Bacall
The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn you can't congeal: there is a forward motion to yearning.
Gail Godwin
I think at a child's birth if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift that gift should be curiosity.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.
Langston Hughes
When we can't dream any longer we die.
Emma Goldman
Reach high for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep for every dream precedes the goal.
Pamela Vaull Starr
The moment of enlightenment is when a person's dreams of possibilities become images of probabilities.
Vic Braden
To the lack of incentive to effort which is the awful shadow under which we live may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.
Mary Church Terrell
Instead of thinking about where you are think about where you want to be. It takes twenty years of hard work to become an overnight success.
Diana Rankin
The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it under its roof.
Barbara Kingsolver
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg
One must desire something to be alive: perhaps absolute satisfaction is only another name for Death.
Margaret Deland
Our visions begin with our desires.
Audre Lorde
Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.
Dorothea Brande
What man can imagine he may one day achieve.
Nancy Hale
If we have not achieved our early dreams we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. If we have accomplished what we set out to do in our youth we need not weep like Alexander the Great that we have no more worlds to conquer.
Rosalynn Carter
All prosperity begins in the mind and is dependent only upon the full use of our creative imagination.
Ruth Ross
Man can only receive what he sees himself receiving.
Florence Scovel Shinn
Before you begin a thing remind yourself that difficulties and delays quite impossible to foresee are ahead. ... You can only see one thing clearly and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that and cling to it through thick and thin.
Kathleen Norris
Virtue is an angel but she is a blind one and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Horace Mann
The only reward of virtue is virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One's outlook is a part of his virtue.
Louisa May Alcott
If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.
Thornton Wilder
Purity is obscurity.
Ogden Nash
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
George Washington
Virtue has its own reward but no sale at the box office.
Mae West