Quotes by Authors - Page 165

The great end of life is not knowledge but action.
Thomas Fuller
Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
Vladimir Nabokov
The great cathedral space which was childhood.
Virginia Woolf
I'm a great believer in luck. I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
Stephen Leacock
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all they have suffered to enrich us.
Marcel Proust
Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The house appointed for all living.
Anonymous
O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?
Anonymous
An outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.
Anonymous
The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government and to protect its free expression should be our first object.
Thomas Jefferson
I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
Thomas Jefferson
The supply of government exceeds the demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
The U.S. Senate - an old scow which doesn't move very fast but never sinks.
Everett Dirksen
When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.
Winston Churchill
When we got into office the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.
John F Kennedy
All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days nor in the life of this administration nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.
John F Kennedy
It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another but above all try something.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress and that is continuously incessantly and without interruption. If it's really going to work the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.
Lyndon B. Johnson
That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves.
Thomas Jefferson
Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom whilst a republic is a raft which will never sink but then your feet are always in water.
Fisher Ames
Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished all the objects for which government ought to be established are answered.
Thomas Jefferson
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Barry Goldwater
Bureaucracy the rule of no one has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy
Doing what's right isn't the problem. It's knowing what's right.
Lyndon B. Johnson
The State that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V.S. Pritchett
The more the world is specialized the more it will be run by generalists.
Marcel Masse
Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
I.F. Stone
When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.
Edith Hamilton
The enemies of Freedom do not argue they shout and they shoot.
Dean William R. Inge
One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.
Rosamond Lehmann
It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
Dean William R. Inge
It is the duty of Her Majesty's Government neither to flap nor to falter.
Harold Macmillan
At certain times of grave national stress when that rag-bag called the British Constitution is in grave danger of coming unstuck thank heaven for the big safety-pin at the top that keeps it together.
Anonymous
Egypt: Where the Israelites would still be if Moses had been a bureaucrat.
Laurence J. Peter
A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.
Dean William R. Inge
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Thomas Jefferson
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about.
Oscar Wilde
I heard the little bird say so.
Jonathan Swift
A little public scandal is good once in a while - takes the tension out of the news.
Beryl Pfizer
What people say behind your back is your standing in the community.
Edgar Watson Howe
What some invent the rest enlarge.
Jonathan Swift
If you can't say something good about someone sit right here by me.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
The best-loved man or maid in the town would perish with anguish could they hear all that their friends say in the course of a day.
John Hay
Hating anything in the way of ill-natured gossip ourselves we are always grateful to those who do it for us and do it well.
Saki
Gossip is when you hear something you like about someone you don't.
Earl Wilson
Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".
Leonard Woolf
Even doubtful accusations leave a stain behind them.
Thomas Fuller
Biography is higher gossip.
Robert Winder
Happy were men if they but understood There is no safety but in doing good.
John Fountain
For the cause that lacks assistance The wrong that needs resistance For the future in the distance And the good that I can do.
George Linnaeus Banks
When you cease to make a contribution you begin to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The age of strong belief is over the good is no longer always very good.
D. L. Coles
The Devil himself is good when he is pleased.
Thomas Fuller
If I knew ... that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good I should run for my life.
Henry David Thoreau
Giving is the highest expression of potency.
Erich Fromm
If a friend is in trouble don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
Edgar Watson Howe
If you're naturally kind you attract a lot of people you don't like.
William Feather
Why is it that when people have no capacity for private usefulness they should be so anxious to serve the public?
Sara Jeannette Duncan
We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
W.H. Auden